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The people with this attitude aren't just fringe fundamentalists who are fearful of messing with God's Plan. Many of them are prestigious professors and authors whose arguments make no mention of religion. One of the most prominent examples is political theorist Francis Fukuyama, author of End of History, who published a book in 2003 called “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.” In it he argues that we will lose our “essential” humanity by enhancing ourselves, and that the result will be a loss of respect for “human dignity” and a collapse of morality.

Fukuyama's reasoning represents a prominent strain of thought about human enhancement, and one that I find doubly fallacious. (Fukuyama is aware of the following criticisms, but neither I nor other reviewers were impressed by his attempt to defend himself against them.) The idea that the status quo represents some “essential” quality of humanity collapses when you zoom out and look at the steady change in the human condition over previous millennia. Our ancestors were less knowledgable, more tribalistic, less healthy, shorter-lived; would Fukuyama have argued for the preservation of all those qualities on the grounds that, in their respective time, they constituted an “essential human nature”? And even if there were such a thing as a persistent “human nature,” why is it necessarily worth preserving? In other words, I would argue that Fukuyama is committing both the fallacy of essentialism (there exists a distinct thing that is “human nature”) and the appeal to nature (the way things naturally are is how they ought to be).

Writer Bill McKibben, who was called “probably the nation's leading environmentalist” by the Boston Globe this year, and “the world's best green journalist” by Time magazine, published a book in 2003 called “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.” In it he writes, “That is the choice... one that no human should have to make... To be launched into a future without bounds, where meaning may evaporate.” McKibben concludes that it is likely that “meaning and pain, meaning and transience are inextricably intertwined.” Or as one blogger tartly paraphrased: “If we all live long healthy happy lives, Bill’s favorite poetry will become obsolete.”

President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, which advised him from 2001-2009, was steeped in it. Harvard professor of political philosophy Michael J. Sandel served on the Council from 2002-2005 and penned an article in the Atlantic Monthly called “The Case Against Perfection,” in which he objected to genetic engineering on the grounds that, basically, it’s uppity. He argues that genetic engineering is “the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature.” Better we should be bowing in submission than standing in mastery, Sandel feels. Mastery “threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift,” he warns, and submitting to forces outside our control “restrains our tendency toward hubris.”

If you like Sandel's “It's uppity” argument against human enhancement, you'll love his fellow Councilmember Dr. William Hurlbut's argument against life extension: “It's unmanly.” Hurlbut's exact words, delivered in a 2007 debate with Aubrey de Grey: “I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly... I’m inclined to think that there’s something profound about aging and death.”

And Council chairman Dr. Leon Kass, a professor of bioethics from the University of Chicago who served from 2001-2005, was arguably the worst of all. Like McKibben, Kass has frequently argued against radical life extension on the grounds that life's transience is central to its meaningfulness. “Could the beauty of flowers depend on the fact that they will soon wither?” he once asked. “How deeply could one deathless ‘human’ being love another?”

Kass has also argued against human enhancements on the same grounds as Fukuyama, that we shouldn't deviate from our proper nature as human beings. “To turn a man into a cockroach— as we don’t need Kafka to show us —would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more than a man might be so as well,” he said. And Kass completes the anti-transhumanist triad (it robs life of meaning; it's dehumanizing; it's hubris) by echoing Sandel's call for humility and gratitude, urging, “We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift that is our own given nature.”

By now you may have noticed a familiar ring to a lot of this language. The idea that it's virtuous to suffer, and to humbly surrender control of your own fate, is a cornerstone of Christian morality.

it's fairly representative of standard Christian tropes: surrendering to God, submitting to God, trusting that God has good reasons for your suffering.

I suppose I can understand that if you believe in an all-powerful entity who will become irate if he thinks you are ungrateful for anything, then this kind of groveling might seem like a smart strategic move. But what I can't understand is adopting these same attitudes in the absence of any religious context. When secular people chastise each other for the “hubris” of trying to improve the “gift” of life they've received, I want to ask them: just who, exactly, are you groveling to? Who, exactly, are you afraid of affronting if you dare to reach for better things?

This is why transhumanism is most needed, from my perspective – to counter the astoundingly widespread attitude that suffering and 80-year-lifespans are good things that are worth preserving. That attitude may make sense conditional on certain peculiarly masochistic theologies, but the rest of us have no need to defer to it. It also may have been a comforting thing to tell ourselves back when we had no hope of remedying our situation, but that's not necessarily the case anymore.

