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In the vicissitudes of life, our recent and living generations moved from the hard times of a hundred years ago to the exponential good times of today. Now a few hundred key pioneers have positioned the world in front of the opportunities of Transhumanism and its main tenet, indefinite life extension. Will we unite the world on these issues and capitalize or waste it and let the weeds reclaim our “wheel”, the magnum opus of our generations? I challenge all would-be leaders and followers to honor our ancestors’ long tradition of pioneering the next stages of our future. Everything about you was crafted and honed for this and there is no other time. Find the blazers of our emerging values and paths, your philosophers of the future, out there at the forefronts on this epic new transhuman voyage of freedoms and discoveries and follow them. All leaders who haven’t already, I implore you to fully embrace your roles, triple down and raise your flags even higher. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book preluding this philosophy of the future, which serves as the structure for this paper and is quoted here throughout.

“[Conditioning to hard times] is thus established, unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations; the constant struggle with uniform unfavourable conditions is, as already remarked, the cause of a type becoming stable and hard. Finally, however, a happy state of things results, the enormous tension is relaxed; there are perhaps no more enemies among the neighbouring peoples, and the means of life, even of the enjoyment of life, are present in superabundance. With one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs: it is no longer regarded as necessary, as a condition of existence—if it would continue, it can only do so as a form of luxury, as an archaizing taste. Variations, whether they be deviations (into the higher, finer, and rarer), or deteriorations and monstrosities, appear suddenly on the scene in the greatest exuberance and splendour; the individual dares to be individual and detach himself. At this turning-point of history there manifest themselves, side by side, and often mixed and entangled together, a magnificent, manifold, virgin-forest-like up-growth and up-striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary decay and self-destruction, owing to the savagely opposing and seemingly exploding aptitudes, which strive with one another ‘for sun and light,’ and can no longer assign any limit, restraint, or forbearance for themselves by means of the hitherto existing morality. It was this morality itself which piled up the strength so enormously, which bent the bow in so threatening a manner:—it is now ‘out of date,’ it is getting ‘out of date.’ ” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

Our elders came from the great depression and world war. Then they had to watch what they called “morals”, but which were actually just coping mechanisms particular to their vicissitude of time, as Nietzsche gets at in various places, become increasingly disregarded. That happened faster than ever because, little did they know, the bell curve of exponential advancements in fields across the board were upon them. The variations of excellence and monstrosities proliferated like no other time and were supercharged for an abundant harvest by the buds of enlightenment and technology that had been poking their heads out of the fertile intellectual fields of civilization from the smatterings of good times they were able to come upon throughout the century. A lot of it was stored as compounding action potential. It went off like rifles in the 50s and 60s, with so much force that the bullets are still flying today, and the shots of individual aptitude have been firing ever since. Like he is saying, it’s a jungle of individual morals competing in the survival of the fittest, so you must find ways, that hard times naturally make, to get all these independent construction workers of the best ideas behind the same projects in order to tap that energy for the big stages and human potentials.

This is our window in time here, as I often say, to get projects like life extension, transhumanism, space exploration, and some other things done. The people of the past didn’t have this opportunity and the chance here isn’t available forever because death will close us off from it or bad times will set back in. A great gate in Plato’s cave has opened, the eternal guard lions of death have left their posts and we don’t know how long until they come back or the gate closes. It is devastating watching those who have been hypnotized by the cave, by the death trance, sitting there with a wide-open door and the clock ticking down. The climb must be made, now is the time, there is no other. Team up and follow the leaders on these new emerging circumstances and moral imperatives or everyone will die as the marvels of space and boundless technology tumble from our hands. We rouse them to action slowly but surely, though all as one, more gets done.

It is not difficult for Transhumanists or the masses to mistake increased privileges, like so many of the industrialized world have these decades, as chance to secure leisure, pride building, keeping up with the Joneses and so forth. When people start to make good money, do they generally harness all the opportunities they seethed about missing out on when they were poor — the recording studio, the seminars, the investments in life extension that I have heard countless people say they would be back to make when their worldly careers were secured? Many times, we just eat more expensive food, wear more expensive clothes, drive a better car and take more extravagant vacations, wasting the capital gains that were there or dreamed about.

Do hard times need to come back again to allow us to see how incredible the opportunities of this generation and the next “were”, so we can spend our time mourning instead of capitalizing? Or as is happening at present, do we need to let the existential voids gut the bulk of an increasing number of the masses around us until the despair is so great that it forces us back into the undistinguished moral frameworks of the intellectually deflated and delicate, those abasements of our character that grow among the fields of new excellence like weeds?

