Instant Genius - Transhumanism - using technology to live forever

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

We talk to Mark O’Connell about transhumanism, a movement whose aim is to use technology to control the future evolution of our species – to improve our flawed biology, and to enable us to live forever. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. In today's episode, we're talking about transhumanism with Mark O'Connell, who's written to be a machine, a book about the subject that's been shortlisted for the Welcome Book Prize. It's a movement whose aim is to use technology to control the future evolution of our species, to improve our flawed biology and to enable us to live forever. Humans have been dreaming about cheating death for millennia, but with our recent rapid technological progress, we're finding more and more opportunities to tamper with our own biology.

Transhumanists are attempting this in a range of different ways. BBC focuses editorial assistant Helen Glennie talks to Mark about some of the people he met on his journey into transhumanism. Look, to be a machine, looks into a movement called transhumanism. Can you explain to us a bit about what transhumanism is? Sure. Yeah, well, basically transhumanism is a social movement that's predicated on the idea that we can and we should use technology to push out the boundaries of the human condition and to ultimately sort of transcend the condition of our biology.

And so, like, in practice, that means things like, things like, like radical life extension through biotechnology and other sort of means ideas like mind uploading, merging ourselves with technology, cognitive enhancements, things along those lines. So it's very science fiction in terms of its sort of aspirations, but it's a movement that has kind of taken root pretty firmly in the soil of Silicon Valley in particular. So there are some fairly prominent technologists who are signed up to some version of this sort of program for the human future. So for the people who are signed up to this, what do you think their ultimate goal is? I would say for most transhumanists, the kind of end goal is actually immortality. And so like not all

transhumanists have the same sort of set ideas about what they want or what they ultimately believe will be possible in their lifetimes. But, you know, in almost everyone that I talked to, for the book, pretty much all of them were either convinced that technology would permit them to be mortal themselves or that future generations of humans would ultimately be immortals through technology. So that's kind of the big one. But along the way, there are all these sorts of ideas about enhancing the human body and mind through technology.

So going back to the mortality thing, where do you think this rebellion against mortality comes from? Well, I think it's sort of something that's inherent in human nature itself, actually, is this desire to be something other than human. I think it's like something that's always been with us, this sort of, I would see it as an inability to or an unwillingness to accept the fact of our mortality. And so this is sort of part of the thesis of the book, actually, in a way to the extent that it has a single thesis is that transhumanism is kind of a contemporary vexality. of sort of yearnings and desires and anxieties that were traditionally the preserve of religion. And what first got you interested in transhumanism? Well, I wrote a very short piece for a magazine maybe eight or nine years ago, which was sort of just me discovering that this movement existed online and that there were like apparently thousands of people who believed that we should transcend

our humanity through like, you know, merging at the bodily, level with technology and just, you know, I wrote, it was a fairly frivolous piece really, but it kind of stuck in my mind and sort of would come back to me occasionally over the years, but then really what happened was what I wrote about in the first chapter of the book, which is that I had a child and part of the sort of very complicated experience of becoming a parent for the first time, along with all the kind of joyful aspect of that was a kind of an unhealthy obsession with my own mortality. So transhumanism kind of came back into my mind at that point as this really strange set of ideas that offered a way out of the condition of mortality. And so yeah, I just got more and more

kind of wrapped up in it and, you know, read a lot of this sort of literature about transhumanism online and eventually kind of started to venture out into the real world and meet these people and sort of engage with their ideas. And, you know, like a part of it is that obviously I I don't agree with transhumanism. I don't really like where they're wanting to take humanity. But the thing for me about the book is that my sort of interest in this movement arises out of a basic kind of sympathy with their critique of human nature, which is that it really sucks that we all have to die.

