Transhumanism's threat to the human: Bafflement Essay #11

Who do we want to become?

The clue's in the “trans”.

The prefix “beyond” or “across” is the key to understanding transhumanism, the movement dedicated to transcending the limits of the human through technology, merging with it in body and mind.

Already we're in the heart of the territory of this long-promised, long-threatened essay on transhumanism, and that's a good thing.

My last piece on transhumanism tip-toed cautiously up to the subject, examining it through an everyday aspect of life. The growing automation, industrialisation and digitalisation of what we eat, how our food is produced and how we obtain it are all elements of what could be called “soft transhumanism”.

In this essay, I'm going to look at full-blown transhumanism, with its goal of the complete transformation of the species and what that means for the future of humanity.

It's a future that's almost here. The first person to receive a brain implant did so courtesy of Musk's Neuralink in January 2024. The technology is developing, with other organisations working on brain-computer connections. There's already talk of implants for new-born babies to enhance their cognitive abilities. In Sweden, over 4000 people have implanted microchips in their palms to pay for things and get access to premises with a wave of the hand.

While recognising that technological developments such as prostheses are a force for the good, I'm not going to make any attempt to “weigh the argument” or look at “both sides” of the question. For reasons I hope will become abundantly clear, I'm going to treat transhumanism as an unqualified Bad Thing, exploring its implications through the lens of evolution in its broadest sense of change, development and expansion.

In this insightful essay, Fred Baumann expands on the point that transhumanism is about going beyond:

“The name of the movement known as ‘transhumanism’ may suggest that it arises out of humanism … But the ‘trans’ is the operative part of the term, and it should be taken seriously … Transhumanism goes a step further and embraces man’s becoming a different machine, or any number of kinds of machines. If that were to come to pass, even if only among elites, it would be a change of world-historical proportions, because it would mean that the new science was no longer merely seeking to transform the world to suit human beings, but rather transforming human beings into whatever they chose.”

The idea of transforming humanity into something radically different is rooted in modern science, particularly the development of computer technology.

In a book published in the last year of the last century, Ray Kurzweil predicted that machines would overtake human intelligence, going on to develop free will and have emotional and spiritual experiences. This would lead to “the singularity”, the point where the power of computers begins to exceed human brain-power. Artificial superintelligence (highly advanced AI) would result in the merging of human intelligence with artificial intelligence. In time, all disease, ageing and death would be reversed or eradicated. The age of the “post-human” would have arrived, a time when we've transcended nature and humans – or some of us at least – are in full control. But more of that later.

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley as shorthand for “evolutionary humanism”, a philosophical viewpoint which combines the understanding of natural selection and other evolutionary forces with humanist values. Its history is thus bound up with a view of life rooted in biological determinism (based on an interpretation of Darwinian evolution which ignores its arguably spiritual perspective) on inevitability. The contemporary transhumanist movement takes off from this sense of inevitability and much of the discourse around it implies that the course of humanity is set.

But what if human evolution were something much richer and more complex? I suggest this as someone who spent much of her formative years reading English literature. The theme of “human nature” is central to a subject which explores human life in all its social, psychological and existential complexity. George Elliot focuses on the moral choices which determine character; D H Lawrence brings the dark impulses which make or wreck lives to the surface. As an academic subject, English tends to assume a fairly fixed notion of human nature, an assumption belied by the fact that the literature of different periods illustrates how humanity changes. Early nineteenth century novels portray a romantic sensibility fostered by limitation and loneliness – recall the boredom of heroines in Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte! Twentieth century fiction reveals a different kind of human, one riven by war and alienation – think Kafka, Huxley and Orwell.

Humanity is always evolving, and the “post-human” envisaged by transhumanists is in fact but one future, grounded in a certain set of civilisational values. The key question – perhaps the most important question of our times – is where this particular path of human evolution is taking us. I'm going to suggest that the need to choose an alternative to transhumanism is not just about avoiding the dangers of dystopia; it would also deprive us of an enormous opportunity of a new way of being human, a future more luminous than our culture allows us to envision.