You see it emerging everywhere, lots of people want it to be a trend not to talk about noble ambitions because it infringes on peoples sacred opinion bubbles, as though open discourse isn’t integral to the human condition and as if those opinion bubbles weren’t arrived at by forms of discourse themselves. Nihilisms everywhere try not only to discourage people from leaving the void but to take up residence in it and work to enrich themselves with absurdity. New kinds of spirituality insist upon random arbitrariness and make it a trend to taboo all dissent. Some in science work to turn what is a mode of investigation into a mechanical way of life. Religion looms there always ready to take advantage of the lost and reclaim its full-time hymn hummers. Television turns gossip and trivialities into an art and trains people in it. Since the world doesn’t have enough leadership yet, or rather, doesn’t recognize enough of it yet, most of the rest of television is reserved for pounding general politics uninspired aimlessness into people’s heads so a few can covertly jockey for power, just to waste that power on screaming into the void from atop piles of gold.

As Nietzsche refers to when talking about politics, and it applies in some ways to the rest of these competing frameworks for wasting time,

”Supposing a statesman were to bring his people into the position of being obliged henceforth to practise ‘high politics,’ for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared, so that they would have to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful mediocrity;—supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to ‘practise politics,’ when they have hitherto had something better to do and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they have been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the essentially politics-practising nations;—supposing such a statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out of their former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offence out of their exoticism and hidden permanency, were to depreciate their most radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and their tastes ‘national’—what! a statesman who should do all this, which his people would have to do penance for throughout their whole future, if they had a future, such a statesman would be great, would he?”

The brevity of the portal of opportunity itself must become the crisis. That, along with the worst crisis of all that has always been here ready to propel us to ascending, unifying action if the masses hadn’t tucked tail and ran to hide among rationalizations and excuses, trying vainly to escape it: the 100-year lifespan. More of us must lead on the issue and follow the lead on the issue of the enormous opportunity cost of death and the horrific tragedy of it. People are rightly held to account for excusing death away, but the blame is also ours for not keeping the injustices of death pronounced so that the excuse makers don’t have such a cush and comfortable time construing them. When pro-death culture is rebutted the messages start soaking in for everyone who hears them, and the people who are still forming their worldviews then have the chance to take in substantive versions of all sides of the story. Many people take a side that’s not conducive to life extension simply by default.

Leaders are needed to start the processions of masses on their courses of history, but there are leaders. So, what it is that’s needed is people to start following them. It’s like they say in movements, the first follower is the first leader because they inspire the next 2 to follow, which inspires the next 4 to follow and so forth. What is lacking is enough people courageous enough to set the example and become the first followers.

These are my leaders and they should be yours too: Aubrey de Grey, Michael West, Dave Kekich, Bill Faloon, Kevin Perrott, Joao Pedro de Magalhaes, Natasha Vita-More, Max More, Zoltan Istvan, Keith Comito, Paul Sandford Mcglothin, Ben Goertzel, Bill Andrews, Dave Gobel, Dave Pizer, Michael Rose, Cynthia Kenyon, Gennady Stolyarov, Nikola Danaylov , Brian Kennedy, David Wood, Hank Pellissier, Eric Klien, David Kelley, Ilia Stambler, Roen Horn, Maria Konovalenko, Mikhail Batin, Michael Greve, Steve Hill, Elena Milova, James Hughes, Reason, Velerija Pride, Peter Rothman, Sven Bulterijs, Adam Ford, Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil and at least a hundred others. Every small action taker is a priceless leader as well and every follower leads by example.

We need the media to start portraying our leaders until they can be recognized as such from a distance, when they have large enough crowds of followers clamoring around them. Media: make the people named here regular pundits and guests on the major news networks around the world. Do that and the people will follow, they will create the demands that get these jobs done. Aubrey will go to the head of the NIA and Kennedy to the head of the NIH, Faloon will go to the head of the FDA, Comito will become the Executive Director of CNN, Reason will have a top rated show on ABC, Danaylov on CNN and Al Jazeera, and Wood on the BBC, Magalhaes will become the Director General of the World Health Organization, Kurzweil will become President. A bunch of them will become unofficial advisors and golf buddies of billionaires. They will fill out more of the roles in pop culture from movies and songs to celebrity personalities and cultural references. Many will become Governors and join Congress, become Deans and Chancellors and the world will be ripe for indefinite life extension and all the rest that follows from it. All of us transhumanists must continue manually building these followings until the media fixes better sight of the growing stories that are leading up to things like those and catches up.

Humanity engineers cells, does more of it and gets better at it every year. With enough resources and focus, we will become master mechanics and precision engineers of the biological clock. Let’s ALL act like we aren’t suicidal and do these things that it takes to get the bustling world industry that supports this built.

