Pulse
1 July 2024
One of the most distinctive features of the Transhumanist project is its unflagging confidence that the advances of science and technology will usher humanity into a marvellous post-human future.
No one has expressed this more sharply than Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and engineering director at Google. In his book, The Singularity is Near (2005), Kurzweil famously writes:
… 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. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.
Transhumanists therefore have a very keen interest in the development of some branches of science and technology such as biotechnology, neuroscience, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, computer science and AI.
In this way, transhumanism shows itself to be the true heir of the Enlightenment. As some have rightly noted, technological progress is the poster child of the Enlightenment civilisation.
There is another way in which transhumanism as a futurist movement is closely aligned with the 17th century intellectual movement.
Both are undergirded by a broadly similar doctrine of progress which says that, as Steve Goldman of Lehigh University has wryly expressed it, ‘something is better than it had been and promises to get better still in the future.’
Both transhumanists and the great architects of the Enlightenment saw progress in society and the human condition as being in concert with and dependent on the advance of science and technology, especially the latter.
But transhumanists seek to take a further step. (In fact, a huge leap!)
While the philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that technology can greatly improve human lives, transhumanists insist that it can change human nature itself.
Transhumanists believe that technology not only can make possible profound modifications and enhancements to human nature. It can enable humans to transcend their very nature and become post-human.
Such is the vision of Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford, arguably transhumanism’s most eloquent evangelist:
Transhumanists view human nature as a work in progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remould in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.
TECHNOLOGISM
The technologism of the transhumanists, however, must be subjected to closer scrutiny.
Broadly defined, technologism is the belief in the almost limitless power of technology to improve society and human lives. According to some accounts, technology is even presented as the ‘answer’ to the numerous challenges that the human species faces, including suffering, disease, poverty, inequality and even death itself.
Transhumanists whole-heartedly believe in this narrative.
For example, they believe that technology will enable society to achieve super-intelligence. This can be achieved by producing super computers. But it can also take the form of brain-machine interfaces where devices are embedded in the human brain that dramatically enhances human intelligence.
Theologian Joel Oesch speculates that ‘technologies will emerge in the next ten to twenty years that may substantially increase memory, perhaps even facilitate photographic memory.’
Technology can also increase the human lifespan indefinitely, according to transhumanists. Transhumanists such as Aubrey de Grey, who is the leading researcher in the field of human life extension, maintain that using technology to extend human life is ‘the single most important imperative of humanity.’
Some transhumanists are of the view that the secret to longevity will be uncovered by genetic science, and genetic engineering will be the key to human life extension. Others put their money on human-machine interfaces, such as mind uploading where the data gleaned from the human brain is uploaded onto a computer or a robotic substrate.
All these approaches point to the supreme confidence that transhumanists have in science and its cousin, technology.
The technologism of the transhumanists is premised upon the mechanistic view of life – indeed of all reality – which is based on the works of the Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) and the biologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882).
Descartes famously proposed that all of nature works according to certain mechanical laws. Philosophers and scientists are able to make sense of the natural world by examining the configuration and movement of its parts.
This philosophical approach – which is later aptly called Cartesian reductionism – maintains that all of reality can be understood by studying its smallest constituent parts.
Some commentators, such as T. J. Johnson, have argued that the mechanistic theory, which was already widely accepted in the 18th century, reached its climax with the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The British naturalist and biologist proposed that all of life could be explained by mechanistic forces, especially natural or sexual selection.
When the mechanistic view of life is accepted uncritically – as the transhumanists are wont to do – it results in a reductionism which supports technologism.
Reflecting the possible consequences of this philosophical view on medicine, the French philosopher at the Paris-Sorbonne University, Jean-Michel Besnier, argues:
Once we accept this mechanistic notion of life and the vocabulary of repair, we will have to embrace the idea that technology will become all-powerful in the health sector / wellbeing industry. Consequently, we will have to accept a scenario involving augmented humans …
SERVANT OR MASTER?
The Christian critique of transhumanism’s confidence in technology must examine the nature of technology and its impact on culture, the relationship between humans and machines, and the notion of technological progress.
The Christian understanding of technology and its appropriate role in society has always been cautious and nuanced. Christians are profoundly concerned about the alleviation of human suffering and improving human lives, and they recognise that technology has an important contribution to make towards this end.
Christians regard science and technology as the outworking of God’s common or universal grace. They should therefore be received as gifts and employed in ways that bring honour to God.
In his 1989-1991 Gifford Lectures, published as Ethics in an Age of Technology, Ian Barbour helpfully describes appropriate technology as ‘creative technology that is economically productive, ecologically sound, socially just, and personally fulfilling.’
This means that technology or technological systems that dehumanises people and fractures human relationships should be checked and kept at bay. While the Christian faith recognises technology as a human enterprise made possible by God’s grace, it is also cognisant that it can be abused due to human sinfulness.
Thus, Barbour writes:
The biblical understanding of human nature is realistic about the abuses of power and the institutionalisation of self-interest. But it also is idealistic in its demands for social justice in the distribution of the fruits of technology. It brings together celebration of human creativity and suspicion of human power.
Within the Christian framework, therefore, the relationship between human beings and technology is ambiguous for just this important reason. Technology can be a vehicle to serve God, but it can also be the instrument for the exercise of oppressive power.
Furthermore, technology, which is a gift from God and which should be used to serve humankind, can also become an enslaving idol. The servant can become the master.
Transhumanist technologism appears naïve precisely because it seems oblivious to the dark side of technological dominance and abuse.
In addition, transhumanism seems to present a rather simplistic notion of technological progress. It appears to be repeating the mistakes of the positivists – past and present – who uncritically celebrate what they regarded as the omnicompetence of the natural sciences and their unstoppable progress.
Thinkers such as Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the ‘scientific’ Marxists, the logical positivists, and the Darwinians so elevated science that they regarded it as saviour. However, in doing so, they have done a great disservice to science by giving it a responsibility it simply cannot bear.
The same can be said of the transhumanists and their inordinate confidence in technology.
Some transhumanists believe that technology will advance at such an incredible pace that it would be virtually unstoppable. Society will simply be carried along by the current of technological progress. Needless to say, human passivity in the wake of the march of technology is not only slothful, it is extremely dangerous.
As far back as the 1960s and 1970s, the Georgetown futurist Victor Ferkiss warned about the perils of a runaway technology – a situation where technological advance is allowed to follow its own course without societal interventions, and without being guided by certain moral commitments.
Ferkiss insists that technological advance must be reined in and kept in check by society and stakeholders. However, he adds: ‘To control technology, to control the direction of human evolution, we must have some idea of where we are going and how far, else we will be mere passengers rather than drivers of the chariots of evolution’.
To be fair, transhumanists have ‘some idea of where they are going’. Or, more precisely, where they want to go.
They want to head for the posthuman future where current limitations imposed by human nature are surmounted, and where human nature itself is transcended, as we morph into something quite different and immeasurably more wonderful. And they believe that technology will bring them there.
The trouble is that this vision lacks a realistic anthropology, a substantial moral mooring and a sober understanding of technology as a cultural artifact. Without these important considerations, the utopian dream of the transhumanists may well become a dystopian nightmare.
Steven Goldman of Lehigh University puts it starkly thus:
What if the new man combines the animal rationality of primitive man with the calculated greed and power-lust of industrial man, while possessing Godlike powers granted him by technology? This would be the ultimate horror!
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.