The human and the machine

Western culture of the past two hundred years has expressed deep concerns about interfering with the order of things, whether construed in terms of the natural or the divine. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Mary Shelley dramatised the unintended consequences of scientific hubris in the novel Frankenstein. The monster who took his name from his creator could neither find acceptance in the human community nor live successfully outside it. The created man turned out to be all-too-human, craving love and belonging while his preternatural size and strength made him unacceptable to natural humans. The story ends with the image of his distant figure traversing the frozen wastes alone, doomed to remain the Outsider, while his creator dies consumed with guilt about what he has done.

The dread that The Machine will become hostile to humans and use its great power against us is the premise of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fact that HAL, the computer which controls the systems on the space craft bound for Jupiter, has gone rogue gradually emerges over the course of its passive-aggressive conversations with one of the astronauts. It's confirmed when HAL refuses to re-open the port to the craft while the other pilot is doing an external repair, condemning him to drift off into space.

As always in such stories, the trouble began with human choices: “As explained in the sequel, 2010 The Year We Make Contact, HAL’s mind had been corrupted by meddling government bureaucrats in order to force “him” to conceal from the crew of the Discovery Spaceship the true nature of its mission to Saturn ... Deliberate deceit, however, conflicted with HAL’s design and purpose and, becoming paranoid, he concluded that he would be able to better complete the mission alone — without the crew.”

E M Forster's 1909 novella The Machine Stops explores a different aspect of automation and artificiality and its consequences for an entire civilisation. The story portrays an underground society in which people live a cerebral existence in separate cells, dependent on an invisible system that provides for their physical needs and enables them to communicate remotely. When the heroine's son requests a face-to-face meeting instead of talking through “the wearisome machine”, his mother is shocked, telling him: “you mustn’t say anything against the Machine.” She and her society have forgotten all about life on the surface of the earth, the feel of the sun and the wind on their skin and the beauty of the natural world.

These cultural examples get straight to the point, illustrating the drama of this new phase of human life. But there are less obvious dangers before we get to such an extreme place. They arise out of the growing automation of our activities and the replacement of human contact by the computer, inserting an intermediary into our transactions and interactions which incrementally erodes our privacy and agency. The proliferation of QR codes, the expectation that everyone possess a smart phone and the push towards digital payments is taking place without any real public conversation or reflection, ignoring the fact they're driven by a commercial and political agenda, one that has long promoted a narrative of “inevitability” and “progress” to convince us of our powerlessness in the face of Technology. (Brett Scott is the go-to analyst on this.)

Even less discussed is what the automation of our lives is doing to us internally and how it reduces our capacities. To be clear, I'm not talking about technologies which could count as purely labour-saving but those which create a dependency that atrophies our skills or, worse, prevents us from developing them in the first place.

Take writing. Until my adblocker saw off the ads on YouTube, I was beset by adverts from Grammarly, the AI writing assistant. They incensed me: as a writer and sometime English teacher, I reject the idea you can get out of learning the craft of language by contracting out an understanding of grammar (whether the instinctual understanding of a native speaker or more deliberately acquired) and an attention to phrasing. The ads took a superior stance which implied that the software, in all its expertise, was in possession of the “right” combination of words for any given situation. They played on people's insecurity at work, suggesting they need a machine to get the “tone” right when communicating with their fellow humans. In an age when confident communication is vital for success in so many areas, how disempowering is that?

Shortly after ChatGPT became available, a student told me that her cohort was using it to write their university essays. I found this sad and put it to her that they were cheating themselves out of their own education – after all, unless your degree certificate is purely a means to a pragmatic end, the point of higher education is self-development. It offers a rare and costly opportunity to learn, exercise your developing skills and get feedback from those who've mastered theirs in a way that should set you up for life.

The entrance of AI into language, as Kit Wilson says in this article, “has huge implications for more or less any task involving words. It’s not so much that AI will end up taking every writing or teaching job on the planet (though it might well snaffle up a few). It’s that it’ll very quickly become common practice for humans to use AI to skip the vast majority of the writing (and research) process — allowing us, effectively, to stop having to think.”