In those good times where people’s individual aptitudes increasingly show, Nietzsche says that then,

”Danger is again present, the mother of morality, great danger; this time shifted into the individual, into the neighbour and friend, into the street, into their own child, into their own heart, into all the most personal and secret recesses of their desires and volitions. What will the moral philosophers who appear at this time have to preach? They discover, these sharp onlookers and loafers, that the end is quickly approaching, that everything around them decays and produces decay, that nothing will endure until the day after tomorrow, except one species of man, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a prospect of continuing and propagating themselves—they will be the men of the future, the sole survivors; ‘ be like them! become mediocre!’ is now the only morality which has still a significance, which still obtains a hearing.—But it is difficult to preach this morality of mediocrity! it can never avow what it is and what it desires! it has to talk of moderation and dignity and duty and brotherly love—it will have difficulty in concealing its irony!”

Nietzsche talks at length about the clever moralists of mediocrity weaving webs of stagnancy. These leaders of mediocrity, the loafers and chicken littles are out there drawing crowds right now. Are you going to let them develop large followings that assimilate the masses to the standpatisms, aimless conventionalities and the evolutionarily flightless bird-like destinations of life that absorb so many now, or are Life Extension and the overall frontier expanding trajectories of Transhumanism the competing evolutionary principles that will win? Will we unite and build the vast armies of pioneers who blaze open the frontiers of Sapiens potential? As Natasha Vita-More writes, “We need a worldwide league of activists and experts to help spread positive news, reliable information, and a well-thought-out socio-political stance.” More heads of life extension organizations and initiatives: take up administration positions at the movement for indefinite life extension page facebook.com/movementforindefinitelifeextension, there are many now and we need you all. Post important things related to life extension there and refer people back to it when the opportunities arise. By getting people to join there, they all join the whole, create solidarity, and a larger show of force, which is crucial in grabbing large-scale attention. We involve increasing percentages of these grassroots supporters from there.

A quarter of a billion people of the world can make these transhuman goals happen and a quarter billion are there to follow if we want them to. Our stance is established in themes and concepts that are written about in papers and books around the cause. I’m writing a key book on the fundamental imperative of indefinite life extension that I have condensed and worked out over the years and suggest that all who join as administrators of the movement for indefinite life extension contribute to a series of books to be called The Movement for Indefinite Life Extension. The admins will meet to develop a list of all foundational stances that we will seek to have covered and make the final decisions on what goes into the series for philosophy, politics, sociology, ethics, history, psychology and so forth. We will also develop one coordinated mass movement for indefinite life extension event to involve the participation of no less than 1,000 people, designed to drive world spotlight to the cause and drive up these “likes’/defacto petition signatures, with no time frame yet set.

When other people try to get transhumanism’s would-be followers to play Duck Duck Goose instead of cosmic chess, they are coming for your future, destiny, place in the history books, all of our lives, your holodeck, our tickets to vacations on other planets and chance to live in a world of superabundance. Things like 3d printing and cheap energy sources can make the entire population of the world richer than the richest Forbes List billionaires of today like the middle class among us today are richer than the richest Kings and Queens of a thousand years ago. Your golden geese circle daffy ducks while the windows close. We can get more people to show up for this than they can for that. Beat them, play to win, you are the alpha thinkers, step into the role, claim your destiny. Who among us is seriously going to follow through with letting these people stomp out the purpose of all our lives? Those are our followers but what is happening is that by leaving them to their own devices, and idle to what’s important, we foster the very conditions that slow us down.

The unique position of this generation, the last and the next is in front of this window of the opportunities of all time and space. Technology can develop far enough and get enough done in time for us. Self-actualization and beyond are ours if we’ll only expedite these goals, if we’ll speed up the process of generating awareness and participation. We know where we’re going, why, and how to get there. Lead by leading or lead by setting the example and following, it’s the same difference, it all gets us there.

“They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their “knowing” is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is—WILL TO POWER.—Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day?”

Let’s keep the mediocre at bay by engaging our ethic of the tradition of progress. Stand behind the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/, the Transhuman Declaration https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/, the Transhumanist Bill of Rights https://transhumanist-party.org/tbr-2/, and the Technoprogressive Declaration https://transvision-conference.org/tpdec2017/ to make sure there is enough support to signal to the world that this is where we all need to be. Otherwise, the scales of supernaturalism, nihilism, consumerism or some other thing could tip us too far into the abysses of lost potential.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, for example:

Article 27: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

Article 28: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”

In other words, the world’s goals are no longer to figure out ways to free ourselves from the worst of the struggles, tediums and grunt laboring — now our goals are to make sure everyone does what it takes to implement the achievements that have unlocked those limitations and enable the right of everyone to stand before the fertile fields of our aptitude.

The spirit of that declaration and centuries of progress and evolving mindset that built up to it have helped establish a foundation for transhumanism to gain its footing and flourish, and those are two of its articles that sum up the angle that the Transhuman Declaration, Transhumanist Bill of Rights, and Technoprogressive Declaration expand on. As they outline, the time to focus on adding to our overall condition, or as we call it, “Humanity+”, is here.

Another line in the UN declaration suggests that these conditions and our morality naturally prescribe this transhuman expansion and direction.

Article 29: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.”

