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.