Mission accomplished, in one sense
I happened to come across this Facebook post of an acquaintance which I must admit reflects my own feelings in recent years. I imagine many others share similar sentiments.
Sometimes I even wonder if it might be better to go ‘Millennial Amish’ – to eschew technology post 2007 or so, i.e. smartphones, social media, streaming services, cloud, and A.I. thralls.
The future seems increasingly crazy and uncertain, society feels in jeopardy, and many of us have a sneaking suspicion that Western Civilization is on its last legs. Our great scientific monuments, such as Arecibo, are crumbling. Western values of human rights are crumbling also. Even hard-won rights of free speech and association are declared passé.
Such rights are also a hindrance in one sense, one not borne by those with differing scruples. Maybe our transhumanist future belongs to throngs of IQ 200 > basketball players, with the great many of us left in the dust. Many people suspect that the future looks like elites flying off to summits in private jets whilst the rest of humanity subsists in carbon-sumptuary squalor, eating meat made from bugs and turds. Crazy actual conspiracy theories have come true so many times recently that some begin to wonder.
Many suspicious people are deeply alarmed by transhumanist ideas, and people associated with this movement could have folk with pitchforks coming after them, figuratively or literally. Transhumanism has become a scary idea to some because it's finally starting to be real, and because the application of transhuman technologies is being masterminded by largely unaccountable entities. The world has taken a far darker shift in recent years, with ongoing polarization, and the looming presence of Big Tech and its insidious overreaches.
I honestly wonder if transhuman technologies will be a net positive for humanity. They may be more likely to enslave people than liberate them.
I do not in any way refer to the transhumanist community or movement: This presents no threat to anyone whatsoever, and is broadly a force for the common good. However, It doesn't matter how innocent and well-meaning a movement is. Research can still be appropriated to benefit the ends of authoritarian exploiters, and little can be done to prevent that.
Technology ideas that transhumanists have discussed for years are finally becoming real in a massive way and the movement must decide how to respond to this fact. As these technologies become familiar to the public, through apparent necessity, the common citizen is forced to grasp with ideas of human enhancement. This presents an opportunity for the transhumanist movement to appeal to more people, potentially. However, there is also a growing perception that the technologies of transhumanism are being adopted by powerful movements for use in mass influence of the global population in non-transparent ways.
In some parts of the world these are being effectively mandated in many nations, on pain of otherwise not being able to enjoy banks and religious worship, access to their children, livelihood, education (even remotely), or even to receive medical treatment. Withholding medical treatment because you wish to punish people for declining to volunteer for human experimentation is without doubt a crime against humanity.
Thankfully, this particular latter decision was eventually overturned (at least for now), but the fact that it happened at all, in Israel of all places, is terrifying. At any other time during the past 70 years such policies would be a one way ticket to The Hague. We have forgotten this in our propagandised temporary madness. Politicians have the audacity to bang the drum about inclusivity, whilst encouraging people to be forced from their jobs, segregated, or chaperoned whilst buying groceries. Meanwhile, of course, uptake of experimental immunity therapies are much lower in many minority populations, significantly due to historical reasons for mistrust. To invite mandates and medical discrimination is to permit racial prejudice by the back door.
Despite some successes, the domain of eugenics has completely lost moral legitimacy as a serious topic of research, even of polite conversation, because it was used as a justification for persecuting people, even leading to genocide. Human enhancement is about to suffer the same fate, because a mass rollout of experimental transhuman immunity Nucleoside-modified messenger RNA gene therapies has been conducted with coercion in many jurisdictions, in gross violation of bioethics.
Bioethics as a domain of philosophy has been morally bankrupted and may never recover. It had one job – prevent the erosion of the Nuremberg Code, it’s most fundamental principles. Very few bioethicists had the courage to speak up in these times, when it was so necessary due to totalitarian initiatives aimed at misleading and manipulating the public into acquiescing to biofascism, a textbook merging of authoritarian state governance and corporate power, with the addition of regulatory capture, mass media propaganda, and payment processor co-option, executed at a whim upon arbitrary biological criteria.