And I kind of start off from a position of sympathy with that idea. Yeah, so you say that, you know, historically, people have been wanting to escape mortality for a long time, but this seems to be really gaining momentum at the moment. Do you know why it's gaining momentum now? It definitely is something that is like, you know, it's like it's becoming more and more visible in the mainstream and more and more people are talking about these ideas

as though they are sort of imminently possible. And I think part of what it is is that for me, transhumanism intersects with Silicon Valley as kind of a cultural phenomenon and the kind of deep sense of the transformative possibilities of technology that arise at the sort of techno-utopian kind of culture of Silicon Valley. And so even at a banal level, the, you know, the idea that every sort of app that comes along is something that is talked about as though it's going to change the world. You know, technologists tend to talk in big picture kind of language. And there's a kind of a a sense of the boundlessness of the possibilities of technology that tends to kind of come out

in the way that Silicon Valley people talk about their work that I think intersects with transhumanism in this really interesting way. So like I think it's no mistake or it's no coincidence that Silicon Valley is the place where transhumanism seems to have found its kind of cultural home. So for the book, you talked to a ton of different people working on this problem and they're all going about it in different ways. And so I thought a good place to start would be with a guy called Randall Coon, who's working on something called Whole Brain Emulation. Can you explain a bit about what he's trying to do? Yeah, well, the whole brain emulation, which is sort of Randall's project, is the idea that you can scan a human brain in such a way that you can extract an actual

consciousness or a mind and emulate it on some other platform other than flesh and blood. So we're really talking about uploading our minds to machines. And this is the sort of pretty out there project that Randall has set himself as a scientist. He's a computational neuroscientist, which is sort of the intersection of computer science and neuroscience. And the idea that the brain, human consciousness, might be computable, might be kind of reducible to zeros and ones. And is he the only person that's going about this? Is the consensus in the scientific field that this is going to be possible? No, he's not. I mean, there are a handful of neuroscientists who are, it's not actively working towards this, at least quite vocal about the idea that it's theoretically possible and maybe even achievable within the sort of medium term.

But the scientific consensus is very strongly against the idea that it's even theoretically possible. Most neuroscientists would tell you that it's basically sort of a category error to imagine that we can reduce human consciousness. to zeros and ones. But it remains, I think, kind of an open question. And even, like, Randall would say that the work that he's doing, he's not actually in the lab sort of, like slicing up brains or whatever. He's what he would describe out as an architect. So he's kind of having conversations with other scientists in relevant fields and sort

of collating the bits of their research and their work that would be relevant towards the eventual sort of endgame of some kind of technology that would. be able to scan the human mind. So there are lots of sort of relevant fields, as you would see it, in this sort of area of neuroscience that might eventually lead to the possibility of brain uploading. So he's still in this stage where he's sort of mapping out a plan as to how he could do this. Yeah, he's sort of laying out the coordinates for, like, how it might be possible.

So there's no, like, there's no laboratory where people are, like, doing research on uploading minds. If Randall succeeds in doing this, what will it look like? Does he have an idea about what it would feel like to exist as a brain that's been uploaded to the cloud? Yeah, I mean, that's like, for me, one of the most interesting questions about all of this is, like, not only what would it feel like and what would it be like to be outside of a human body, but would it be you? Because obviously, we're talking about a kind of a copy of your consciousness. So that's a whole other question as well. But I think like, so these are conversations that I had with Randall and my meetings with him.

And what was interesting to me was that he was interested in these questions in more or less the same way as I was in that, you know, I would say these things to him. And he would say, yeah, you know, that's a really interesting question. And it kind of like it's something I think about a lot. But he didn't have any solid answers, nor I suppose, should I have expected him to have them because no one would know. But so when we did talk about it, he tended to talk. not about being uploaded to like the cloud and being a sort of a disembodied quote-unquote intelligence or consciousness. But he would talk about it in the sense that, well, a human consciousness is like sort of

inextricably bound up with embodiment. And so we would have to have some kind of a robot type creature that we would be uploaded to. And obviously it would be a completely open question as to what kind of a creature or what kind of a robot who would be uploaded to, whether it would be something very close to an existing human body or something completely different. But,

yeah, I think it's like when transhumanists in general talk about this stuff, they use this term morphological freedom, which is basically this idea that it's almost a human right to take any form that you could possibly take, so that if you want to be a conscious toaster oven or a conscious, sort of like Mars rover type robot, that's your thing. And most people would want to be like some kind of humanoid robots.