I think there is a seperation of Transhumanism and what Massimo is referring to. Things like robotic arms and the like come from trying to deal with a specific defect and thus seperate it from Transhumanism. I would define transhumanism the same way you would (the achievement of a better human), but I would exclude the inventions of many life altering devices as transhumanism. If we could invent a device that just made you smarter, then ideed that would be transhumanism, but if we invented a device that could make someone that was metally challenged to be able to be normal, I would define this as modern medicine. I just want to make sure we seperate advances in modern medicine from transhumanism. Modern medicine being the one that advances to deal with specific medical issues to improve quality of life (usually to restore it to normal conditions) and transhumanism being the one that can advance every single human (perhaps equally?).

I agree with all your points about why the arguments against transhumanism and for suffering are ridiculous. That being said, when I first heard about the ideas of Transhumanism, after the initial excitement wore off (since I'm a big tech nerd), my reaction was more of less the same as Massimo's. I don't particularly see the need for a philosophical movement for this.

if people believe that suffering is something God ordained for us, you're not going to convince them otherwise with philosophical arguments any more than you'll convince them there's no God at all. If the technologies do develop, acceptance of them will come as their use becomes more prevalent, not with arguments.

Agar directly tackles Hughes’ ideas of a “democratic transhumanism.” Here as post-humans and humans live shoulder to shoulder in wonderful harmony, all persons have access to the technologies they want in order to promote their own flourishing.  Under girding all of this is the belief that no human should feel pressurised to become enhance. Agar finds no comfort with this and instead can foresee a situation where it would be very difficult for humans to ‘choose’ to remain human.  The pressure to radically enhance would be considerable given the fact that the radically enhanced would no doubt be occupying the positions of power in society and would consider the moral obligation to utilise to the full enhancement techniques as being a moral imperative for the good of society.  For those who were able to withstand then a new underclass would no doubt emerge between the enhanced and the un-enhanced. This is precisely the kind of society which Hughes appears to be overly optimistic will not emerge but which is more akin to Lee Silver’s prediction of the future with the distinction made between the "GenRich" and the "naturals”.  This being the case, the author proposes that we have two options: radical enhancement is either enforced across the board or banned outright. It is the latter option which Agar favours but crucially does not elaborate further on so it is unclear as to how he would attempt such a ban given the complexity of the issue. This is disappointing as any general initial reflections which the author felt able to offer would have added to the discussion and added further strength to his line of argument.

A Transhuman Manifesto The final focus for Agar is James Hughes, who published his transhumanist manifesto Citizen Cyborg in 2004. Given the direct connection with politics and public policy this for me was a particularly interesting read. The basic premise to Hughes argument is that once humans and post humans recognise each other as citizens then this will mark the point at which they will be able to get along with each other.

Agar takes to task the argument Bostrom made with Toby Ord, concerning claims against enhancement. Bostrom and Ord argue that it boils down to a preference for the status quo; current human intellects and life spans are preferred and deemed best because they are what we have now and what we are familiar with (p. 134).  Agar discusses the fact that in his view, Bostrom falls into a focalism – focusing on and magnifying the positives whilst ignoring the negative implications.  Moreover, Agar goes onto develop and reiterate his earlier point that the sort of radical enhancements Bostrom et al enthusiastically support and promote take us beyond what is human so they are no longer human. It therefore cannot be said to be human enhancement given the fact that the traits or capacities that such enhancement afford us would be in many respects superior to ours, but they would not be ours.

With his law of accelerating returns and talk of the Singularity Ray Kurzweil proposes that we are speeding towards a time when our outdated systems of neurons and synapses will be traded for far more efficient electronic circuits, allowing us to become artificially super-intelligent and transferring our minds from brains into machines.

Having laid out the main ideas and thinking behind Kurzweil’s proposals, Agar makes the perceptive comment that despite the apparent appeal of greater processing power it would nevertheless be no longer human. Introducing chips to the human body and linking into the human nervous system to computers as per Ray Kurzweil’s proposals will prove interesting but it goes beyond merely creating a copy of us in order to that future replication and uploading can take place. Rather it will constitute something more akin to an upgrade. Electrochemical signals that the brain use to achieve thought travel at 100 metres per second. This is impressive but contrast this with the electrical signals in a computer which travel at 300 million metres per second then the distinction is clear. If the predictions are true how will such radically enhanced and empowered beings live not only the unenhanced but also what will there quality of life really be? In response, Agar favours something what he calls “rational biological conservatism” (pg. 57) where we set limits on how intelligent we can become in light of the fact that it will never be rational to us for human beings to completely upload their minds onto computers.

