Imaginary Worlds - Humans: New & Improved

Episode Date: May 5, 2016

When Graeme Manson started as a showrunner for BBC America's Orphan Black, he needed to create villains who were on the cutting edge of science, and believe that humans should take control of their own evolution. He found inspiration in the real-life movement of Transhumanists, who advocate using tech to improve our bodies, and live well beyond our natural life span. Transhumanist Natasha Vita-More says their vision of a posthuman future is not science fiction, even if it's inspired by it. But Graeme Manson and journalists like Elmo Keep still ask tough questions -- like whether only the rich could afford to stop aging, and what that would do to your ego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So one of my favorite shows, Orphan Black, is now in its fourth season on BBC America. The main character is a British woman named Sarah Manning who is a drifter and a drug dealer living in North America. Until... I saw her go kill herself.

Who? A jumper? Yeah, and she looked exactly like me, Felix. She discovers that she's a clone who's been kept out of sight from all the other clones in the shady corporation that created them. So she meets Allison, the soccer mom. Hello, Allison. I was just assaulted by a disgusting thug who thought I was you.

Who? What did he look like? I don't know. He was urban. Helena, the Ukrainian assassin. And Rachel, the fearsome corporate mogul. There is a painless way to reunite with Siobhan and Kira. Simply surrender yourself. And many, many other clones, all played by Tatiana Maslany. Now, I talked about Orphan Black in my episode about doppelgangers because there is a part of my mind that believes Tatiana Maslany is only playing Sarah and all the other

clones are being played by other actresses. Graham Manson feels the same way, which is kind of weird because he helped create the show and he's on the set every day. I mean, I'm just in, I'm constantly in a state of disbelief because she, she needs to stay in these characters all day. If she's that character all day, she'll talk with Sarah's accent. On Helena days, like certainly in the early years of Helena, you didn't want to be around her. And nobody, and Rachel, like, I just like, I don't want to go and give notes to Rachel. But I didn't want to talk with him about the clones, even though they're awesome. I wanted to talk with him about the villains in the show, because I'm obsessed with them. There's actually a lot of villains in the show, but the main ones are called Neolutionists,

which is a combination of neo and evolution. And they are based on a real movement of people called transhumanists who believe that we should use technology to enhance our senses and abilities, either by embedding tech under our skin or in our brains, or manipulating our DNA to live longer, maybe modify our bodies in all these really weird and incredible ways. I don't think that transhumanists are villains at all. When you're coming up with bad guys, especially in a sci-fi show,

science is often, you know, it's the dark side of science that, you know, your heroes end up battling. But most science isn't dark at all. Most scientists is smart people trying to better humanity. And at the end, at the end of the day, or at the foundation of transhumanism, that's what I understand it is. It is to better mankind. Better to whose ideals is always the question that I ask. And when it's tech, when it's patented technology, when someone's making money off that technology, do they have a broader agenda? Now, in real life, transhumanists are a pretty disparate group that mostly talk about what could happen in the future. Their fictional counterparts on the show have come a lot further in developing that technology and putting it to use. Neolution is an open source concept.

We embrace the fringes, the fiction to our science. Well, your book inspires them to play God, to tinker on themselves in basement labs. Also, the clones discover that the Neolutionists have a chain of command, which goes all the way up to multilateral corporations and shady government agencies. When the conspiracy is actually... To control human evolution, darling. To create a more perfect human being.

to create a more perfect human being. That's always been sort of where we thought that the Neolution agenda lay. That's very different from a transhumanist trying to be all that they can be, trying to expand what it means to be human. One of them I find quite brave, and a very human act, in fact, whereas the other one is, it's just power as it plays out among human beings. Which makes them great antagonists for the clones. The clones are owned. They discover through the course of the series that they are patented technology. And then all of a sudden, you try and cast that off. You're a renegade.

Then you're a narrative underdog and a narrative hero. And as a writer, that's the kind of juice and the kind of opposition that you're looking for. An orphan black keeps reminding us what's at stake with biotechnology, our bodies. That gives the show a feminist angle since the clones, who call each other sister, are fighting to have full control of their bodies and their reproduction. Dignity and freedom of choice is a big theme of the show. But Graham is also a big fan of a subgenre called body horror, particularly movies by David Cronenberg like The Fly or Dead Ringers, where Jeremy Irons played twin gynecologists. Patients are getting strange.

What are they? They're working on mutant women. From David Cronenberg, who in The Fly made the fantastic real. You can see the Cronenberg influence on characters like Olivier, the neolutionist who hacked his DNA to grow back his vestigial tail. I cannot tell if that tail is computer-generated or prosthetic, but either way, it is so creepy. And when Graham first pitched the idea to the writer's room... Everybody's just like, you want a guy with a tail?