But, you know, at this point, all bets are off and it could be almost anything. Yeah. So another group that you met up with that is approaching this from a totally different way is the company called Grindhouse Wetware, although they might not actually call themselves a group of people. Can you tell me a bit about what they're doing? Yeah, actually that's would they call themselves people? Yeah,

they call themselves cyborgs. I mean, they consider themselves to be human-machine hybrids already. So like they're quite unusual in terms of the transhumanist movement in that they are, most transhumanists are kind of operating at a speculative level. They're talking about the future.

Whereas the grind-house guys are part of this movement, the biohacking movement, whereby they're sort of saying we want the transhumanist future now. We want to be already post-human. And so they're kind of designing and building technologies for implanting under their own skin to become sort of superhuman capabilities. Like to give them sort of superhuman capabilities. Like in practice, these are very mildly superhuman capabilities that would give them

the ability to do things like, you know, open doors by waving their hands or sense magnetic north by facing a certain direction or whatever. The actual kind of enhancement, that they're working on would be actually much cruder than the kind of thing that like a smartphone would allow you to do and it's sort of a like an everyday basis but it's really

I think they're operating at a level of sort of almost kind of performance provocation and that they're sort of taking technology into their own bodies as kind of like an advanced guard of the sort of post-human future so are they working towards something you know some modifications

that they can make to their own bodies that might be more significant than what they're doing now? Yeah, I mean, like, so the technologies tend to be, like, anything that I saw was mostly like things that, as I said, you could do with the phone or whatever. And so I think probably the most sophisticated thing, I mean, I use the term sophisticated sort of advisedly, but so when I went to visit these guys,

the main, the CEO of this company is a guy called Tim Cannon, and Tim had just recently had, a gigantic implant inserted under his arm, sort of about the size of a pack of cards. And it allowed him to take like biometric measurements from his body and sort of like extract medical information and upload it directly to his laptop via the cloud. And it also kind of registered his body temperature

so that if he was staying up late coding or whatever, he wouldn't have to get up from his desk to turn on the... heating because the thing was connected to his thermostat. So those kinds of things that are like on one level quite impressive and on another level like why would you want to do that? And that's the big question about these biohackers and cyborgs is that they're kind of they're operating on another level in terms of like their understanding of what it means to be human. Like they're impatient to become machines essentially. And this is what they do right now. So they're doing what they can do basically

to sort of hasten their own transition towards the condition of like, being post-human. I guess who I found to be the most optimistic people in your book are the ones that are looking into cryonics. So you visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Can you tell us a bit about what they're doing there? Yeah. I mean, by optimistic, do you mean, are you being polite and sort of suggesting that they're

diluted, or do you mean that it's like something that you would find quite hopeful and optimistic from your own point of view? I find it a little bit optimistic, but what do you think? Where do you sit on the balance between optimism and deludedness? Yeah, well, definitely the Chionics thing seems to me to be, like, the aspect of transhumanism that seems, yeah, most sort of, yeah, optimistic would be a kind word. And so, like, the idea, so I visited this place just outside of Phoenix in Arizona called Alcor. And Alcor is, like, one of, I think, four cryonics facilities in the world, three of them are in the US. unsurprisingly, I think one is in Russia.

And basically the idea is that immediately after the point of death, as soon as possible after clinical death, you are rushed to this facility by sort of quionic paramedics. And you're basically frozen. You're like frozen in liquid nitrogen. In most cases, the corpses, or they don't call them corpses, they call them patients, are beheaded

and the head is kind of stored in this gigantic kind of stainless steel dewer essentially. And the idea is that you're stored there for however long it is, like a decade, 100 years, 500 years until such point as technology makes it possible to take you out of the gigantic stainless steel flask that you're in and defrost you and bring you back to life, at which point like brain uploading is kind of the source of hope for most of these people. but again like there's a kind of a veneer of science to plionics but overwhelmingly the scientific consensus is that this stuff is like it's it's completely diluted so and they're aware of this but their kind of reasoning is well you know maybe like the cell degradation caused by um you know