Developing our species is the overarching reason why you exist, the nature of your reality. We must know what is going on in order to know what we need and want, and that cannot be known until we develop enough to have the chance to do so. New technologies and extended lengths of lifespan are imperative.

The Transhumanist Declaration, the Transhumanist Bill of Rights and the Technoprogressive Declaration declare these kinds of fundamentals of our condition in various ways.

In the Transhumanist Declaration:

“Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded.”

In the Transhumanist Bill of Rights:

Article IV. “Sentient entities are entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering, making personhood improvements, and achieving an indefinite lifespan via science and technology.”

Article VIII. “Sentient entities are entitled to the freedom to conduct research, experiment, and explore life, science, technology, medicine, and extraterrestrial realms to overcome biological limitations of humanity.”

In the Technoprogressive Declaration:

“Our vision is a sustainable abundance of: clean energy, healthy food, shelter, affordable healthcare, all-round intelligence, mental well-being, and time for creativity, enabled by application of converging technologies, with no one left behind.”

Did the people of 1,000 years ago have opportunities like these? Most of the opportunities they go over weren’t even conceived of yet, not even 100 years ago. Only some of the seeds were then growing deep in the forests of daily awareness. Now the fruits are falling off the trees in groves as far as the eye can see. There has never been a time like this before. Anyone who is considering getting in on this movement, do it now before it’s too late. Just message me and I will personally pitch you indisputable reasoning why you ought to join. Stay tuned to the movement for indefinite life extension post feed for a steady stream of the news, reasoning, philosophy, sociological insights, declarations, opportunities for involvement, updates and everything else.

”The problem of those who wait.—Happy chances are necessary, and many incalculable elements, in order that a higher man in whom the solution of a problem is dormant, may yet take action, or ‘break forth,’ as one might say—at the right moment. On an average it does not happen; and in all corners of the earth there are waiting ones sitting who hardly know to what extent they are waiting, and still less that they wait in vain. Occasionally, too, the waking call comes too late—the chance which gives ‘permission’ to take action—when their best youth, and strength for action have been used up in sitting still; and how many a one, just as he ‘sprang up,’ has found with horror that his limbs are benumbed and his spirits are now too heavy! ‘It is too late,’ he has said to himself—and has become self-distrustful and henceforth forever useless.—In the domain of genius, may not the ‘Raphael without hands’ (taking the expression in its widest sense) perhaps not be the exception, but the rule?—Perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather the five hundred hands which it requires in order to tyrannize over the kairos, ‘the right time’—in order to take chance by the forelock!”

We all ride the same orb through the galaxy here, products of the same glorious struggle for survival, progeny of the same springs if ingenuity and imagination, the accomplishments of many triumphant generations worth of “a better tomorrow for our grandchildren”. Life extension, space travel and all the rest aren’t just goals for some particular culture or two, this is for all of us, this is for continuing the tradition of the evolution of our species and the universe.

The Roman Empire never did conquer the North East. Communication was harder back then but let’s say that they had a signup sheet and a newsletter that went out to the whole empire within a minute. Do you think they would have been able to drum up enough support and unity to get it done then? Of course, it would have been simple then. They would have conquered the world. That’s what a Facebook page does for us. It SEEMS too simplistic, but it’s not. If you don’t want the window to close, then just “like” the movement for indefinite life extension page and add and direct people to like the page like your life depends on it. Every aspect of the cause goes out to those “likers”, those defacto petition signers, and increased percentages of them are actively sent off to fitting projects and organizations and involved by us, one on one, via notices and others methods from there. One, solid, unified showing of numbers, social proof, is the only thing standing between you and the train ride to the future.

“the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called GREATNESS: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full.”

Now, on through the window and into the mysteries, in pursuit of the homunculus, to the edges of infinity, through the wonders of imagination, down into the atoms, in search of the purpose of life we go!

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dr-jeanette-gallagher/2018/03/09/can-we-help-our-body-regenerate-in-a-changing-world-of-transformation

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-americans-think-of-body-modification-technologies/

https://www.weforum.org/communities/the-future-of-human-enhancement

[*This article was first published in the September 2017 issue of Paradigm Explorer: The Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network (Established 1973). The article was drawn from the author’s original work in her book: The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), especially from Chapters 4 & 5.]

We are at a critical point today in research into human futures. Two divergent streams show up in the human futures conversations. Which direction we choose will also decide the fate of earth futures in the sense of Earth’s dual role as home for humans, and habitat for life. I choose to deliberately oversimplify here to make a vital point.

The two approaches I discuss here are informed by Oliver Markley and Willis Harman’s two contrasting future images of human development: ‘evolutionary transformational’ and ‘technological extrapolationist’ in Changing Images of Man (Markley & Harman, 1982). This has historical precedents in two types of utopian human futures distinguished by Fred Polak in The Image of the Future (Polak, 1973) and C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ (the humanities and the sciences) (Snow, 1959).