It's like, yeah, he's got a tail. Wouldn't you have one if you could? Everybody's like, no. And then it was a funny battle with the networks, because it was like, that's pretty out there. But we managed to talk everybody into it. And even to the point where we severed the tail or the back cock, as it was referred to in the writer's room. Would you ever want an enhancement if everyone was doing it and you were like, okay, fine? What would you do?

Oh, that's a good question. If my mind starts to slip, I'll do whatever it takes. I'll strap on whatever ridiculous gizmo looks ridiculous on my head or take whatever drug to maintain my memory and my faculties. That's practical. Life extension? I don't know. Who runs the world then? Whoever's lived the longest and has learned to wield power the most effectively? What happens to your ego when you've lived to be 300 years old?

Is this only the domain of the rich? And what does that do to society? All very important questions that people have been asking transhumanists in real life. And in a moment, a transhumanist will explain why the future won't be like Orphan Black, or Elysium, or Gattaca, or any of those other sci-fi worlds. That is just after the break. Elmo Keep is an Australian journalist who covers technology. And yes, she has a very cool name,

Elmo, like the Sesame Street character, and Keep, like the verb. Anyway, she had never really heard of transhumanism until she started playing this video game called Fallout. It is all about visions of transhuman science gone awry and awful. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic future full of cyborgs and mutants. You know,

there's a part where you get to a facility eventually, which is where almost all of these ideas came from. And the scientists who at the time were the greatest scientific brains on earth managed to make themselves into like uploads and put themselves into computers and then augment themselves with mind-enhancing drugs. I am Dr Klein, Chief Head Researcher of Logistical Operations and Ideology here at Big Mountain. But they have gone completely crazy and so they can't remember who they are or what they're doing

and, you know, quests sort of revolve around trying to convince them of who they are and that they're actually the people who have created this horrible world. Will you indulge me? Say a few words. Face towards the monitors, please, so that I might record it for further examination. When she learned that these scientists were based on real people,

she went deep into research mode and ended up writing a really great piece on the history of transhumanism for an online magazine called The Verge. Now, the word transhumanism was first coined by Julian Huxley in the 1950s. He is the brother of Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World. But the movement itself of people thinking that science fiction could become reality didn't really gain momentum until the 1990s in California. But they didn't call themselves transhumanists yet. At first, they called themselves extropians. So extropy is in opposition to entropy.

So this idea that everything is going to decay, that everything will die. This is the known physical laws of the universe. That's the definition of entropy. That's the definition of entropy. So the idea of extra pee is we can resist that force. You know, it's interesting. Transhumanists will often change their name as part of the spirit of reinvention.

One of their leaders, Max Moore, was born Max O'Connor, and he now runs a cryonics lab. His wife, Natasha Vita Moore, changed her name from Nancy Clark. And Natasha is very much kind of front and center as an advocate or spokesperson for this movement. And she told me that her interest started way back. When I was 11 years old, I had this bump in my jaw on the inside of my mouth. The long of the short is I had an aggressive tumor in my jaw, which was basically eating up the bone mass within my jaw. A lot of kids would be completely freaked out by that. But she was fascinated.

During my recovery period, I had to go to my plastic surgeon's office in Chicago. And in the waiting room, I saw the most astonishing and poignant levels of deformity and necessary reconstructive surgery. It was shocking, to be sure, but it was more enlightening than anything to have gone through this at such an early age, But it was more enlightening than anything to have gone through this at such an early age, seeing how humans are malformed and what can be done through surgery, through medical technology to restructure our bodies. She grew up to become an artist, a fitness model, but she couldn't shake that image of kids that were like dolls needing replacement parts. So she traveled around the world and met with experts in bioengineering, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. And in 1997, she poured all of those ideas into a digital work of art called Primo Posthuman.

And it's my body that is used for the prototype of Primo Post-Human. And it's a naked body, and on it I have a link. It's an interactive piece where you can link two aspects of the body, and you'll go to a description of how that particular part of the body can be re-engineered. So if we have a whole body damaged, but our brain and mind are still active, then a very fundamental objective there would be to have the body replaced. And here you think of someone who has perhaps a disease like Stephen Hawking's, for example. If he would, his mind is very active, what if he was put in a whole body prosthetic? But not all of the adaptations are medical. Some are cosmetic. Like if you're a transhumanist scuba diver. You could theoretically

alter your DNA to grow gills or breathe underwater instead of carrying that heavy oxygen tank. So when we start shedding these elements of biology, then we can get more into an interesting design of what's possible. I think that the body could change color and change tone and texture and have a shimmer to it like some animals in their feathers or the beautiful texture of a snake skin. Well, I'm having flashes of Timothy Leary, Dr. Moreau, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs all at once. I think you're spot on. I think, yeah, exactly. Have you gotten negative reactions? Oh, yeah. I used to get very upset about it. In fact, I think I cried a number of nights. And it hurt because often I got attacked for being an artist designer, for being a woman, for wanting to be younger than I am. But it did,