Language is intimately related to the ability to think. I'm sometimes told my writing has helped a reader crystallise their own thinking on a difficult topic; something I've experienced many times as a reader myself. Writing takes the thinking process yet further, enabling or forcing you to articulate things that are hazy or disparate. I started these “bafflement essays” to do exactly that because the world had become so strange. It's worked: this piece is the last or penultimate in the series because I've written myself into clarity about the upside-down nature of the times.

Language originates in the human, as a way of naming the world into being. In a recent essay about automation, Charles Eisenstein points out that language is one of the main ways humans connect to reality: “The mind stays intelligent when it can renew its symbols and metaphors by connecting to their material, sensory source”.

Take some of the most common expressions in English. The compound visual image of “couch potato” draws on the widely-understood social reality that many people live sedentary lives. “The world is your oyster”, a metaphor I've often explained to students, requires some general knowledge. It works only if you see the oyster as a closed shell which can open to reveal a pearl. “Tallow face”, an insult hurled by Juliet's father at his pale-faced daughter in Romeo and Juliet, is incomprehensible if don't know that candles, an everyday feature of Elizabethan life, were made of yellowy animal fat.

Language is a living thing, its meaning born of our response to the material and social world. “The point is not that we should never use metrics, symbols, or categories, but that we must connect them repeatedly to the reality they represent, or we will be lost,” says Eisenstein.

Beyond describing the world around us, language is essential for the expression of emotions, a foundational human characteristic. When such expression doesn't happen, we think of people as being “without voice”, repressed or oppressed. That's why free speech, now under threat in Britain and many other western countries, is a core value. Without it, humans lose agency and creativity; you could even say we cease to be fully human.

To put it in the words of Rudolf Steiner: “The gods did not intend human beings to become automatons which they could influence like automatic machines. They wanted them to be free individuals who realize what will take them forward.”

The significance of transcending nature

As already established, transhumanism involves getting beyond the perceived “limits” of nature.

Yuval Noah Harari is perhaps the most famous contemporary exponent of this viewpoint. In this video, he's labelled an advisor to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. That's not quite right; he's more of a thinker and commentator. But Hariri's take on the subject goes some way to explain why some have been so ready to demonise him: his thinking assumes that the replacement of nature by The Machine is both inevitable and exciting:

“Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design – not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds but OUR intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds – the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud. These are the new driving forces of evolution … After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection we are entering the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.”

“Organic life” replaced by the digital, its workings placed in the hands of the tech people. See how it’s presented as the fulfilment of four billion years of life, the result of an inexorable process of evolution. But in fact such a view draws on the recent and culturally-specific understanding of evolution that came out of the mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment. Western culture, in its hubris, has tended to conceive of scientific materialism as the last word in human development, something which, once arrived at, can only be improved on with supplementary knowledge in the form of technological development.

Do we really want to take the triumph of technology to its ultimate conclusion? What might we lose if we do?

In this interview with Andre Duqum, Greg Braden tackles the implications head-on: “There is a movement to replace our bodies with synthetics, chemicals in the blood, sensors under the skin, computer chips in the brain, artificial intelligence. It steals from us our ability to access this part of us. We're about to give our humanness away to the technology before we've even know what it means to be fully human.”

A native American he had fallen into conversation with while hiking in a remote area put this drive to technology in a new light:

“A long time ago, the people of the earth remembered who they were and they lived much closer to the earth and they were much happier. And then something happened – even the elders don't know what it was – but the people of the earth began to forget who they are. But they so longed for the deep connection that they had between themselves and the forces of nature that they began to build in the world outside of them reminders of that connection inside of them. We live in that world today. We long for that connection. We miss ourselves, our true potential.”

“We'll keep building. We'll clutter our world with gadgets and machines and devices that mimic and reflect back to us who we are until one day we wake up and say 'oh my god, that's us' and we will let the external technology go because we will have remembered to awaken our inner technology. The world becomes more sophisticated and yet it looks simpler because the external clutter goes away.”

