About three years ago, I had a three-hour coffee session with an ethicist who also works as a litigation expert, specialising in very unique cases that revolve around human rights and fertility. It was one of the most fascinating and crazy conversations of my life.
To put it in simple terms: he works on cases that would help place the borders around genetic engineering and some of its related fields: bio-engineering, human enhancement; that sort of thing.
What he told me blew my mind, in terms of what is possible and actually what is coming. I walked around for three days in a daze realising the world was not at all what I thought it was; that my kids would have to work through some moral and ethical dilemmas that I never had to grapple with—dilemmas that were always presented on shows such as Star Trek but in my mind would be far, far away from now.
The next year, Covid hit. And so did a ton of conspiracy theories. And interestingly, I found, most of these were fed by, or fed into, what it was my ethicist friend was talking about.
Underneath the surface of the questions around the vaccine, the crazy and unnecessary politics, the world leaders who quite frankly seem to have lost their mind around this issue, government overreach, fear about the virus, fear about surveillance, fear about anti-vaxxers, the role of science, crazy (and quite frankly, unworkable) theories from the World Economic Forum, the “Great Reset” etc., is a common theme; a meta-story, as it were. As I “did my own research” (something people praised you for three years ago and which now makes you a crazy conspiracy theorist) from pure interest in where all the stories might lead (that’s the storyteller and journalist in me), I discovered that in the background of all the mRNA technological breakthroughs and related gene therapies, the emergence of 5G technology, vaccine passports, and the power of social media and media bias and media power, was actually lying a much bigger fear about where the human race is going not just politically and economically but physically.
Some are framing this story as the battle between a technocracy and democracy. I think this is true. But I’m very interested in the psyche behind it—the thing living behind everyone’s fears right now. And I think it’s actually the obvious: Technology and humanity are merging together much quicker than most of us anticipated, and we’re not really prepared for it.
What used to be a fringe ideological movement has clearly become the underscoring driving philosophy of our world. Covid has accelerated this ideology, or rather manifested it into the public light in myriad ways, and exposed a lot of its “dark side”.
It’s the movement of transhumanism.
It’s the story that is driving the fear in the background—seen most clearly perhaps in the fear around Covid vaccines and vaccine passports, etc.—as increasingly we see very powerful people who seem to be confused about who the bad guys are in all the sci-fi movies. Because, after all, if you merge today’s and tomorrow’s technology with totalitarianism, you get every sci-fi dystopia ever conceived of or predicted by authors in the last hundred years.
Transhumamism is a story that captures the imagination because, after all, it’s the human story from the beginning—the story of bettering ourselves… but on our own terms.
Transhumanism, defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is simply, “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.” A 2017 paper at the Journal of Medicine & Philosophy puts it more poignantly (emphasis mine):
Transhumanism is a “technoprogressive” socio-political and intellectual movement that advocates for the use of technology in order to transform the human organism radically, with the ultimate goal of becoming “posthuman.” To this end, transhumanists focus on and encourage the use of new and emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces. In support of their vision for humanity, and as a way of reassuring those “bioconservatives” who may balk at the radical nature of that vision, transhumanists claim common ground with a number of esteemed thinkers and traditions, from the ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to the postmodern philosophy of Nietzsche. It is crucially important to give proper scholarly attention to transhumanism now, not only because of its recent and ongoing rise as a cultural and political force (and the concomitant potential ramifications for bioethical discourse and public policy), but because of the imminence of major breakthroughs in the kinds of technologies that transhumanism focuses on.
An example: Elon Musk’s Neuralink is a very real company, with very real investment and very real breakthroughs, striving to develop “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” It plans to put a chip into a human brain this year.
“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast,” said Elon Musk about five years ago in a now deleted comment at edge.org. “Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year time frame. Ten years at most.”
Neil Harbisson, pictured above, is the first person in the world with an antenna implanted in his skull and also the first to look to be legally recognised as a cyborg. He is an activist for “transpecies” rights. Read more about him at Wikipedia.
The transgender debate is, I think, another clear picture that the ‘spirit of the age’, the topic working in the background on everyone’s mind in the wake of our technological, fourth industrial revolution age, is what makes us human and, more poignantly, how we are able to shape that for ourselves. The transhuman discussion takes this one step further.
Just today, Pfizer inked a deal with Beam to use mRNA for gene editing. This was one of the original hopes for mRNA when it was first being developed, and that fact seeded several fears around mRNA from the beginning. Some of these fears have been reasonable, I think, and others have not. I don’t want to get sidetracked into that discussion. The point is to note that gene editing is going mainstream.
A quote from Jamie Metzl at The Economist, author of the book Hacking Darwin, illustrates something of where we’re at when it comes to genetic engineering:
We have internalised the idea that information technology is variable, which is why we expect each generation of our phones and computers to be better than the last. It’s harder for us to come to grips with the idea that our biology could be as variable as our IT, even though we understand intellectually that somehow we evolved from single cell organisms to complex humans over the past 3.8 billion years. Starting to see all of life, including our own, as increasingly manipulable will force us to think more deeply about what values will guide us as we begin altering biology more aggressively.