Agar then proceeds to argue that in the pursuit of Kurzweil enhanced capacities and capabilities we might accidentally undermine capacities of equal value. This line of argument would find much sympathy from those who consider human organisms in “ecological” terms, representing a profound interconnectedness which when interfered with presents a series of unknown and unexpected consequences. In other words, our specifies-specific form of intelligence may well be linked to species-specific form of desire. Thus, if we start building upon and enhancing our capacity to protect and promote deeply held convictions and beliefs then due to the interconnectedness, it may well affect and remove our desire to perform such activities (page 70). Agar’s subsequent discussion and reference to the work of Jerry Foder, philosopher and cognitive scientist is particularly helpful in terms of the functioning of the mind by modules and the implications of human-friendly AI verses human-unfriendly AI.

In terms of the author’s discussion of Aubrey de Grey, what is refreshing to read from the outset is the author’s clear grasp of Aubrey’s ideas and motivation. Some make the mistake of thinking he is the man who wants to live forever, when in actual fact this is not the case.  De Grey wants to reverse the ageing process - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) so that people are living longer and healthier lives. Establishing this clear distinction affords the author the opportunity to offer more grounded critiques of de Grey’s than some of his other critics. The author makes plain that de Grey’s immediate goal is to achieve longevity escape velocity (LEV), where anti-ageing therapies add years to life expectancy faster than age consumes them.

In weighing up the benefits of living significantly longer lives, Agar posits a compelling argument that I had not fully seen before. In terms of risk, those radically enhanced to live longer may actually be the most risk adverse and fearful people to live. Taking the example of driving a car, a forty year-old senescing human being who gets into their car to drive to work and is involved in a fatal accident “stands to lose, at most, a few healthy, youthful years and a slightly larger number of years with reduced quality” (p.116). In stark contrast should a negligibly senescent being who drives a car and is involved in an accident resulting in their death, stands to lose on average one thousand, healthy, youthful years (p.116).  

De Grey’s response to this seems a little flippant; with the end of ageing comes an increased sense of risk-aversion so the desire for risky activity such as driving will no longer be prevalent. Moreover, plus because we are living for longer we will not be in such a hurry to get to places!  Virtual reality comes into its own at this point as a means by which the negligibly senescent being ‘adrenaline junkie’ can be engaged with activities but without the associated risks. But surely the risk is part of the reason why they would want to engage in snow boarding, bungee jumping et al in the first place. De Grey’s strategy seemingly fails to appreciate the extent to which human beings want “direct” contact with the “real” world.

Continuing this idea further though, Agar’s subsequent discussion of the role of fire-fighters is an interesting one.  A negligibly senescent fire fighter may stand to loose more when they are trapped in a burning inferno but being negligibly senescent means that they are better fire-fighters by virtue of increase vitality. Having recently heard de Grey speak and had the privilege of discussing his ideas further with him, Agar’s discussion of De Grey were a particular highlight of the book and made for an engaging discussion. Whilst expressing concern and doubt in relation to De Grey’s ideas, Agar is nevertheless quick and gracious enough to acknowledge that if such therapies could be achieved then De Grey is probably the best person to comment on and achieve such therapies given the depth of knowledge and understanding that he has built up in this area.

Now the project is involved with a second set of human trials, pushing the technology to see how far it goes and trying to miniaturise it and make it wireless for a better fit in the brain. BrainGate's concept is simple. It posits that the problem for most patients does not lie in the parts of the brain that control movement, but with the fact that the pathways connecting the brain to the rest of the body, such as the spinal cord, have been broken. BrainGate plugs into the brain, picks up the right neural signals and beams them into a computer where they are translated into moving a cursor or controlling a computer keyboard. By this means, paralysed people can move a robot arm or drive their own wheelchair, just by thinking about it.

he and his team are decoding the language of the human brain. This language is made up of electronic signals fired by billions of neurons and it controls everything from our ability to move, to think, to remember and even our consciousness itself. Donoghue's genius was to develop a deceptively small device that can tap directly into the brain and pick up those signals for a computer to translate them. Gold wires are implanted into the brain's tissue at the motor cortex, which controls movement. Those wires feed back to a tiny array – an information storage device – attached to a "pedestal" in the skull. Another wire feeds from the array into a computer. A test subject with BrainGate looks like they have a large plug coming out the top of their heads. Or, as Donoghue's son once described it, they resemble the "human batteries" in The Matrix.