What I call ‘human-centred futures’ is humanitarian, philosophical, and ecological. It is based on a view of humans as kind, fair, consciously evolving, peaceful agents of change with a responsibility to maintain the ecological balance between humans, Earth, and cosmos. This is an active path of conscious evolution involving ongoing psychological, socio-cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual development, and a commitment to the betterment of earthly conditions for all humanity through education, cultural diversity, greater economic and resource parity, and respect for future generations.

By contrast, what I call ‘technotopian futures’ is dehumanising, scientistic, and atomistic. It is based on a mechanistic, behaviourist model of the human being, with a thin cybernetic view of intelligence. The transhumanist ambition to create future techno-humans is anti-human and anti-evolutionary. It involves technological, biological, and genetic enhancement of humans and artificial machine ‘intelligence’. Some technotopians have transcendental dreams of abandoning Earth to build a fantasised techno-heaven on Mars or in satellite cities in outer space.

Interestingly, this contest for the control of human futures has been waged intermittently since at least the European Enlightenment. Over a fifty-year time span in the second half of the 18th century, a power struggle for human futures emerged, between human-centred values and the dehumanisation of the Industrial Revolution.

The German philosophical stream included the idealists and romantics, such as Herder, Novalis, Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. They took their lineage from Leibniz and his 17th-century integral, spiritually-based evolutionary work. These German philosophers, along with romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge (who helped introduce German idealism to Britain) seeded a spiritual-evolutionary humanism that underpins the human-centred futures approach (Gidley, 2007).

The French philosophical influence included La Mettrie’s mechanistic man and René Descartes’s early 17th-century split between mind and body, forming the basis of French (or Cartesian) Rationalism. These French philosophers, La Mettrie and Descartes, along with the theorists of progress such as Turgot and de Condorcet, were secular humanists. Secular humanism is one lineage of technotopian futures. Scientific positivism is another (Gidley, 2017).

Transhumanism, Posthumanism and the Superman Trope

Transhumanism in the popular sense today is inextricably linked with technological enhancement or extensions of human capacities through technology. This is a technological appropriation of the original idea of transhumanism, which began as a philosophical concept grounded in the evolutionary humanism of Teilhard de Chardin, Julian Huxley, and others in the mid-20th century, as we shall see below.

In 2005, the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford founded The Future of Humanity Institute and appointed Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom as its Chair. Bostrom makes a further distinction between secular humanism, concerned with human progress and improvement through education and cultural refinement, and transhumanism, involving ‘direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits.’

Bostrom’s transhumanism can enhance human performance through existing technologies, such as genetic engineering and information technologies, as well as emerging technologies, such as molecular nanotechnology and intelligence. It does not entail technological optimism, in that he regularly points to the risks of potential harm, including the ‘extreme possibility of intelligent life becoming extinct’ (Bostrom, 2014). In support of Bostrom’s concerns, renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and billionaire entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk have issued serious warnings about the potential existential threats to humanity that advances in ‘artificial super-intelligence’ (ASI) may release.

Not all transhumanists are in agreement, nor do they all share Bostrom’s, Hawking’s and Musk’s circumspect views. In David Pearce’s book The Hedonistic Imperative he argues for a biological programme involving genetic engineering and nanotechnology that will ‘eliminate all forms of cruelty, suffering, and malaise’ (Pearce, 1995/2015). Like the shadow side of the ‘progress narrative’ that has been used as an ideology to support racism and ethnic genocide, this sounds frighteningly like a reinvention of Comte and Spencer’s 19th century Social Darwinism. Along similar lines Byron Reese claims in his book Infinite Progress that the Internet and technology will end ‘Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger and War’ and we will colonise outer space with a billion other planets each populated with a billion people (Reese, 2013). What happens in the meantime to Earth seems of little concern to them.

One of the most extreme forms of transhumanism is posthumanism: a concept connected with the high-tech movement to create so-called machine super-intelligence. Because posthumanism requires technological intervention, posthumans are essentially a new, or hybrid, species, including the cyborg and the android. The movie character Terminator is a cyborg.

The most vocal of high-tech transhumanists have ambitions that seem to have grown out of the superman trope so dominant in early to mid-20th-century North America. Their version of transhumanism includes the idea that human functioning can be technologically enhanced exponentially, until the eventual convergence of human and machine into the singularity (another term for posthumanism). To popularise this concept Google engineer Ray Kurzweil co-founded the Singularity University in Silicon Valley in 2009. While the espoused mission of Singularity University is to use accelerating technologies to address ‘humanity’s hardest problems’, Kurzweil’s own vision is pure science fiction. In another twist, there is a striking resemblance between the Singularity University logo (below upper) and the Superman logo (below lower).

