Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement

Humanity's End

Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology

Kim Sterelny and Robert A. Wilson, editors

Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution,

Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, editors, 2000

Coherence in Thought and Action,

Paul Thagard, 2000

Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered,

Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, 2003

Seeing and Visualizing: It’s Not What You Think,

Zenon Pylyshyn, 2003

Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere,

Tim Lewens, 2004

Molecular Models of Life: Philosophical Papers on Molecular Biology,

Sahotra Sarkar, 2004

Evolution in Four Dimensions,

Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, 2005

The Evolution of Morality,

Richard Joyce, 2006

Maladapted Psychology: Infelicities of Evolutionary Psychology,

Robert Richardson, 2007

Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic,

Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel, 2007

The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature,

Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, 2008

The Extended Mind,

Richard Menary, editor, 2010

Humanity’s End,

Nicholas Agar, 2010

Humanity's End

Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement

Nicholas Agar

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agar, Nicholas.

Humanity’s end : why we should reject radical enhancement / Nicholas Agar.

   p.  cm.—(Life and mind)

A Bradford book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01462-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-28893-4 (retail e-book)

1. Human evolution—Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Technological innovations—Social aspects. I. Title.

GN281.A33 2010

303.48'3—dc22

2010003166

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

1    What Is Radical Enhancement?      1

2    Radical Enhancement and Posthumanity      17

3    The Technologist—Ray Kurzweil and the Law of Accelerating Returns      35

4    Is Uploading Ourselves into Machines a Good Bet?      57

5    The Therapist—Aubrey de Grey’s Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence      83

6    Who Wants to Live Forever?      107

7    The Philosopher—Nick Bostrom on the Morality of Enhancement      133

8    The Sociologist—James Hughes and the Many Paths of Moral Enhancement      151

9    A Species-Relativist Conclusion about Radical Enhancement      179

Notes      199

Index      217

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of a short review article that Joyce Griffin and Greg Kaebnick asked me to write for the Hastings Center Report.¹ I’m grateful both for their prompting me to think seriously about radical enhancement and for their constructive critiques of my early efforts.

Many debts (all nonpecuniary) were incurred on the journey from a 3,000-word review to a 70,000-word book. My good friends Stuart Brock, Joseph Bulbulia, and Timothy Irwin formed a committee of readers whose skepticism prevented many errors and deepened discussion in many places—all for the price of a few Cab Savs and Sav Blancs. I should point out that their conclusion was pretty much thanks for telling us about the millennial life spans and super-intelligence, now where can we get some. Score three to the advocates of radical enhancement. Mark Walker, one of radical enhancement’s most astute defenders, passed a critical eye over drafts of all of the chapters. To forestall Mark’s expulsion from the World Transhumanist Association I should say that he did his best to purge the book of its humanist biases. I’m grateful to Rob Wilson, an editor of the series in which this book appears. Rob provided valuable comments on the manuscript and invited me to present an earlier version of chapter 4 at the Human Kinds symposium at the 2009 Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Vancouver. The other symposiasts offered helpful comments. My colleague Diana Burton did an excellent job helping to transform some disorganized early thoughts about radical enhancement into philosophical critiques. Big thanks go to Jan Agar who read and gave expert editorial advice on the entire manuscript.

My critical targets, Nick Bostrom, Aubrey de Grey, and James Hughes, were all generous with their time and advice. I’m sure Ray Kurzweil also would have been, had he not been too busy offering advice to the incoming Obama administration and founding a tertiary education institution. It goes without saying that many differences remain—Hughes has promised a vigorous review.

I owe thanks to Tom Stone who originally commissioned the project for MIT Press and Philip Laughlin who very capably stepped in after Tom’s departure from the Press. Judy Feldmann’s expert copyediting fixed many broken sentences and tightened expression throughout.

Among others who offered insights along the way are Sondra Bacharach, Ramon Das, David Eng, Matt Gers, Peter Hutchinson, Edwin Mares, Alice Monro, Dan Turton, and David Wasserman.

Finally, I’m grateful to my wife, Laurianne, and kids, Alexei and Rafael, who put up with me throughout. They were refreshing human reference points through all my investigations of the various wacky and terrifying forms that posthumanity might take.

1

What Is Radical Enhancement?

Suppose someone makes you the following offer: They will boost your intellect to such an extent that your cognitive achievements far exceed those of Einstein, Picasso, Mozart, or any of our familiar exemplars of genius. You’ll have a huge range of new experiences much more marvelous than climbing Mt. Everest, being present at full orchestra performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or consuming peyote. You’ll live for thousands of years. And the years you will gain won’t have the diminished quality of those that modern medicine tends to provide. There’ll be no need for oxygen bottles, Zimmer frames, bifocals, or any of the other standard accessories of extreme age in the early twenty-first century. The extra years will come with a guarantee of perfect health.