Charles Eisenstein articulates the mindset based on the technological interference with nature in Climate: A New Story – a book that presents as an argument against “climate fundamentalism” but is about much more than that – thus:

“With machines to suck carbon and algae pools to make oxygen, maybe someday we can dispense with nature entirely. Maybe someday we can replace every natural and wild thing with artificial substitutes. Hydroponic solutions can replace soil, water filtration machines can replace wetlands, vat-grown meat can replace livestock. We can fine-tune greenhouse gas levels to create just the right temperature. The conquest of nature will be complete.

“What scares me the most is not that this is a vain fantasy doomed to failure. What scares me is that we will succeed.”

Without the countervailing natural food movement, we'd be well on the way to the success of this fantasy with Big Food: industrial forms of nourishment produced by large corporations with the help of digital technology. Such a future is already being created in Food Valley in the Netherlands, where companies are melding the artificial with the natural to create new products, experimenting with genetic modification, crop vaccines and farming conducted by data and drone. The supermarkets are up for all this: a report by Sainsbury's envisages a time when the company will inject your breakfast directly into your arm. Within the context of full-throttle transhumanism, this is not just about convenience or profit, but the final step in humanity's separation from nature.

That would preclude a very different future, one in which, Eisenstein writes, we become part of “the Whole [which] has created humans for its purpose”:

“Who are we humans? We are life too. We are life, born into a certain form, with a unique array of gifts. Like all life, our purpose is to serve life—to serve both what it is and what it might become. For never is life static. Each unfoldment of complexity builds on the last. What is the dream of life? What wants to be born next, and how can we serve that?”

“If we affirm that Gaia is a living being with a life cycle and a destiny, then we can only assume that humanity was born for an evolutionary purpose. Each species, each child of Gaia, has a role to play, and we are no exception. The fulfilment of that role is thus of crucial planetary importance.”

What a very different conception of human evolution! It’s one shared by a growing number of thinkers with backgrounds from the scientific to the esoteric. One such is the spiritual teacher Matias de Stefano who thinks we’re well on our way to a phase of human evolution which will bring us into greater, rather than less, unity with nature:

“The new systems that are coming … are more related to how biology works. We have a perfect technology because we work perfectly in our daily life,” he says. The human body, made of millions of cells and parts functioning without direction from some external force, is naturally self-organising: “They don't follow rules … our cells don't have a president, a parliament or laws. They apply different types of laws which is the inner law, resonance, they apply freedom. They know what to do and when to do it. They use the brain to share data and information not as a way of control and rule. If you pay attention to how biology works is how the future will work.”

At this point we would indeed have surpassed a limit, going beyond the way human life has been lived up to this point, as herds or tribes with leaders. But the key difference from the transcendence of the transhumanists is that, rather than making permanent our current separation from nature, we will join the community of being in which everything, understood as “from earth”, is “human”: “a tree, a mushroom, a whale is also human because it's a life from from earth,” says De Stefano. “We will become humanity when we stop thinking as mammals.”

In Cyprus, where I wrote part of this essay, the ambient environment was comfortable enough for this mammalian human to get a taste of that kind of unity. At the coast one day, the elements – sun, sea, a gentle wind and the stone-sand-earth beneath my feet – combined to make it comfortable enough to stop and be. If I closed my eyes and tuned into my senses, I could almost merge with the elements. The experience was immeasurably different from that of sitting indoors staring at a screen as I had been earlier that day. I felt bigger yet lighter, calm and free.

I'd gone for a walk spontaneously, realising that I badly needed to exchange my cerebral state for a more embodied one. Despite all the incursions of the digital, this is a decision most humans are still able to make. But would a future human, with chemicals in the blood, sensors under the skin, computer chips in the brain, fuelled by synthetic food and getting much their information from AI, still be able to make that choice?

Later during that walk, I sat down on a bench next to a cat who immediately got onto my lap. As the sun went down, we spent the next twenty minutes together, the cat periodically emitting a meow of pleasure at the unexpected cuddle while I, missing my cat at home, felt hugely comforted. Some of the people passing by sent me a gleam which showed they understood the power of this temporary bond between human and animal.

But one young man walked by unseeing, his eyes fixed to the concrete ground, the sounds of the world around him blocked out by earbuds.

I know which kind of human I'd rather be.