The failure of bioethics as a civilizational institution is a tragedy. Decades of painstaking work have been rendered meaningless. This is aside from its failure to prevent incredibly unwise research in the first place. There is increasing evidence suggesting that the virus itself may have been engineered by someone tinkering with nature in an extremely irresponsible manner. We are expected to trust the same hubristic cadre of individuals who may have unleashed this problem on the world with a further intervention. We are compelled to swallow a transhuman spider, to catch their transgenic fly.
During the pandemic, we have seen completely new, untested MRNA technology be deployed at 'warp speed' into 70-90% of the population of many nations, without adequate longitudinal safety checks. In fact, if it turns out that spike protein circulating in the bloodstream can cause rapid-onset prion disease, Alzheimer’s, premature ovarian failure in following generations, or DNA damage, the vaccine intervention may present a catastrophic risk to humanity. It’s already clear that this experimental regimen is causing serious lifelong health damage for many, especially in younger people. It already seems set to be the worst instance of gross negligence and wilful misconduct in medical history. If we escape massive public disability as a result of this intervention, it will be a Stanislav Petrov-style moment of immense providence for the human species. We won’t know for certain for decades to come.
In any case, the extreme hubris of this very imprudent course of public health policy has not been recognized or learned from. Also, the short-sightedness of deploying a leaky untested therapy on an active pandemic, thereby creating selection pressures on the bug to make it worse, has been ignored. The prevailing attitude is that the program has indeed been successful – effective, safe, necessary, and timely – and that we should do the same again. Various research initiatives seek to roll out even more avant garde interventions faster in future.
If experimental immunity therapeutics can be mandated, on pain of loss of a job, a child, or even one’s life, anything can. Whatever that is may not even be transparent. In the not too distant future will we have IQ, morality, attention-enhancing, or law and order ‘therapeutics’ that we are obliged to accept, even against our will – our conscience?
In a world with increasingly algorithmically controlled workforces the new meaning of ‘white collar’ is a position relatively free from such petty bureaucratic tyrannies. Now consider neural laces/links, devices to connect the human mind with computers. We may soon be obliged to submit to such oppressive measures or face societal exclusion.
The globalist worldview seeks to drive progress at an increased pace, whilst managing problems of scarcity at a global scale. To achieve this, this worldview accepts the undermining of national and ethnic identities to create a globally homogenised culture that favors greater economic integration and interdependence. Globalists view these processes as essential for dealing with mounting global pressures, such as climate change, which they consider likely to lead to further mass migration and societal strife, which can only be mitigated by tolerating the discomfort of a lower standard of living and a society of strangers.
However, there is strong resistance to these internationalist projects, as such progress may come at the expense of many people's dearest wishes for things to remain much as they are, and the pandemic has amplified such sentiment further. The narratives calling for a Great Reset as a result of the pandemic have significantly increased anti-globalist paranoia.
Sadly, an element of paranoia about the intentions of unaccountable elites is fair and reasonable. The power of technology such as AI and synthetic biology is immense. Such powers are like unfathomable magic to the public, and dark maleficarum jealously guard their secrets. They can be applied to all kinds of plausibly deniable tyranny, once economics and biology start becoming fused, and social credit and sumptuary systems decide who is allowed access to what, in an enclosed open prison panopticon.
Our society has become increasingly coerced by immensely powerful technologically elite interests. The deployment of powerful new technologies at a time of such consolidation in power by technologically driven elites presents significant barriers to trust for many people.
Such elite technological interests include
Big Tech (richer and more powerful than many nations)
Internationalist Think Tanks
Mass Media narratives controlled by a handful of companies
Financial organizations, including payment processors
All of these have been fusing together in recent years, and have become more powerful than the sum of their parts. By default, we seem headed for a world of technofeudal Oligarchic Transhumanism.