These are examples of what I will call radical enhancement. Radical enhancement involves improving significant human attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings. The radical enhancers who are this book’s subjects propose to enhance intellects well beyond that of the genius physicist Albert Einstein, boost athletic prowess to levels that dramatically exceed that of the Jamaican sprint phenomenon Usain Bolt, and extend life spans well beyond the 122 years and 164 days achieved by the French super-centenarian Jeanne Calment.

Is the offer of radical enhancement one that should be taken seriously? If you received it by e-mail you might be tempted to file it in the folder reserved for unsolicited and ungrammatical offers of millions of dollars from the estates of people you’ve never met, and invitations to participate in multilevel marketing schemes. We will be exploring the ideas of a group of thinkers who make the offer in full earnestness. They propose to radically enhance our intellects and extend our life spans not by waving magic wands, but instead by administering a variety of technologies and therapies. These technologies and therapies are not available yet. But they could be soon. The writers of the Star Trek television series envisage our descendants two hundred years hence acquiring the ability to speedily travel to light-years-distant stars. If contemporary advocates of radical enhancement are right, then the individuals making those voyages will be more like the cerebral science officer Spock or the android Lieutenant Commander Data than the endearingly and annoyingly human Captain Kirk. It’s also possible that we’ll be alive to pilot the starships alongside them.

Prominent among advocates of radical enhancement is a social movement known as transhumanism. Nick Bostrom, the movement’s foremost philosopher, defines transhumanism as an intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.¹ Transhumanists do not have a monopoly on the idea of radical enhancement, however. Some would-be radical enhancers are far too busy working out how to boost intellects and extend lives to bother affiliating themselves with an Internet-based social movement.

Fantastic offers tend to have catches, and radical enhancement is no exception to this rule. I’ll argue that there’s another side to the vision of millennial life spans and monumental intellects. Radical enhancement threatens to turn us into fundamentally different kinds of beings, so different that we will no longer deserve to be called human. It will make us posthuman. Although the benefits of radical enhancements of our minds and extensions of our lives may seem obvious—so obvious that they scarcely require defense—there is much that we stand to lose as we make the transition from human to posthuman. The aim of this book is to bring the costs of radical enhancement properly into focus. Some readers may find that its rewards are worth the price. But I suspect that many will not.

A Recent History of Radical Enhancement

Radical enhancement is not a new idea. Religion and myth are rich in accounts of humans seeking and undergoing radical enhancement. Those who transcribed myths or transmitted God’s messages were alert to the possibility of a downside for such dramatic transformations. In ancient Greek myth, Zeus grants Tithonus the gift of eternal life. One thing he doesn’t grant, however, is eternal youth. This leads, in some versions of the myth, to Tithonus’ withering away to a cicada, a state in which (so the myth goes) he can be observed today. For Christians, the chief venue for radical enhancement is heaven. This is where the faithful experience an eternity of bliss in God’s presence. According to many Christians, there’s another, hotter location that offers a somewhat inferior version of eternal existence.

What’s common to these stories is the view that one undergoes radical enhancement through the intercession of divine beings or by interacting with supernatural forces. The figures discussed in this book don’t advocate prayer. They’re offering DIY—do-it-yourself—radical enhancement. The idea that humans could be radically enhanced is not new; but the notion that it’s something that we could arrange for ourselves certainly is.

Some reflections of the British biologist Julian Huxley make a convenient starting point for a recent history of DIY radical enhancement. Huxley was one of the twentieth century’s greatest popularizers of science, a man driven by the belief that important choices should be informed by the relevant facts. Right at the top of Huxley’s list of important choices were those concerning humanity’s future.² He claimed to have noticed the possibility for a shift in our species’ evolution that was both for the better and fundamental. The blind and uncaring forces of evolutionary change had given us conceptual thought and consciousness, gifts that empowered us to take charge of our own evolution. Huxley wrote, [i]t is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution—appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job.³ Huxley thought that the very best thing we could arrange for our species would be its transcendence, shifting human existence as it is has always been, a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance, toward a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension.⁴

A lot of things have happened since 1957, the year in which Huxley’s call for transcendence was published, but a concerted, conscious redirection of human evolution doesn’t seem to be among them. Indeed, humanity seems a good deal closer to extinction from greenhouse gases or weapons of mass destruction than it is to transcendence. What has changed between now and then that might make radical enhancement possible for us?