BrainGate's highly advanced computer programs are able to decode the neuron signals picked up by the wires and translate them into the subject's desired movement. In crude terms, it is a form of mind-reading based on the idea that thinking about moving a cursor to the right will generate detectably different brain signals than thinking about moving it to the left.

The technology has developed rapidly, and last month BrainGate passed a vital milestone when one paralysed patient went past 1,000 days with the implant still in her brain and allowing her to move a computer cursor with her thoughts. The achievement, reported in the prestigious Journal of Neural Engineering, showed that the technology can continue to work inside the human body for unprecedented amounts of time.

Donoghue talks enthusiastically of one day hooking up BrainGate to a system of electronic stimulators plugged into the muscles of the arm or legs. That would open up the prospect of patients moving not just a cursor or their wheelchair, but their own bodies.

If Nagle's motor cortex was no longer working healthily, the entire BrainGate project could have been rendered pointless. But when Nagle was plugged in and asked to imagine moving his limbs, the signals beamed out with a healthy crackle. "We asked him to imagine moving his arm to the left and to the right and we could hear the activity," Donoghue says. When Nagle first moved a cursor on a screen using only his thoughts, he exclaimed: "Holy shit!"

BrainGate and other BCI projects have also piqued the interest of the government and the military. BCI is melding man and machine like no other sector of medicine or science and there are concerns about some of the implications. First, beyond detecting and translating simple movement commands, BrainGate may one day pave the way for mind-reading. A device to probe the innermost thoughts of captured prisoners or dissidents would prove very attractive to some future military or intelligence service. Second, there is the idea that BrainGate or other BCI technologies could pave the way for robot warriors controlled by distant humans using only their minds. At a conference in 2002, a senior American defence official, Anthony Tether, enthused over BCI. "Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine." Anyone who has seen Terminator might worry about that.

Donoghue acknowledges the concerns but has little time for them. When it comes to mind-reading, current BrainGate technology has enough trouble with translating commands for making a fist, let alone probing anyone's mental secrets

As for robot warriors, Donoghue was slightly more circumspect. At the moment most BCI research, including BrainGate projects, that touch on the military is focused on working with prosthetic limbs for veterans who have lost arms and legs. But Donoghue thinks it is healthy for scientists to be aware of future issues. "As long as there is a rational dialogue and scientists think about where this is going and what is the reasonable use of the technology, then we are on a good path," he says.

Ptolemy’s portrayal of Kurzweil is unmistakably positive, but to his credit he includes several critics from both religion and science. From the former, a radio host named Chuck Missler, a born-again Christian who heads the Koinonia Institute (“dedicated to training and equipping the serious Christian to sojourn in today’s world”), proclaims: “We have a scenario laid out that the world is heading for an Armageddon and you and I are going to be the generation that’s alive that is going to see all this unfold.” He seems to be saying that Kurzweil is right about the second coming, but wrong about what it is that is coming. (Of course, Missler’s prognostication is the N+1 failed prophecy that began with Jesus himself, who told his followers (Mark 9:1): “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.”) Another religiously-based admonition comes from the Stanford University neuroscientist William Huribut, who self-identifies as a “practicing Christian” who believes in immortality, but not in the way Kurzweil envisions it. “Death is conquered spiritually,” he pronounced.

On the science side of the ledger, Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sagely notes: “What Ray does consistently is to take a whole bunch of steps that everybody agrees on and take principles for extrapolating that everybody agrees on and show they lead to things that nobody agrees on.” Likewise, the estimable futurist Kevin Kelly, whose 2010 book What Technology Wants paints a much more realistic portrait of what our futures may (or may not) hold

Kelly agrees that Kurzweil’s exponential growth curves are accurate but that the conclusions and especially the inspiration drawn from them are not. “He seems to have no doubts about it and in this sense I think he is a prophetic type figure who is completely sure and nothing can waiver his absolute certainty about this. So I would say he is a modern day prophet…that’s wrong.”

Transcendent Man is clearly meant to be an uplifting film celebrating all the ways science and technology have and are going to enrich our lives.

An especially lachrymose moment is when Kurzweil is rifling through his father’s journals and documents in a storage room dedicated to preserving his memory until the day that all this “data” (including Ray’s own fading memories) can be reconfigured into an A.I. simulacrum so that father and son can be reunited.

Although Kurzweil says he is optimistic and cheery about life, he can’t seem to stop talking about death: “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” One wonders how much of life he is missing by over thinking death, or how burdensome it must surely be to imbibe over 200 supplement tables a day and have your blood tested and cleansed every couple of months, all in an effort to reprogram the body’s biochemistry.