Power corrupts, and the immense power of these technologies is likely to be used in profoundly negative ways, in many jurisdictions. The technologies of transhumanism at present seem as likely to be used to coerce and enslave people as to liberate them (and almost certainly a mix of the two). These possibilities were not factored into the equation by gung-ho idealists who handwave away issues of inequality and shifted costs laid upon the social fabric of societies.
By messing with things that we think we can optimize, we may create further problems. Think of birth control and intra-uterine devices, undoubtedly a transhuman technology. These have been immensely liberating for women in many ways. But it has also led to the death of healthy gender relations, a great many ‘leftover women’, and a collapse in birth rates in many societies, with an associated inverted population pyramid that makes welfare systems untenable.
The liberation of women to professional careers has also left many women unable to find partners sufficiently in their socioeconomic league, or unable to capitalize on their fertility and sexual market value when at its prime, when able to produce the most healthy offspring.
Perhaps further transhuman developments can somewhat ameliorate the problems we have already created. However, I cannot help but observe that perhaps on balance many people are less happy and secure than they once were, and human beings are more miserable and neurotic than ever as a result of our technologies.
Kaczynski observed that technology tends to liberate, before it enslaves in turn. It's a dark bargain, and there are no free lunches. I would really like to see the concepts of shifted costs, Moloch, and Chesterton's Fence put front and center in these discussions. The questions are not about could we, but should we, or who should benefit, and when, and how can we avoid it going wrong?
A pioneering natural experiment in human enhancement has led to gross bioethics violations, and in some cases crimes against humanity, due to insidious coercion. People will never trust human enhancement again, and understandably so. Transhumanism as a movement is probably dead as a result. We were naïve to believe that our dream of technological liberation from the human condition wouldn’t be used to steal our humanity instead.
I am of the opinion that transhumanism needs a rebranding or a reframing if it is to maintain appeal, even to its already limited community. It needs to be inviting, accessible, somewhat precautionary, and not dismissive of ethical concerns or broader societal ramifications. We must better understand what externalities and systemic vulnerabilities might be being created by AI and synthetic biology.
It is essential that the Transhumanism movement demonstrates genuine care and concern for those who are not receptive towards enhancement, or who are not yet assured of the long-term benefits.
The movement should focus on radically improved mental and physical health of individuals, families, and societies. It should avoid mention of 'superpowers', or anything that appears to diminish human-ness, anything too machine-like. It must be extremely mindful to demonstrate that those in the movement seek to be more human(e), not less. If it fails in that endeavor, eventually pitchforks and torches may seek it out.
It also needs to present realistic opportunities to make these technologies available for all who desire them (in an absolutely non-coercive manner), to demonstrate that we are not dismissive elitists. It needs to take a leadership position standards of ethics for the implementation of transhuman technologies, present and near future, in a way that is open, participatory, and practicable. Mere principles are not enough – no pernicious feel-good abstractions suffice; we need criteria that are tangible and directly able to be implemented.
The movement must step up the mark and lead from the front in these times where a great evil is being done to so many through coerced human enhancement. If the movement, who knows this domain so well, who has pioneered it for decades, does not undertake this important and difficult work, who will? If it is left unfinished, the chance of dystopian outcomes seems all but certain.
We need to cultivate more trustworthy and reliable institutions, ones which are difficult to capture by perverse interests. Those institutions are a prerequisite foundation for a beneficial transhuman future. A collapse of ecosystems and institutions can only be mitigated through careful reform, and investment in societal infrastructure. Only by undertaking work to ensure that there are appropriate safeguarding ethical institutions for transhuman technology can we avoid damage to personal and community reputations, and prevent these technologies from being applied to wicked purposes.
The sun will always rise tomorrow. But a better future will only arise if we undertake the work necessary to shephard it into being. That's work for aspiring angels, rather than Iron Man wannabes.
Hope must return to our vision of the future – a hope based on meaningfully humane and truthful values, long term sustainability, and societal cohesion, rather than constructed narratives and empty technological progress as an end in itself.
Technology without carefully reasoned values set in actionable fulfilment criteria is simply an amplifier for evil and chaotic ends.