When unleashing accelerating technologies, we need to ask ourselves, how should we distinguish between authentic projects to aid humanity, and highly resourced messianic hubris? A key insight is that propositions put forward by techno-transhumanists are based on an ideology of technological determinism. This means that the development of society and its cultural values are driven by that society’s technology, not by humanity itself.

In an interesting counter-intuitive development, Bostrom points out that since the 1950s there have been periods of hype and high expectations about the prospect of AI (1950s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s) each followed by a period of setback and disappointment that he calls an ‘AI winter’. The surge of hype and enthusiasm about the coming singularity surrounding Kurzweil’s naïve and simplistic beliefs about replicating human consciousness may be about to experience a fifth AI winter.

The Dehumanization Critique

The strongest critiques of the overextension of technology involve claims of dehumanisation, and these arguments are not new. Canadian philosopher of the electronic age Marshall McLuhan cautioned decades ago against too much human extension into technology. McLuhan famously claimed that every media extension of man is an amputation. Once we have a car, we don’t walk to the shops anymore; once we have a computer hard-drive we don’t have to remember things; and with personal GPS on our cell phones no one can find their way without it. In these instances, we are already surrendering human faculties that we have developed over millennia. It is likely that further extending human faculties through techno- and bio-enhancement will lead to arrested development in the natural evolution of higher human faculties.

From the perspective of psychology of intelligence the term artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Intelligence, by nature, cannot be artificial and its inestimable complexity defies any notion of artificiality. We need the courage to name the notion of ‘machine intelligence’ for what it really is: anthropomorphism. Until AI researchers can define what they mean by intelligence, and explain how it relates to consciousness, the term artificial intelligence must remain a word without universal meaning. At best, so-called artificial intelligence can mean little more than machine capability, which will always be limited by the design and programming of its inventors. As for machine super-intelligence it is difficult not to read this as Silicon Valley hubris.

Furthermore, much of the transhumanist discourse of the 21st century reflects a historical and sociological naïveté. Other than Bostrom, transhumanist writers seem oblivious to the 3,000-year history of humanity’s attempts to predict, control, and understand the future (Gidley, 2017). Although many transhumanists sit squarely within a cornucopian narrative, they seem unaware of the alternating historical waves of techno-utopianism (or Cornucopianism) and techno-dystopianism (or Malthusianism). This is especially evident in their appropriation and hijacking of the term ‘transhumanism’ with little apparent knowledge or regard for its origins.

Origins of a Humanistic Transhumanism

In 1950, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) published the essay From the Pre-Human to the Ultra-Human: The Phases of a Living Planet, in which he speaks of ‘some sort of Trans-Human at the ultimate heart of things’. Teilhard de Chardin’s Ultra-Human and Trans-Human were evolutionary concepts linked with spiritual/human futures. These concepts inspired his friend Sir Julian Huxley to write about transhumanism, which he did in 1957 as follows [Huxley’s italics]:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature (Huxley, 1957).

Ironically, this quote is used by techno-transhumanists to attribute to Huxley the coining of the term transhumanism. And yet, their use of the term is in direct contradiction to Huxley’s use. Huxley, a biologist and humanitarian, was the first Director-General of UNESCO in 1946, and the first President of the British Humanist Association. His transhumanism was more humanistic and spiritual than technological, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin’s spiritually evolved human. These two collaborators promoted the idea of conscious evolution, which originated with the German romantic philosopher Schelling.

The evolutionary ideas that were in discussion the century before Darwin were focused on consciousness and theories of human progress as a cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual ideal. Late 18th-century German philosophers foreshadowed the 20th-century human potential and positive psychology movements. To support their evolutionary ideals for society they created a universal education system, the aim of which was to develop the whole person (Bildung in German) (Gidley, 2016).

After Darwin, two notable European philosophers began to explore the impact of Darwinian evolution on human futures, in other ways than Spencer’s social Darwinism. Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about the higher person (Übermensch) were informed by Darwin’s biological evolution, the German idealist writings on evolution of consciousness, and were deeply connected to his ideas on freedom.

French philosopher Henri Bergson’s contribution to the superhuman discourse first appeared in Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1907/1944). Like Nietzsche, Bergson saw the superman arising out of the human being, in much the same way that humans have arisen from animals. In parallel with the efforts of Nietzsche and Bergson, Rudolf Steiner articulated his own ideas on evolving human-centred futures, with concepts such as spirit self and spirit man (between 1904 and 1925) (Steiner, 1926/1966). During the same period Indian political activist Sri Aurobindo wrote about the Overman who was a type of consciously evolving future human being (Aurobindo, 1914/2000). Both Steiner and Sri Aurobindo founded education systems after the German bildung style of holistic human development.

Consciously Evolving Human-Centred Futures

There are three major bodies of research offering counterpoints to the techno-transhumanist claim that superhuman powers can only be reached through technological, biological, or genetic enhancement. Extensive research shows that humans have far greater capacities across many domains than we realise. In brief, these themes are the future of the body, cultural evolution and futures of thinking.

