Day: July 31, 2003

The Village Voice on Transhumanism

The Village Voice has an extended look at last month’s World Transhumanist Association held at Yale. The author hits briefly on the Singularity, nanotech, and all of the rest of the transhumanist panapoly. But what attracted my attention was this quote from Bill McKibben,

I go straight to the question of why on earth we would want to do this in first place. I’ve been unable to come up with an answer. All of this enhancing and souping up presupposes a goal or an aim. What is that goal? What is it we’re not intelligent enough to do now? It’s not to feed the hungry—that has to do with how we share things. Fighting disease? We’re making steady progress in conventional medical science with the brains that we have right now. There are a thousand reasons not to trade in people, as we have known them throughout human history, for something else.

I can envision McKibben’s distant ancestors lecturing anyone who will listen,

What good is this whole agriculture thing for? What is the goal? Who needs this? We’ve been hunting and gathering for thousands of years, why switch now?

People want to transcend humanity because it is one of the most deep-seated desires in most human beings. This is usually expressed in the context of religion in which such transcendce occurs after death. Transhumanists want to avoid the whole “wait until you die” version of transcendence and instead transform themselves and others into something more than human in this universe.

A major theme of the last 10,000 years is of human beings increasingly exerting control over both themselves and their environment. Transhumanism is simply the logical extension of that in the face of the often bewildering pace of technological change.

On one end of the spectrum, McKibben rejects technological change, complaining that we are in danger of leaving the “natural world” (whatever that means) behind. On the other, transhumanism says “bring it on,” betting that the pace of technological change will continue to accelerate until what comes next becomes inherently unpredictable (the Singularity) and that this will be a very good thing.

Vietnam Casualties

This weblog is rightly criticizing Washington Times columnist Jack Kelly for Kelly’s racist dig at Arabs,

The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies were bright, skilled, resourceful, well-led, and very brave.

In Iraq, we’re fighting Arabs.

Kelly is also one of many people who do not appear to understand commonly touted statistics about deaths in the Vietnam theater,

In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives. At the height of the war, 500 soldiers were being killed each week.

In the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation, we have lost fewer men to hostile fire than in a single terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. We’ve been losing about a soldier a day since the first of June. At this rate, we’ll reach the Vietnam total in about 158 years.

Sorry, but no. The 58,000 figure is of combat and non-combat deaths in the Vietnam theater. If you’re going to use that statistic, then you need to compare it with total combat and non-combat deaths in Iraq (which, the last time I checked, sat at about two deaths per day).

The level of violence in Iraq is still extremely low — I get the feeling that your average L.A. street gang would be more vicious than these rather ineffective holdout Saddam loyalists. As Kelly points out in another part of his colum, the suicide bombers who attacked the Marine compound in Lebanon killed more Americans in one fell swoop than these jokers in Iraq have been able to do since the beginning of the war.

Not very impressive, except perhaps to the media who seem to find a annual death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 in a war zone to be indicative of enormous problems.