When Huxley first proposed it, radical enhancement was really little more than wishful thinking about the direction in which evolution might take us. Huxley’s hope for transcendence stood in contrast to the more pessimistic view about humanity’s evolutionary future presented by a sometime collaborator of his, the author and essayist H. G. Wells. Wells’s novel The Time Machine depicted a humanity split into two descendant species. The ruling classes, accustomed to being waited on by their social inferiors, had given rise to the pretty but brainless and indolent Eloi. The working classes take a kind of delayed, evolutionary revenge by becoming the bestial Morlocks and periodically emerging from underground dwellings to capture and eat the Eloi. If you are accustomed to thinking of evolution as a process of continual improvement then you might have difficulty seeing how we could possibly evolve into the Eloi and the Morlocks. But evolution’s concept of improvement differs from our own. One biological design is better than another in evolutionary terms if it conduces more efficiently to survival and reproduction. Homo habilis became the more intelligent Homo erectus, which in turn became the even more intelligent Homo sapiens, because, in the past, increases in intelligence have tended to boost the chances of surviving and having children. Wells imagines a future in which this correlation between increases in intelligence and greater success at surviving and reproducing no longer holds. If stupid, lazy people reliably have more children than intelligent industrious people, then the former are better adapted to their environments, and therefore better in evolutionary terms than the latter.

Contemporary advocates of radical enhancement want to use a variety of technologies to help us to avoid Wells’s outcome. The really useful thing about the technologies that are this book’s focus is that they can serve our ideals about improvement rather than those of evolution. Bostrom presents a concept of posthumanity that conceptually connects it with radical enhancement. He defines a posthuman as a being that has at least one posthuman capacity, where a posthuman capacity is a general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means.⁵ According to Bostrom, general central capacities include, but are not limited to, healthspan, which he understands as the capacity to remain fully healthy, active, and productive, both mentally and physically; cognition, which comprises intellectual capacities such as memory, deductive and analogical reasoning, and attention, as well as special faculties such as the capacity to understand and appreciate music, humor, eroticism, narration, spirituality, mathematics; and emotion, the capacity to enjoy life and to respond with appropriate affect to life situations and other people.⁶ Bostrom thinks that the desirability of improving our central capacities is obvious. We all want to live longer, be healthier, reason better, and feel happier. The only surprise is that we may not have to content ourselves with the small improvements offered by better diets, exercise programs, and bridge lessons. The right technologies can boost our mental powers and physical constitutions to levels far beyond those previously attained by humans.

The technologies that are the focus of this book can change us in the ways that petitioners for radical enhancement want, and can do so quickly. The dial on the time machine that takes Wells’s hero to the Earth of the Eloi and Morlocks is set at AD 802,701; this fits with what Wells knew, and what we now know about evolution. It takes time for evolution to effect changes as large as those between us and the Eloi and Morlocks. This is good news for those who fear that we or our immediate descendants might suddenly become indolent or bestial dullards. But it’s bad news for those aiming at transcendence. Huxley has some suggestions about how to speed up human evolution while ensuring that it takes us in the right direction. But we should not exaggerate the degree of this acceleration. Today’s aspiring radical enhancers don’t want to wait 800,000, or 700,000, or even 10,000 or 1,000 years for their vision of our future to be realized. They don’t view extended life spans and superior intellects as gifts to be enjoyed by our great, great, great . . . grandchildren. They want these things for themselves—and if not for themselves, for their children. The technologies that we will examine in this book will not only be better than evolution at changing us in ways that we want, they’ll also work much faster.

Four Would-Be Radical Enhancers: The Technologist, the Therapist, the Philosopher, and the Sociologist

This book’s investigation of radical enhancement follows the views of four of its leading advocates. They are Ray Kurzweil, whom I shall label the technologist, Aubrey de Grey, the therapist, Nick Bostrom, the philosopher, and James Hughes, the sociologist.⁷

Ray Kurzweil, the technologist, is a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and the inventor of the speech recognition technology that enables blind people to use computers. He’s also a futurist with a fine record in predicting how technologies will develop and how they will affect us. Kurzweil isn’t like the clairvoyant whose apparent success in forecasting the future depends on our generous tendency to forget the many mistaken predictions and remember the few accurate ones. The technological advances that will enable radical enhancement are consequences of a law governing technological change—something Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns. According to this law, technologies improve at an ever accelerating rate.

Kurzweil uses three letters to summarize the law’s significance for us—GNR. G is for genetics. Geneticists have mapped the human genome and begun to connect strands of DNA with human characteristics. They’ve identified genes that influence how prone to disease we are, our rate of aging, and how intelligent we are. It’s the combination of this knowledge with emerging techniques for selecting and altering DNA that Kurzweil envisages making us smarter and healthier.