Who benefits from transhumanism?

Transhumanism, with the possibilities it affords for total or near-total control of populations and resources, is mesmerising to those hungry for money and power. Maybe the emperors of old were content with the dominion of lands, vast stores of gold and as many young bodies they could lay their hands on. But the digital age allows the oligarchs of the day to entertain ambitions of global proportions.

“This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different,” writes Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. “It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”

So it should be no surprise that the development of transhumanist projects is hitched to corporate interests. Much of the necessary investment needed to fund big projects comes from tech giants and billionaires: in 2013 Google cofounder Larry Page launched Calico Life Sciences LLC, a research and development company working on extending the human life span through technology. Two years later, Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute for the creation of “friendly AI”. In 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was among those investing $3 billion in Altos Labs, a biotechnology company seeking to reverse ageing and disease.

And – the latest, in a surprise announcement from Trump's new administration – is the Stargate Project, a $500 billion project to boost the AI infrastructure in the US with the creation of big data centres. According to Larry Ellison of the software giant Oracle, the scheme will herald a new age of computer-generated cancer vaccines.

The history of transhumanism, points out John Kennedy Phillip in this article, makes it clear that it’s “not merely a utopian vision of techno optimists, but receives substantial funding from various rich organizations”. The alliance makes sense when you realise there's a natural affinity between “tech values” and the convenience, efficiency and longevity envisaged by the movement’s projects. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal,” posted Musk about Neuralink's first product.

Soon, says Hariri, “some corporations and governments and will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls. We are now hackable animals.”

Do those corporations and governments understand the dangers of what they are doing?

In this conversation, Hariri offers some fascinating insights into the thinking of the likes of Sam Altman, Bill Gates and the founders of Google: “Most of them are afraid of what they are doing. The understand better than anybody else the destructive potential of what they are creating and they are very afraid of it.

“At the same time, their basic shtick is that 'I'm a good guy, and I'm very concerned about it. Now you have these other guys, they are bad. They don't have the same kind of responsibility that I have so it would be very bad for humanity if they create it first. So I must be the one who creates it first and I will at least do my best to keep it under control.'”

To get an idea of how entrusting this amount of technology-based power has gone so far, let's take a quick look at the track record of such organisations. In the 2010s, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that covert mass harvesting of data and creation of psychological profiles had taken place in order to influence users’ political positions. That’s small fry compared to what Google has been doing since 2008, interfering in no fewer than 41 elections. The tech giant shows no sign of giving up its attempts to manipulate voters: “in all 50 states, Google is sending liberally biased content,” says psychologist Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behaviour Research and Technology. “They’re not sending content based on people’s interests. They’re sending content based on their interest.”

In the UK, a new state-funded sector dedicated to the behaviour management of its citizens has formed. As Gary Sidley says in this piece in The Critic, “in effect, we — the taxpayers — are commissioning the nudgers to furtively influence our day-to-day thoughts and actions so as to align them with what the state’s technocrats have decided is in our best interests. Open, transparent debate is no longer deemed necessary.”

At a recent UK Internet Governance Forum Meeting, also funded by the taxpayer, misinformation experts got together to discuss how they might better control what we post and read online. They included Chris Morris, chief executive at Full Fact, a charity partly funded by Meta and Google, and Henry Parker of Logically, a technology startup which “fights disinformation”. Both had technocratic solutions to the “problem” of free speech, describing new AI tools able to “fact check” large numbers of posts or videos and identify “health misinformation”.

And who gets to define what constitutes “misinformation”? The tech companies, governments and international bodies such as the WEF, WHO and EU, of course.

With the potential to control the field of information to an extent that's never happened before, AI is the ultimate tool of manipulation. It's already capable of deceiving humans, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found in a study which called Meta’s AI system Cicero “a master of deception”: “Large language models and other AI systems have already learned, from their training, the ability to deceive via techniques such as manipulation, sycophancy, and cheating.”

Of course, AI is only putting out what's being put in. Perhaps the AI created by a more evolved human would yield very different results. So now let's take a look at what that more mature, better-behaved human being might look like.