I tell you, over the years, it did cause me to go back to school and get two masters and a PhD just to, so they get off my back on that. The projects that are being worked on that are extensively, that are a transhuman project like gene sequencing or like trying to reverse ageing. Like those things are actually in ways advancing, you know, like CRISPR, the gene sequencing tool. People are like this is a transhuman dream and it's real. So there's kind of this melding of the less extreme parts

of it becoming more attainable and so that's sort of giving the broader transhuman movement hope that the more outlandish and more difficult things will also become possible. Elmo is particularly troubled by the idea of, quote, radical life extension. I mean, if you look at the grand scheme of things, we're not supposed to be around that long. Death is a big part of evolution. Natural selection improves and adapts the human body generation after generation. And each generation decides which ideas from the past are worth preserving and what's outdated. I mean, at one point, Elmo and I just started joking about

like, yeah, could you imagine if people from the Middle Ages were still around and making comments on contemporary politics? I think that there would be a great sci-fi film in cryogenics actually working somehow in hundreds or maybe millennia from now. There's the 10 people who could afford it and they're like Simon Cowell and Max Moore and whoever else and Elon Musk. And then the nanobots do over time become self-intelligent enough to,

to survive, but it takes them like millennia to get to the point where they can then reconstitute the bodies. And so these five people wake up alone in like millennia from now and just this horrible horror film that that would be. And then like actually wanting to die and be like, but they can't because they keep getting reconstituted by these. It's like a vision of hell, really.

I feel like if you could actually live forever, it would just be horrible. But that's not how Natasha sees her future. No, no. And I don't like the term immortality. I think it reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. It's like you're stuck there forever. I like the idea of life expansion, where you expand into multiple platforms or systems

to have your cells put in a safety deposit laboratory so you can regenerate different body parts, and also to have a backup plan to back up your mind, your brain, and to back up your body. And I think that all the research being done in brain transfer is very, very important. I'm of two minds about this whole thing. I mean, living forever or at least hundreds of years. Yeah, you know, sure, a couple compromises, it may not be entirely comfortable, but you get to see the future. And then I think of the game Fallout, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that could go really badly.

On the other hand, I worry about my dad, who is in a lot of pain orthopedically. And we've tried just about everything. And I asked him if this technology were possible, would he ever want to, like, grow new limbs or upload his brain to an entirely new body? And he said, sure, with a wink and a smile, because, you know, it just sounds like science fiction to him. But Elmo has another theory why transhumanism is popular now. There's this growing awareness that the planet is in like pretty dire shape. And I think that that sort of connects very precisely with the rise of transhumanism

because these ideas are, that's okay. We're going to be able to, through technology, we're going to be able to reverse engineer the environment. Like we'll be able to fix all the stuff that we've done wrong. In other words, if we are the source of our own problems, you know, if human beings are capable of messing up the earth to the point where it may not even be habitable for us in a few hundred years, then the solution is to become better people, not morally, but genetically. And this isn't just to

solve climate change or world hunger. Transhumanists believe in something called the singularity, which is the moment in the future when artificial intelligence will become self-aware and we'll have the opportunity to merge our minds with computers. The human, as much as I like being human and as much as I respect our humanity and our level of empathy and our problem-solving capabilities, we're just not all that smart. We are unable to solve the problems at the level they need to be solved. And it's very disappointing. It's like having someone come up and critique you and saying,

you know, you're just not good enough, or you didn't perform well enough, or your paper wasn't articulate enough. So it's like when someone says, oh, you're only human. We're only human. That is, it's like, someone says, oh, you're only human, we're only human. That is, that's not good enough. I can make all the mistakes in the world and I can screw up so many times because after all, I'm only human. And you're saying? I say, come on, we can do better than that.

We'll see about that. Or apparently some of us will. In the larger debate, whether transhumanism is an accurate prediction of the future or science fiction wish fulfillment, Graham Manson doesn't come down on either side because he says you can't separate the two. I understand that the transhumanist movement is growing very rapidly. Of course it is. Of course it is. You know, if you're computer literate by the time you're three years old if you're growing up with electronic devices if you get so used to rapid societal technological societal change

i mean it just seems like the logical future to for young younger people growing up and then you feed everyone a steady diet of sci-fi and we're all fucked but you're not to blame for that you're exploring deep questions And then you feed everyone a steady diet of sci-fi and we're all fucked. But you're not to blame for that. You're exploring deep questions. Well, we're all to blame. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Elmo Keep, Natasha Vita Moore, and Graham Manson, who is glad that Orphan Black is finally ready to come out of the closet and admit what we already knew. The show is Canadian. We wanted a show that had international appeal. So the decision was made to sort of set it in what we call generica. But to us, it is Toronto. And I think to the audience now, it is Toronto. And Toronto call generica. But to us, it is Toronto, and I think to the audience now, it is Toronto.

And Toronto is generica. This episode featured original music by Alexis Quadrato. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment on iTunes. I tweet at Emalinski. I'll have links to Elmo's article

and Natasha's images at my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.