Vexed by James Mumford

Author:James Mumford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472966353
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

5

Reverence for Nature: Why Greens Shouldn’t Become Cyborgs

When I was at university, tucked away on a thousand-year-old side-street, there existed a little organization with a preposterous name – the Future of Humanity Institute. In that office sat a lonely philosopher playing out various scenarios in his mind about what happens next to the species, nay, the planet, nay, the galaxy. Humanity conquers death. Humanity conquers Mars. Technology conquers humanity etc. etc.

At least, I am now told he did. None of us had ever heard of him at the time. None of us encountered the Future of Humanity Institute, despite our vested interest in it. Nick Bostrom didn’t feature in the student newspapers. He didn’t have a stall at Freshers’ Fair. Bostrom was hidden away like other obscure academics, whiling away the time on quixotic questions – even more off the map since he didn’t teach undergraduates.

Today, however, the movement in which Bostrom is a luminary – transhumanism – is in the ascendant. Its self-avowed aim is to ‘seek the continuation and acceleration of the intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology’.1 The cult has gone public. Its home has migrated from an attic operation in a quiet college town to the shiny giant complexes of Silicon Valley. A crazy coterie of utopians connected by the internet, signing charters and committing themselves to ‘The Principles of Extropy’, has come to the attention of the world. How on earth has this happened?

One reason for transhumanism’s sudden prominence is the staggering development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) during the last decade. The breakthrough in Deep Learning – the machine learning technique that mimics the brain mechanisms by which we identify patterns in large amounts of data – has precipitated astonishing advances. Robots have come along by leaps and bounds. Long-lasting records in speech and language recognition have been smashed almost overnight. And the quicker the discoveries have come, the more urgent the question has become: ‘How long would it be until an artificial intelligence could reason indistinguishably from a human being?’2 Inevitably, AI researchers and big-tech have come knocking on the door of the transhumanists, inviting them to their conferences, joining with foundations to pour fortunes into their research projects.3

Meanwhile, while robots stride forth from laboratories on one side of the corridor, from a laboratory on the other side has emerged the world’s first designer baby. As I wrestle with words and struggle with syntax, news has just come in of the delivery of a genetically edited child. A Chinese scientist claims to have successfully modified the germline, deleting at embryo stage a gene that acts as a ‘doorway’ to HIV infection, and bringing twins to term. For the first time, the constitution of a human being and all its descendants will have been altered by another human being. The aim of this endeavour may be to cure disease, the final goal of medicine. But for transhumanists this is not the end but the beginning

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