N is for nanotechnology, which involves the manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular level. Nanotechnology will become a technology of human transformation chiefly by way of microscopic robots called nanobots. Once introduced into human bodies, nanobots will enable enhancements that cannot be achieved by the insertion, deletion, or transposition of the chemical letters of DNA. Some nanobots will purge our arteries of bad cholesterol, while others will fix the glitches in our memories. Still others will create rich and vivid virtual realities that blur the distinction between the real and the virtually real. Kurzweil thinks we will become like the characters in the Matrix movies, moving things around in the world by the power of our minds alone. The difference between the movies and the forecast is that these feats won’t be achieved in a convincing virtual reality: They will occur in an actual reality that has had the morphing qualities of virtual reality added to it.

R is for robotics, the technology that will complete our escape from human biology. Fortunately for us, the G and N technologies will have dramatically enhanced our intellects by the time we are expected to contemplate the robotic revolution, because its implications are beyond current comprehension. With R’s arrival, technological change will be so rapid that new technologies will succeed older ones almost instantaneously. We will arrive at the Singularity—a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.⁸ The Singularity isn’t just something that might happen. It is the almost inevitable consequence of the law of accelerating returns. And it’s going to happen soon. Kurzweil offers 2045 as the year of the Singularity, a prediction that, if true, would make the next forty years considerably more eventful for us and our biological lineage than the previous forty million. He proposes that we will celebrate the Singularity by creating a mind that is about one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.⁹

Kurzweil says two things about this massively intelligent mind. First, it will be human. Second, it will be nonbiological. Its neurons will have been replaced by electronic circuits that are both computationally more efficient and entirely immune from disease. This won’t happen all at once—for most of us there’s unlikely to be a single replacement event. Kurzweil predicts a gradual merger of human with machine. In its early stages this merger will be motivated by a desire to fix parts of our brains that have become diseased. Cochlear implants already help profoundly deaf people to hear by directly stimulating their auditory nerves. Soon prosthetic hippocampuses could be restoring the memories of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Once we install the implants, we will face a choice about how to program them. We hope that they can at least match the performance of the parts of the brain they replace; we hope, for example, that prosthetic hippocampuses will be as good at making and retrieving memories as healthy biological human hippocampuses. But if you’ve gone to all the trouble of installing a prosthetic hippocampus, why would you rest content with a human level of performance when you could have so much more? From a technological perspective there’s nothing sacred or special about our present intellectual powers. Leaving the performance dial set on human is a bit like resolving to drive your new Porsche exactly as you drove your old Morris Minor. This attitude to the machinery of thought will lead, in the end, to a complete transformation of the human mind. Chapters 3 and 4 explore Kurzweil’s ideas, focusing especially on this idea of uploading ourselves into machines. I will argue that the prudent person will never freely trade in all of his or her neurons for electronic circuits. This should significantly slow our progress toward the Singularity, and perhaps even cancel it.

Predictions about the arrival of ideal states have an annoying habit of not turning out. Speaking in the mid-1950s, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev claimed that Communism, the perfect social arrangement in which there would be no state and people would entirely lack class consciousness, would arrive by 1980. It didn’t. Prudent revolutionaries have contingency plans. If Kurzweil’s margin of error is anything like Khrushchev’s, he may need some help to ensure that he is still around for the Singularity. This brings us to Aubrey de Grey, whom I label the therapist. Calling de Grey a therapist makes him seem like a doctor. But de Grey’s aims differ markedly from those of modern medicine. Present-day medical therapies have the purpose of keeping us alive and moderately content for what we think of as a normal human life span. De Grey’s therapies may keep us youthful and healthy for thousands of years.

De Grey trained initially as a computer scientist. He became aware that very little was being done about a fact of human existence that is horrible and currently universal—aging. You can be mindful of recklessly driven buses, refrain from smoking, and refuse to holiday in war zones. But these measures only ever postpone death. Even the most careful and fortunate among us face a fate of progressive enfeeblement followed by death. De Grey decided to do something about this and set about teaching himself everything known about the aging process with an eye to reversing it. His goal is to engineer what he calls negligible senescence. A negligibly senescent being does not age. As we will see in chapters 5 and 6, his thinking has advanced considerably beyond idle philosophical speculation about how nice agelessness might be. De Grey has a plan. It’s possible that he can play a better chess game against death than did the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s iconic movie, The Seventh Seal.

The details of Kurzweil and de Grey’s proposals are quite complex. However, in both cases there is a central principle that both pulls these details together and aids in their presentation. Kurzweil’s master idea is the law of accelerating returns. This law explains why he’s confident that we will soon be able to engineer super-intelligence into machines and into ourselves. De Grey’s central principle is an idea he calls longevity escape velocity. It explains his confidence that some people alive today may still be alive in a thousand years’ time. According to de Grey, we need to begin the process of working out how to repair age-related damage as soon as possible. The techniques we invent will add years onto the life expectancies of everyone who has access to them. Longevity escape velocity will have arrived when new therapies consistently give us more years than the time it takes to research them.

Nick Bostrom, the philosopher, does not face technical or biological obstacles. Instead, he