Michael Murphy’s book The Future of the Body documents ‘superhuman powers’ unrelated to technological or biological enhancement (Murphy, 1992). For forty years Murphy, founder of Esalen Institute, has been researching what he calls a Natural History of Supernormal Attributes. He has developed an archive of 10,000 studies of individual humans, throughout history, who have demonstrated supernormal experiences across twelve groups of attributes. In almost 800 pages Murphy documents the supernormal capacities of Catholic mystics, Sufi ecstatics, Hindi-Buddhist siddhis, martial arts practitioners, and elite athletes. Murphy concludes that these extreme examples are the ‘developing limbs and organs of our evolving human nature’. We also know from the examples of savants, extreme sport and adventure, and narratives of mystics and saints from the vast literature from the perennial philosophies, that we humans have always extended ourselves—often using little more than the power of our minds.

Regarding cultural evolution, numerous 20th century scholars and writers have put forward ideas about human cultural futures. Ervin László links evolution of consciousness with global planetary shifts (László, 2006). Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind traces socio-cultural developments over the last 2,000 years, pointing to emergent changes (Tarnas, 1991). Jürgen Habermas suggests a similar developmental pattern in his book Communication and the Evolution of Society (Habermas, 1979). In the late 1990s Duane Elgin and Coleen LeDrew undertook a forty-three-nation World Values Survey, including Scandinavia, Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and the United States. They concluded, ‘a new global culture and consciousness have taken root and are beginning to grow in the world’. They called it the postmodern shift and described it as having two qualities: an ecological perspective and a self-reflexive ability (Elgin & LeDrew, 1997).

In relation to futures of thinking, adult developmental psychologists have built on positive psychology, and the human potential movement beginning with Abraham Maslow’s book Further Reaches of Human Nature (Maslow, 1971). In combination with transpersonal psychology the research is rich with extended views of human futures in cognitive, emotional, and spiritual domains. For four decades, adult developmental psychology researchers such as Michael Commons, Jan Sinnott, and Lawrence Kohlberg have been researching the systematic, pluralistic, complex, and integrated thinking of mature adults (Commons & Ross, 2008; Kohlberg, 1990; Sinnott, 1998). They call this mature thought ‘postformal reasoning’ and their research provides valuable insights into higher modes of reasoning that are central to the discourse on futures of thinking. Features they identify include complex paradoxical thinking, creativity and imagination, relativism and pluralism, self-reflection and ability to dialogue, and intuition. Ken Wilber’s integral psychology research complements his cultural history research to build a significantly enhanced image of the potential for consciously evolving human futures (Wilber, 2000).

I apply these findings to education in my book Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Gidley, 2016).

Can AI ever cross the Consciousness Threshold?

Given the breadth and subtlety of postformal reasoning, how likely is it that machines could ever acquire such higher functioning human features? The technotopians discussing artificial superhuman intelligence carefully avoid the consciousness question. Bostrom explains that all the machine intelligence systems currently in use operate in a very narrow range of human cognitive capacity (weak AI). Even at its most ambitious, it is limited to trying to replicate ‘abstract reasoning and general problem-solving skills’ (strong AI). In spite of all the hype around AI and ASI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)’s own website states that even ‘human-equivalent general intelligence is still largely relegated to the science fiction shelf.’ Regardless of who writes about posthumanism, and whether they are Oxford philosophers, MIT scientists, or Google engineers, they do not yet appear to be aware that there are higher forms of human reasoning than their own. Nor do they have the scientific and technological means to deliver on their high-budget fantasies. Machine super-intelligence is not only an oxymoron, but a science fiction concept.

Even if techno-developers were to succeed in replicating general intelligence (strong AI), it would only function at the level of Piaget’s formal operations. Yet adult developmental psychologists have shown that mature, high-functioning adults are capable of very complex, imaginative, integrative, paradoxical, spiritual, intuitive wisdom—just to name a few of the qualities we humans can consciously evolve. These complex postformal logics go far beyond the binary logic used in coding and programming machines, and it seems also far beyond the conceptual parameters of the AI programmers themselves. I find no evidence in the literature that anyone working with AI is aware of either the limits of formal reasoning or the vast potential of higher stages of postformal reasoning. In short, ASI proponents are entrapped in their thin cybernetic view of intelligence. As such they are oblivious to the research on evolution of consciousness, metaphysics of mind, multiple intelligences, philosophy and psychology of consciousness, transpersonal psychology and wisdom studies, all providing ample evidence that human intelligence is highly complex and evolving.

When all of this research is taken together it indicates that we humans are already capable of far greater powers of mind, emotion, body, and spirit than previously imagined. If we seriously want to develop superhuman intelligence and powers in the 21st century and beyond we have a choice. We can continue to invest heavily in naïve technotopian dreams of creating machines that can operate better than humans. Or we can invest more of our consciousness, energy, and resources on educating and consciously evolving human futures with all the wisdom that would entail.

