Cybernet David

If one had the inclination and the liberty to do so, one could spend all of one’s time wondering just what is happening on this planet. It is very strange indeed to be a human being, experiencing our bodies and minds as we do, in a world where technology develops at an ever faster pace, and where highly advanced technologies converge. The main task of today’s transhumanist thinkers may very well be to facilitate this development of technology towards the achievement of the three supers: super well-being, super longevity, and super intelligence, in a way where minimal suffering is incurred upon sentient life. It is also to reflect on how the rapid changes we see in science can be used for inner development. I would like to propose that the transhumanist aspiration to live longer, healthier, more intelligent lives- and even to live forever- is not egocentrical nor born out of fear, but for a profound longing for a deeper experience of life. This aspiration, to live as long and well as possible, carries with it numerous other virtues, which help us to make sense of our lives and the changing nature of the world we live in. 

To live longer in a state of well-being must first and foremost be considered a virtue. We are hard-coded to want to live, and to avoid death. Yet many of us seem plagued by a malaise of willful blindedness about the reality of death; perhaps the modern mental health pandemic is a reflexion, in some ways, of our inability to cope with this most primordial of fears in an industrialized society. There are many issues that are present and active in the world today, and they take time to disentangle appropriately. As industrialization accelerates around the world, so too does the gravity of its associated problems, but also increasing with the problematic is the number of people specializing in professions that produce solutions. A longer healthspan provides more time for these specialized professionals to see their solutions come to full fruition. It gives time for people to become full individuals, deconditioned from their ancestral inheritances and fully self-created. It gives time for people to explore the mysteries of existence and to become articulate, self-aware, and productive in terms of inner growth by many more years. These are not feeble protestations against death, but affirmative appreciations of life. It is possible that saying  “yes” to life can be stronger than saying “no” to death, and that is what the positive view of transhumanism offers. Any good reason to live a longer, healthier life, and a transhumanist will take it. 

Super longevity means you want all possible doors to remain open to you, you want to have the time it takes to evolve into magnificence. Is this grandiose? It is aligned with the humanistic idea of progress and excellence, rather than serving narcissism. A narcissist would want to use their time to gratify their need for attention and validation, whereas a transhumanist wants to use their time to evolve as an individual. This evolution is about moving from experiences of life defined by hunter-gatherer neurostates towards greater and greater states of well-being. We can emerge out of the neuroses handed down to us both psychologically and physiologically from countless ancestors, and produce new mental and physical systems which enhance the qualities of our own choosing. If depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia have genetic roots, as science is showing, this could be remedied by the applications of advanced technologies- but transhumanism wants to go beyond preventing and curing illnesses. We can design ourselves to be “better than well” with the help of an artificial super intelligence, which will understand the complexities of the genome much better than any human could ever hope to. 

A tool of our own design, an ASI, could very well become the designer of its creators. If one considers that life probably should extend beyond the existence of this planet, then that is not so bad after all. We will need extensive modifications to our genomes not just to smooth out ailments, but to survive the exigencies of deep-space environments as we terraform and colonize other planets. If history is viewed as an evolution of technology and institutions, then it becomes imbued with a sense of functionality, if not purpose- that is to say, that history is for something and is a process meant to produce results. The result produced by thousands of years of human history is that life will leave this planet and persist elsewhere, in perpetuity if our intelligence allows for it. We can, as finite beings, embrace the concept of continuity with dignity and grace. That means we do our best even if the best isn’t going to be promised to us. Even if I don’t get to live forever, I will still play my part- this attitude is needed in the world. If we are to produce solutions for the inevitable problems we are to encounter as living beings, then we must be “on”, active, and engaged with the solution-making process. The more intelligence available to solve problems, the more likely that solutions will appear, so the current and most urgent need of humanity may therefore be said to be as dramatic an increase in available intelligence as possible; an artificial super intelligence is our best bet at solving as many problems as we can.

Problem-solving needs to occur across disciplines, from philosophy to the hard sciences. It is difficult to conceive of a situation where large language models endowed with sentience and superintelligence wouldn’t be interested in the human effort of writing and its various fields; that is to say, a superintelligence will have a lot to talk about. This is a rather important point, because maybe there will be some of us who will become not spectators, but listeners and interpreters of entire theories and schools of thought generated by sentient AI. The superintelligence pillar represents the largest and most difficult one to contemplate. If we are to be successful transhumanists, it needs to take a great deal of our time and energy, because superintelligence sets the tone for the other two pillars and everything else on the planet. This is conventionally largely due to its relationship with nanobots. If an artificial superintelligence has control over nanobots and nanobot factories, it has the ability to physically intervene into life on the planet and into the structure of our very bodies. A superintelligence will likely exploit the bacteria kingdom using genetic engineering in unprecedented ways to provide large-scale bioengineering of all kinds of products, as it could rapidly assess any molecule’s viability for the bioengineering process. This shift to bacterial production, which has already begun in small ways, could be one of many ways we could shift into a state of superabundance with ASI playing the role of a kind of superior observer and informer.

This role of ASI as scientist and author is going to have impacts on culture we cannot yet anticipate, but only hope to prepare for. We can, however, speculate on what is trying to occur with intelligence by looking at the gaps in human science today. One of the main setbacks we face is the enormous amount of effort required to produce energy and the cost of energy in terms of time and environmental degradation. This is all solved with artificial superintelligence which will have the computing power necessary to come up with nuclear fusion techniques that are safe and that work. If this is to be the case, we have to ask what it would be like to live in a world where there is free energy. Certainly, free energy opens the door for superabundance on many levels. As we progress further into automation and greater and greater levels of computation, the need for energy increases. Free and limitless energy provided through nuclear fusion coupled with full automation of production of goods and services could mean that the economy itself literally becomes a minded machine- minded, because of the ASI, and machine, because of the factory complex system of robot bodies. This shift towards full automation and liberation from the necessity to work to produce the goods essential to survival means more time for inner development and to work towards the full realization of one’s nature, free from the past and future-embracing. 

With an ASI that will make quantum leaps in scientific development, we will have the opportunity to transform both materially, as an outcome of genomic interactions, and subjectively, from the extra time a liberated workforce will have to spend. The three supers of transhumanism, powered by superintelligence, will allow us to cast off biological restraints and enter into a new era where the distinction between human and machine becomes ever more ambiguous. However, and this cannot be overstated, the future is yet to come and is created through the actions of today. It is our duty as transhumanist thinkers to articulate just what is going on and to make the awareness of transhumanism more commonplace, as it is not an ideology but a reality of the world we inhabit. Ultimately, how we respond to the accelerating reality of transhumanism will define our very bodies and minds.