using bodies and liquid nitrogen for decades does cause like a huge amount of damage and maybe it's irreparable, but also hopefully at some point in the future technology will be able to repair that. And their kind of rationale is, well, maybe if you sign up for cryonics and are preserved, maybe you won't get brought back to life. But if you don't sign up, you definitely won't get brought back to life. So that it worth a shot, I think, is the reasoning. Yeah, so were you at all tempted to sign up? Not really, no, to be honest. Well, it's expensive for one thing. You have to sign up for essentially so most people pay for it by signing over there life insurance policies.

So that would be a conversation that would have to have with my loved ones and I don't think it would go very well if I did. So yeah, it seems like I'm happy to, you know, if and when I check out, I'm happy for that to be the end point, really. Yeah, so it seems like a lot of these technologies that may or may not end up working are quite expensive. Do you think that there's anyone working in this area who is just trying to make money off people's fear of death?

That's an interesting question. And that would be like sort of, you know, coming into a blind, that would be my immediate assumption would be that like the whole area is ripe for exploitation. And I'm sure there are people who are making good money out of things like cryonics or whatever. But I never, in the people that I met,

I never got the sense that they were purely in this for a quick book. I mean, I'm sure there's much easier ways to make a quick book. almost all of the people who I encountered were genuinely convinced they were transhumanists themselves and they were genuinely convinced that this was a kind of a almost like a humanitarian thing so I never got the sense of like snake oil off any of this I did like you know definitely got the sense that some of these people had very wacky ideas and were you know potentially even quite diluted and there were other things going on but like mere exploitation was not something that I ever got the sentence.

Yeah, and so there are some other implications about the money issue as well. If these things do end up working, potentially only the rich are going to be able to afford them. And that's got to have some implications on society, right? Right. I mean, for me, that's one of the big questions that harbors around all of this is that, well, first of all, most transhumanists, certainly the ones who I met, they tend to be people who are already pretty privileged in society to begin with.

So I think, you know, if the idea of your own mortality is something that you're like willing to kick back against and sort of, you know, plan money and time and effort into trying to forestall, that's something you can only really consider a serious problem if you're already in a position of privilege. And so most of the people who I met, like transhumanists are overwhelmingly male for a start and almost all white males, a lot with some with some with some exception. But I mean, it was difficult to separate that from the kind of demographics of the tech world generally because transhumanism tends to be a kind of subset of the tech world. But I think that's true. And so the sort of major sort of ethical question around all of this is that if these technologies were to become available and if they were to start to exert changes on, you know, human experience and society, who would be the people? benefits from them. And I think the obvious answer to that is people who are already extremely rich. And that leads to some pretty troubling implications, I think, whereby you have not only a society that is divided along the lines of fast economic disparities, but also, you know, cognitive enhancements

and so on. So, you know, if you have an economic elite that then becomes a cognitive elite and, you know, is potentially living radically extended lifespans or even immortal. That's a real sort of dystopic scenario that transhumanists as a group seem not that interested in reckoning with. It's something that did come up quite a lot in my conversations and they tend to talk about these technologies as though they are just sort of they will be like any other consumer technology. So, you know, 20 years ago, cell phones were extremely expensive or, you know, 30 years ago they were gigantic. and very expensive and only very privileged people had them. And now everyone's got a smartphone. So the idea is that these technologies will kind of become more and more available to people.

And there'll be a sort of trickle-down economics of cognitive enhancement and life extension and so on, which seemed to me to be not that convincing as an idea. And so a lot of these people that you talk to, they're interested in extending life. But are they talking much about quality of life? Like when we're living forever as human machine hybrids, are we going to be sitting around enjoying Christmas dinner with our families or going rollerblading? Well, I mean, Evan has different ideas of what the sort of post-human future would look like.