Here’s the ethical clincher:
We create beautiful art, philosophy and universal concepts like human rights but wipe out millions of each other in wars and genocides and still today invest massive amounts of our collective wealth in tools of mass murder. The “better angels of our nature” remain primary drivers in our development of genetic technologies, but the dark side of human nature could also be empowered through these same tools. We need a very strong ethical and cultural framework to increase the odds that we’ll use these technologies wisely, not least because access to them will be decentralised and democratised.
If you’ve never seen Gattaca, now’s the time to watch it. It’s a brilliant movie and not so far into the future as most of us thought!
Interest in mutants and superheroes is also, I think, so mainstream because, at the back of peoples’ minds, the question that the X-Men had to face around the place of mutants is precisely the kind of questions we’re needing to answer.
French philosopher, Jacques Ellul, put (or predicted) things this way:
For the psychocivilised society, the complete joining of man and machine will be calculated according to a strict system, the so-called “biocracy”. It will be impossible to escape this system of adaptation because it will be articulated with so much scientific understanding of the human being. The individual will have no more need of conscience and virtues. His moral and mental furnishing will be a matter of the biocrats’ decisions.
What I believe we’re going through right now in the world is an emerging awareness of the transhuman story and obvious conflicts that result from it. Autonomy, freedom, the “greater good”… these are all natural arguments and conflicts we should expect.
For instance, if an mRNa vaccine could, for argument’s sake, alter the genes that make certain people more susceptible to sociopathic or psychopathic disorders, would you give it to your children? This is the kind of discussion my ethicist friend and I were having. He says the answer is simple: if you would give medication to your kids to help out with ADHD or other such issues, why not then conduct gene therapy to make their brains more healthy?
And if you would do all you can to give your kid a “leg up” in sport—take them to training early, give them the right diet… why not alter the genes?
If you’re into diversity, why not create diversity through DNA editing? Why must there be a limit?
These were his questions, and quite frankly most of us are not ready for these sorts of questions. Especially when they’re no longer just hypothetical thought exercises.
Even further, and a little closer to home. If a vaccine could lower mental disorders in society, should the whole world not take it “for the greater good”? Should such a choice even be optional? Those who refuse—are they selfish? Should they not risk possible side effects for the sake of a healthier society?
Would such genetic engineering take away moral responsibility from free agents? Or is that no longer a relevant question in this case?
These aren’t a hypothetical questions. They’re the kind of moral dilemma we’ve been living in for two years—a moral dilemma that was politicised from both sides and in some cases is ramping up.
The evolution of social media
Another example to showcase where we’re at right now. Most of us laughed at Mark Zuckerberg’s awkward presentation of his company’s name change to Meta, and the announcement of their role in the development of the metaverse. “The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection,” says the company’s website.
Of course, Facebook has to evolve in the wake of web3 technologies—blockchain, effectively. This change wasn’t just a PR exercise in response to a company that has generated a bad reputation, but it was because Zuckerberg and co. know that their time in the sun is limited and that technology is quickly moving on. Blockchain is not only relegated to cryptocurrency, although that’s a whole discussion of its own, but it is the way the internet, this hidden world that lives within our world, is evolving. The explosion of NFT’s (virtual assets) this last year is a sign of how the blockchain is moving beyond cryptocurrency.
I find the idea of the ‘hidden world’, the digital world, a fascinating one. In the absence of a hidden, spiritual world, we have gone and created our own. Just a thought.
The thing about blockchain is it is meant to be a decentralised technology. Effectively, the internet was originally a decentralised, democratising technology. When “Web 2.0” came around, which is how social media and cloud computing and all the rest was described, it was the process of centralising the tech, making it easier to understand and use. Social media was an interesting animal which centralised and decentralised all at the same time, providing easy-to-use platforms for conversation—democratising opinions and information but within a centralised space. (That’s how it killed independent blogging.)
That centralisation is now becoming a point of conflict. Hence, all the discussion around censorship on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. Covid misinformation, no matter how you classify that, has simply shown the limits of the Web 2.0 view of life—and shown how the internet has come to simply reflect the old human power struggles. Social media has, as time has gone by, begun to platform the already platformed and powerful and de-platform smaller or dissenting voices. Sure, some smaller voices manage to rise in the mix, but this is becoming less the norm. PR basically found out how to manipulate through social media—as we saw in the fascinating Bell Pottinger case in South Africa.
Zuckerberg no doubt knows that if he doesn’t get into controlling web3 early and centralising it like he did with Web 2.0, he and his company are going to become irrelevant, in even as short a time as ten years. Personally, I think their approach will prove to be wrong, but they won’t go down without a significant fight.
