The Transhuman Age
Beyond the computer software-based opportunities for mind-enhancement promoted
by Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi and
the enlargement of human potential posited by The Aquarian Age, and the opportunities for
ubiquitous telecommunications promoted by The Telespheral Age, the central theme of
The Transhuman Age grapples with considerations of what it means to be
human.
According to FM-2030, The Transhuman Age
will witness the evolution of human beings who will have high tech bodies (implants, smart limbs,
electronic monitors); will undergo major body
reconstruction; will have their body moods telemonitored and regulated (see
Michael Crichton's The Terminal
Man); will be teleconnected to other people and services via onbody
telecommunications devices; will contribute to reproduction only through
collaborative asexual methods; will be androgynous; will be products of asexual
insemination or anovulation; will be free of kinship ties, legislated
nationality, ethnicity, racism, sexism, aggression, patriarchy, religion,
competition, finite time and space, and thoughts and feelings that who they are
and what they do are exclusively human; will travel and live beyond this
planet; and will expect and accept multiple options and accelerating change
(202-215).
Rather than the high-tech augmented evolution of Homo sapiens posited by
FM-2030, Osborne Hardison, Jr. sees
the possibility of an evolution from carbon-based life as we know it to life
forms based in the silicon chips of computers with human intellectual
abilities, imagination, and creativity modeled in, and less desirable traits
filtered out (347). Silicon-based life, says Hardison, will be immortal and
able to travel easily to the farthest reaches of space. Time will cease to
regulate life.
They will be telepathic since they will hear with antennas. They
will communicate in the universal language of 0 and 1, into which they will
translate the languages of the five senses and a rainbow of other senses
unknown to carbon man. They will not need to hear music or light to see
beauty. . . . They will be invisible, but we can try to imagine them, even as
fish might try to imagine the fisherman on the other side of the mirror that is
the water's surface. (348)
Hardison says we may already be on our way to such an intertwining as new
developments in science, history, language, and art produce broad ranging
reverberations. For example, our notions of language and general educated
opinion may be changing as the idea of artificial or machine intelligence is becoming
more generally accepted. Simply stated, humankind is in the process of
disappearing into the machines it has created.
The Transhuman Age may be, as Ed Regis
calls it, "fin-de-siecle hubristic mania" (7), a desire for complete
control over matter. Regis walks the fine line between scientific fact and
science fiction, and enjoys showing how they often cross and blur beyond
recognition, while exploring the cutting edge technologies associated with
cryogenics (the freezing of humans immediately after death for the purpose of
preserving them for later resurrection), nanotechnology (the direct
manipulation of matter at the atomic level), artificial life (life made by man
rather than nature), and other forms of the postbiological engineering of
mankind.
Concerning the latter, we have known since the 1930s that electrical activity
occurs in the human brain. This led to the thought that human memory, perhaps
even human personality, existed in the form of electrical impulses. Precedence
for this idea comes from Claude
Shannon, who theorizes that information of any type can be encoded and transmitted as electronic
signals, and Arthur C. Clarke (1956),
who proposes a future world where humans learn to analyze and store the
information that defines a specific human being.
Since then there have been other interesting considerations. Frederik Pohl says the essence of a human
being is memory, personality, or mind which can be saved as a collection of
magnetic impulses in a computer. Dick
Fredrickson discusses implanting human beings in alternative hardware. Hans Moravec devotes an entire book to
detailed descriptions of how people can become robots by downloading their
neural selves into a cyborgian entity, or perhaps into a sentient, collective
artificial intelligence. Ed Regis
examines the notion of copying human sentience into some future iteration of
computer technology and faxing it about the universe. Paul Davies argues that the distinctions
between "organic" and "machine" are already blurred and may soon disappear
altogether.
We can confidently predict the use of micro-chip implants in the
human brain or nervous system to extend its capabilities. Conversely, computer
scientists are currently exploring the idea of using organic material in
computers. It may soon be possible literally to grow computer parts
organically or to graft brain tissue into solid-state automata.
(53)
Finally, Alvin Toffler predicts the
ultimate cyborg will be a direct link
between a human brain, shorn of its connections to the physical human body, and
a computer. "Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the
supercomputer of the future may be massed human brains" (213).
Regarding this direct link between humans and computers, philosopher Robert Jastrow poetically envisions a
time when a scientist will be able
to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic
lattices of a computer. Because mind is the essence of being, it can be said
that this scientist has entered the computer, and that he now dwells in it. At
last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the
weakness of the mortal flesh. . .. It is in control of its own destiny. The
machine is its body; it is the machine's mind. (166-167)
How should these new symbiotic computer-human brains work? Psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird says a computer
program might be a model, but he is disturbed by the implications of this idea.
There is a remote possibility that the computations of a human mind
might be captured within a medium other than a brain. A facsimile of a human
personality could be preserved within a computer program. . . . The concept of
interacting with a dynamic representation of an individual's intellect and
personality is sufficiently novel to be disturbing. It raises mental,
metaphysical and scientific issues of its own. (391-392)
On the other hand, Paul Churchland,
a professor of philosophy and member of the cognitive science faculty at the
University of California, San Diego, has long championed the development of
neural networks and the implantation of computers in human brains to augment
our thinking capabilities.
"The Seven Ages of Computer Connectivity" (The Transhuman Age)
by John F. Barber