Very few people that I talk to imagine it as being just like business as usual, just like humans are now, but being sort of immortal and with like various bells and whistles attached. is this idea of the singularity, which is kind of one of the major kind of ideas at the center of my book, basically the singularity is one of the ways that it gets talked about is as the rapture of the nerds, because it's essentially a kind of religious idea, like it's sort of an end-time prophecy, whereby at a certain point, like technology gets so sophisticated and our sort of merger with technology becomes inevitable. And at that point, what it means to be human is completely changed.

So we become as different from our current sort of evolutionary state as we are now from, say, the higher primates or whatever. So, you know, the idea of us sitting around watching Netflix or whatever becomes completely redundant because we are a completely higher and different level of consciousness. And the idea is that we almost become like gods. And so at that point, like all bets are off, who knows what we'll be doing will be like exploring the mysteries of the universe or whatever. So it's a very, it's like it's a deeply kind of religious notion, actually. It's a deeply kind of sort of story I envision of something that happens after, you know, the end in a way. Okay, so you've done a pretty deep dive into all of this stuff. How do you feel about it?

You know, are there any of these modifications, either that have already happened or in development that you might end up considering for yourself? I'd say the short answer to that is no. I mean, so like I went into this subject already quite skeptical, but I think like it was important for me to be open-minded and to sort of be skeptical about my own skepticism. So for me when I started writing the book and while I was doing the reporting, the sort of ideal scenario for me was to at least have the potential to be converted to transhumanism, to be sort of brought over their kind of. world. And that sort of happened in small ways, but it never happened in a major way. I mean, I think, like as I said at the beginning, the critique of, of like human existence, their kind of existential stance against death was always really, like, provocative and troubling and in some ways appealing to me. And so I had some really interesting conversations about, like, the prospect of

mortality, where I would be sort of forced into a position of saying, well, isn't the fact that we die, surely what gives life meaning? And they would say, well, no, you, like, you've got, they would use some deathism, which was kind of like, almost like a Stockholm syndrome kind of relationship to death, as in, you know, you know you're going to die and you're just trying to convince yourself that it's, like, potentially a good thing. So that sort of happened, but it, like, it never really became, like, I never wanted to get an implant or I never really find up to any version of the transhumanist future. Like to me, in fact, the opposite sort of became the case that I sort of,

it treated is probably not the right word, but I sort of started to see my own life and sort of human life more generally in terms of like animal meaning. As in like what sort of what's worthwhile and what has meaning about life is sort of, is mammalian in a way. So like the fact that we die and the fact that we love each other, all these things are quite animal comparatives. And so, yeah, it sort of pushed me in the opposite direction in a way. Yeah, it's funny that you talk about that, you know, that Stockholm syndrome,

attitude towards death. That's exactly the same thing that I felt when I was reading the book. I became very defensive of death and almost fond of it. Right, yeah. I mean, I don't know that I'd ever go surprised to say that I became fond of death, but definitely I felt like I had to make a case for it. So it was very difficult because I still. I still think it's sort of unacceptable that we die, but in a weird sort of paradoxical way,

I think it would be even less acceptable for us to live forever. Like I don't, I personally have no interest in dying, but I have even less interest in living forever. So yeah, I guess it became the sort of irresolvable kind of contradiction in terms of how I was thinking about it when I was writing the book. But I do feel that any sort of meaning that is in our lives is for better or worse, inextricably bound up with mortality. That was Mark O'Connell talking about transhumanism. His book, To Be a Machine, is available from Granta Books now. It's been shortlisted for the Welcome Book Prize, along with five other titles,

and the winner will be announced on Monday the 30th of April. In the April issue of BBC Focus magazine, which is on sale now, we search for exoplanets by taking a look at Project Blue. This audacious plan has a single goal in mind to photograph an exoplanes. planet in the habitable zones of the nearest sun-like stars in the hope of finding a potentially habitable planet. Plus, you can find out more about real-life robocops, how freezing patients could save their lives, and how geoengineering might cause a climate war. Did you enjoy this podcast? If you liked what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave us a review? You can find

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