SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY?
It can be difficult to know what transhumanism amounts to—a worldview, an ideology, a movement, or some combination—but it cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant. Doctoral dissertations and academic conferences have focused on transhumanism, and a few major universities have scholarly centers wholly devoted to exploring transhumanist ideas. Books and blogs, think tanks and online communities, documentaries and blockbuster movies have all helped to popularize those ideas. Major news outlets routinely publish reports uncritically explaining them.5 Meanwhile, some of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are committed transhumanists. Perhaps the most prominent promoter of transhumanism, the inventor and bestselling author Ray Kurzweil, subject of countless media profiles, was hired by Google in 2012 to serve as the company’s director of engineering.6 Three years earlier, Kurzweil cofounded Singularity University, an institution dedicated to disseminating transhumanist ideas, with sponsorship from several high-tech companies and philanthropic foundations, as well as help from NASA.7 In short, many of the people who are inventing the tools of tomorrow embrace, or are at least informed by, the transhumanist vision of the day after tomorrow.
The transhumanist program to redesign humanity is often linked with the rise of the so-called “converging technologies”: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology (and sometimes robotics), and cognitive science.8 They are called converging technologies because each reinforces the potential that the others have for vastly increasing our ability to manipulate nature, including our own nature. And what remarkable things are now in the works! While it is still possible to make a splash by writing a book about how, in the not-so-distant future, people will regularly have sex with robots,9 that is hardly a revolutionary thought when for some time others have been writing books about people turning themselves into robots.10 The “virtual reality” expected soon to make movies and games more immersive is just a precursor to direct connections between our brains and computers, and even that is merely a prelude to uploading our minds into computers—providing us with a kind of immortality (so long as proper backups are made).11 The undoubted promise biotechnology holds for lengthening human lives is overshadowed by speculation concerning the ability of nanotechnology to bring the dead back to life.12 We are told that genetic engineering to cure disease and bioengineering to overcome disabilities are just foreshadowings of a complete re-engineering of human beings to add whatever senses, features, and capacities an individual might wish to possess.13
Are such developments really likely, or even possible? Some critics point out problematic scientific or technological assumptions underlying transhumanists’ ideas, or the obstacles that they might have overlooked. Critics also sometimes focus on the considerable uncertainty about what is possible, arguing that that uncertainty might in and of itself be adequate reason for ignoring those who happily anticipate an end to humanity. Without a clearer idea of what will actually be possible in the future, debating the details of various transhumanist predictions might seem like a waste of time—and surely we have more pressing things to worry about today.
But even if the converging technologies do not pan out exactly as transhumanists expect, who would really want to bet against the likelihood that science and technology will, in the future as in the past, continue to allow us to do things routinely that only a few decades previously might have seemed like mere science fiction? Indeed, it is surely likely that for a great many items on those worry-about-it-today lists, we will call upon science and technology to deal with them. That is our contemporary way of thinking about solving problems. Nanotechnologies are already being developed to deal with environmental and energy issues.14 The fight against terrorism has spurred advances in robotics.15 The most surprising human future would be one in which we did not continue to accumulate scientific information and innovative technology and use them to increase our powers over nature, which includes power over ourselves.
From this point of view, it is clear that the broad transhumanist goal of overcoming the human condition does not depend on whether or not a particular constellation of technologies works as expected. Indeed, we will see how some transhumanists reasonably suggest that dissatisfaction with the human condition and the wish to transcend it run deep in human thinking, and perhaps even define our humanity. If so, we may just keep trying to redesign ourselves with whatever means actually become available.
MAN IS BORN TO TROUBLE
Dissatisfaction with the miseries of human life—whether we are beset by them from outside or we bring them on ourselves—is nothing new. In the Bible, the Book of Job lays out the situation in a familiar way from which certain generic conclusions can be drawn. Job loses his great wealth, the external goods that make for a comfortable life. Boils afflict his body and take his health away. Job is deprived of his loved ones, and to that extent also of his future, as he fears that death is absolutely final. The only thing missing is deliberately omitted. Satan expects the balance of Job’s mind will be disturbed and he will curse God. But while Job acknowledges confusion, longs for death, and contends with God, he does not explicitly curse Him.
So the human condition has long been understood to include the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of being deprived of external goods, bodily goods, and goods of the mind or spirit—and by dissatisfaction that we have such vulnerabilities. Doubtless that kind of dissatisfaction helped to prompt ancient imagination of longer lives, greater wealth, and superhuman power, as in the case of the Greek gods and heroes. These Greek gods—without the curse of mortality, with all possibility of ease and wealth and security, full of rude health and bodily vigor—are just what we might wish to be. And yet they are still restless, jealous, capricious, untrustworthy, often angry, unhappy, and quite dissatisfied. Even without the darker sides of the human condition, and without having to bear real consequences for the vast majority of their actions, they have a terrible lightness of being.
While these gods will punish those who seek to be too much like them, the gods themselves are punished for being what they are, for having some of the very goods that mortals hope for. Apparently, in the ancient view, the things we might have thought would make us happy do not guarantee it at all. Failure to appreciate this catch-22 means that imagination of something better is likely to be just another source of suffering, since what you imagine would never work out in any case. So whether you think things could be better or not, suffering is to be taken for granted. Options for dealing with this fact of life, whether among premodern polytheists or monotheists, were likewise limited. One might seek to delay suffering by proper relationships with gods or God, or to find some message or meaning in the suffering when it inevitably occurred, or simply to accept it with resignation as the cost of living. And at that, even the pious rabbis of the Talmud were known to wonder if it were better for mankind to have been created or not. When it came to a vote, they voted not.16
Even if the sources of our misery have not changed over time, the way we think about them has certainly changed between the ancient world and ours. What was once simply a fact of life to which we could only resign ourselves has become for us a problem to be solved. When and why the ancient outlook began to go into eclipse in the West is something scholars love to discuss, but that a fundamental change has occurred seems undeniable. Somewhere along the line, with thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes playing a major role, people began to believe that misery, poverty, illness, and even death itself were not permanent facts of life that link us to the transcendent but rather challenges to our ingenuity in the here and now. And that outlook has had marvelous success where it has taken hold, allowing more people to live longer, wealthier, and healthier lives than ever before.
So the transhumanists are correct to point out that the desire to alter the human condition runs deep in us, and that attempts to alter it have a long history. But even starting from our perennial dissatisfaction, and from our ever-growing power to do something about the causes of our dissatisfaction, it is not obvious how we get from seeking to improve the prospects for human flourishing to rejecting our humanity altogether. If the former impulse is