The point is to note that decentralisation could be the future, which I rather support. But there are a whole lot of people who don’t like that. And what happens when you decentralise transhuman technologies? How would a society form and shape itself? What would the human race develop into?
No one seems to know.
But I think that the current powers-that-be do see an opportunity to not just protect their interests but significantly expand them. And so we have a conflict. The transhuman story will move forward whether we all like it or not but the conflict is a simple one: who gets to control it? And what will they do with it?
The story of Progress and transhumanism
In a secular world, there is only one way to understand time: chronologically. This forward movement means that things must progress. I’ve written about this before but I think it’s important to keep remembering this as it effects the way we view our world, which naturally has a knock-on effect on our culture and our spirituality, which, right now, are in obvious need of reformation across the world.
Progress, as I have said before, has developed into a rather subjective idea. Where one views Progress another sees Regress. What’s important for us to note here is that the only place the Progress story can go, which is built off a Darwinian evolution worldview, is transhumanism.
And that’s precisely where it is going, because that’s where some pretty powerful people are trying to take it. That’s not a conspiracy theory at all, it’s self-evident and it’s also market driven. The way to get ahead of the technology curb is to, well, get ahead. Technology exists to make our lives easier and transhumanism is just an obvious step.
The seeds of transhumanism can be seen and experienced in our cultures the world over with our dear little cellphones that we’re all glued to, regardless of where we are in the world, or even where we are on the socio-economic scale.
But there are ethical questions around humanity that I don’t think they (those in power) can answer, hence their light-speed approach. And, even more, there are spiritual questions that need to be met. And pretty urgently. Because right now, the way ordinary people are responding to all this is with layered fear or, on the other hand, an ambivalence that will make it very easy for things to go badly.
For the sake of our kids, we have to answer the technology question right now—we need a sort of “magna carta” for technology that establishes the borders and the direction. In the absence of this, the Silicon Valley cowboy mentality is taking us further than I think a lot of people realise or would feel comfortable with if they did, and the result will be more chaos than we’re already seeing.
Transhuman and blockchain spirituality
Questions around what makes us human will naturally bring with it spiritual questions. A religion is even being launched (by an atheist) the uses blockchain technology as its basis, so that it can evolve in a decentralised way. It’s an interesting experiment, but also showcases that there are new questions coming our way… and quickly.
From a spiritual perspective, I’ve been thinking for a long time on what I think the best response to all this is. And so that will be the subject of a follow-on post to this one. Hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to comment, critique, even argue in the comments!
Greetings Alan! I've only read this first post of yours and it is spot-on, spiritually speaking; the "reasons" this is happening with technological advances are completely aligning with what I was shown in 1984 by The Holy Spirit of The Living God - yes, our Creator. First: There is only ONE Power, none other. Our Creator "tempts no man" but has Created a "tempter of man" for that purpose. Good and evil are very real: See The Holy Bible - Isaiah 45:7: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." We (humans) were Created in this exact likeness and image: we have within us both good and evil, as does our Creator, only with this caveat: God is bundling up the evil, to put it out of the Created universe forever. Our Inheritance (as brothers and sisters in Christ) will contain absolutely NO EVIL whatsoever. But back to technology...
All the "techys" (tech giants included) are being used of God for God's Purposes - the NEXT PHASE of the Creative Process. In Genesis Chapter 1, God (elohim in Hebrew) Created etc. In Genesis Chapter 2, now Lord God (YHWH in Hebrew) Created etc. In the coming creation, Lord God (Whom Jesus called "My Father" thus our Father, is now preparing the next "genesis" of the Creation of the earth and heavens/universe, so it will be turned over to Jesus and us to "build out" this massive space.
Finally, to accomplish sending a human body 38 light-years (or 200 or 4,000) away to erect a tent and tower is ridiculous: This flesh-and-blood body would never make the trip; it will require to robotic "vehicle" which is even now being developed by God through God's "techys" according to God's Instructions (and they don't know it's happening). Even if Elon Musk knows what our Creator is doing through him (and the others), God Knows about it and this can be our solace, i.e. trusting in Lord God to Accomplish His Purposes.
God Says: "Alan! I need you to go for Me to Alpha Centauri planet Rg3 and put up a tent and a radio tower!" And Alan says: "Yes, sir!." Alan is instantly on Rg3 in the robot body (which has been developed exactly like human bodies now - though synthetic/mechanical - but which have all of the feelings and emotions and pleasures, but without fear or evil) doing the Appointed work, then instantly "back to base" for the next assignment (after a rest, of course!).
So fear not: God's Got This Blessings
Great article Ryan. It bothers me enormously that ordinary people are not giving any consent or input to the way the future is unfolding from the hands of our technocrats, and the implications are existential, as you note. You might find this Jack Murphy interview interesting for Part 2. It discusses the counterposing movement of spiritual traditionalism that sees time (and progress) as cyclic, and its current impact on US politics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7htZJ9ktSKQ