The future human

This returns us to the question: what does it mean to be human? There have been all sorts of answers to that through the ages, from religion, society and the many iterations of human civilisation.

If you don't give the matter much thought or unthinkingly accept the definition provided by the high-ups of your time, it's remarkably easy to “know” what it is to be human. Steiner makes the point with an anecdote about a school in Greece:

“A human being is a creature who walks on two legs and does not have feathers. The next time the pupil came to school he brought a plucked cockerel: a creature who walked on two legs and had no feathers. This is a human being, he said, according to the definition.

“Many definitions of this kind are generally accepted, and many of our scientific definitions are therefore more or less in accord with the truth.”

This definition chimes with the flat description of the human condition espoused by the transhumanists: humans are flawed biological beings which need to be improved and corrected with the addition of the non-human. Notice the lack of curiosity and possibility in this trajectory, the absence of opportunity for us humans to further explore and develop our innate potential as emotional, spiritual and physical beings.

“We are more than the machines that we have a built,” says Braden. “So this is a decision that we have to make as a society. Are we willing to give ourselves away to the efficiency and the speed of a computer chip at the expense of losing the power of losing human emotion, our ability to have empathy and sympathy and compassion for another being?”

Making the wrong choice and taking the path of transhumanism would result in a loss of our divinity, he believes, divinity defined not in terms of institutional religion but as “the power within us to transcend perceived limitations”. That means evolving to a stage where we are no longer driven by the need to survive and have transcended fear, the emotion underlying so much of our behaviour from violence to anxiety. And this is an evolution that can only take place in our natural state: “the power of human divinity ... is only possible through the biological body”.

For Penny Kelly, the transition to this more evolved state basically means growing up:

“We are a very young civilization that is attempting to grow into maturity and unfold into more of our potential. What is the human version of success for humanity and society? Have we envisioned our world and taken steps to bring that world into reality ... or has someone else defined it for us?” she asks in The Revival.

“As we look around at the people, places, businesses, and interactions between and among us, it is obvious that the absolute most pressing difficulty we must face is the failure of the human race to mature properly. Failure to mature is like having a crop in the field that never blossoms and sets fruit. Why? There are many reasons. Perhaps they are trying to grow in a climate that doesn’t have the appropriate conditions (freedom and community). Maybe they are beset by storms (wars) that create damaging and discouraging conditions (poor education and gaslighting). Perhaps they experience drought or flood and must cut back on their creativity because they either don’t have enough of what they need (experience and perspective) to finish developing, or they have been swamped by too much of the wrong information (propaganda) and cannot function (critical thinking) effectively.”

The symptoms of humanity's failure to mature – exploitation, poverty, domination, war – are recognisable to everyone in today's world. But many people are either baffled by the causes or put them down to “human nature”, conceived of as a static state. The twentieth century saw the emergence of the idea of personal development and psychological transformation, some of which has now morphed into the consciousness movement. But so far, the belief that wholesale change is possible AND that it lies in our hands hasn't extended to the social and political domain. Many of those worried about the growing authoritarianism of western societies are still searching for leaders and solutions that belong to the old order. Meanwhile, the secular materialism of mainstream Britain limits our capacity to see the alternatives which could liberate us.

And so we arrive at a pivotal point, a choice between two diverging paths. I can't put what's at stake any better than Relendra:

“We’re forced to the precipice of a turning point in human evolution. One direction will lead us to fold in and collapse on ourselves—on our unique human divinity and sovereignty—and become the hackable human robots envisioned by Harari, Ray Kurzweil and the intelligentsia of the technocracy. But there is another direction available to us.

“Our conscious awareness is called on to evolve at this time. We are called upon to turn our eyes and hearts away from the empty baubles and flashing lights of the hypnotic spell casters. Our conscious awareness is ready to evolve. As it does, all the old spells will fall away, unable to retain their old purchase. We will unlock our true latent potential. The curse of dehumanization is ready to dissolve.

But only we can make it happen.”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow road”

Practical, inspiring, empowering, envisioning of the kind I outline in If Only You Knew, is in desperately short supply in the UK. The @NewEarthSalon on X is a small step towards beginning that kind of conversation.