About Professor Jennifer M. Gidley PhD

Author, psychologist, educator and futurist, Jennifer is a global thought leader and advocate for human-centred futures in an era of hi-tech hype and hubris. She is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS, Sydney and author of The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017) and Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016). As former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009−2017), a UNESCO and UN ECOSOC partner and global peak body for futures studies, Jennifer led a network of hundreds of the world’s leading futures scholars and researchers from over 60 countries for eight years.

References

[To check references please go to original article in Paradigm Explorer, p. 15–18]

In Unexpected Futurist, we profile the lesser known futurist side of influential individuals. This episode’s unexpected time-traveler: Benjamin Franklin. Ben Franklin was an inventor, observer, electricity pioneer, and serial experimenter, so it’s not entirely surprising he looked to the future. But it turns out he was looking to the far, far future. In 1780 he wrote a letter to a friend in which he lamented that he was born during the dawn of science.

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How will our relationship to technology evolve in the future? Will we regard it as something apart from ourselves, part of ourselves, or as a new area of evolution? In this new video from the Galactic Public Archives, Futurist Gray Scott explains that we are a part of a technological cosmos. Do you agree with Scott that technology is built into the universe, waiting to be discovered?

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This film was compiled from audio of a discussion futurist FM-2030 held at the University of California on February 6th, 1994. In this discussion 2030 laid out an overview of his ‘transhuman’ philosophy and held a back and forth with other people present in the discussion. Discussion and debate included items such as the value of researching ‘indefinite lifespan’ technologies directly as opposed to (or in addition to) more traditional approaches, such as researching cures for specific diseases.
The excerpts in this archive file present a sort of thesis of FM 2030’s transhuman ideas.

About FM 2030: FM 2030 was at various points in his life, an Iranian Olympic basketball player, a diplomat, a university teacher, and a corporate consultant. He developed his views on transhumanism in the 1960s and evolved them over the next thirty-something years. He was placed in cryonic suspension July 8th, 2000. For more information about FM 2030, view the GPA Archive File: ‘Introduction to FM 2030′ or visit some of the following links:

Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030

Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies:
ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/Transhuman

The New York Times:
nytimes.com/2000/07/11/us/futurist-known-as-fm-2030-is-dead-at-69.html

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Predicting an economic “singularity” approaching, Kevin Carson from the Center for a Stateless Society writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010) we can look forward to a vibrant “alternative economy” driven less and less by corporate and state leviathans.

According to Carson, “the more technical advances lower the capital outlays and overhead for production in the informal economy, the more the economic calculus is shifted” (p. 357). While this sums up the message of the book and its relevance to advocates of open existing and emerging technologies, the analysis Carson offers to reach his conclusions is extensive and sophisticated.

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, “increasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will – between them – arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents” (p. 346).

An unrivalled champion of arguments against “intellectual property”, the author believes IP to be nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by talentless corporations to continue making profit at the expensive of true creators and scientists (p. 114–129). The view has significant merit.

“The worst nightmare of the corporate dinosaurs”, Carson writes of old-fashioned mass-production-based and propertied industries, is that “the imagination might take a walk” (p. 311). Skilled creators could find the courage to declare independence from big brands. If not now, in the near future, technology will be advanced and available enough that the creators and scientists don’t need to work as helpers for super-rich corporate executives. Nor will the future see such men and women kept at dystopian, centralized factories.

Pointing to the crises of overproduction and waste, together with seemingly inevitable technological unemployment, Carson believes corporate capitalism is at death’s door. Due to “terminal crisis”, not only are other worlds possible but “this world, increasingly, is becoming impossible” (p. 82). Corporations, the author persuades us, only survive because they live off the subsidies of the government. But “as the system approaches its limits of sustainability”, “libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms” are destined to “break out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different society” (p. 111–112).

Giant corporations are no longer some kind of necessary evil needed to ensure wide-scale manufacture and distribution of goods in our globalized world. Increasingly, they are only latching on to the talents of individuals to extract rents. They may even be neutering technological modernity and the raising of living standards, to extract as much profit as possible by allowing only slow improvements.

And why should corporations milk anyone, if those creators are equipped and talented enough to work for themselves?

The notion of creators declaring independence is not solely a question of things to come. While Kevin Carson links the works of Karl Hess, Jane Jacobs and others (p. 192–194) to imagine alternative friendly, localized community industries of a high-tech nature that will decrease the waste and dependency bred by highly centralized production and trade, he also points to recent technologies and their social impact.

“Computers have promised to be a decentralizing force on the same scale as electrical power a century earlier” (p. 197), the author asserts, referring to theories of the growth of electricity as a utility and its economic potential. From the subsequent growth of the internet, blogging is replacing centralized and costly news networks and publications to be the source of everyone’s information (p. 199). The decentralization brought by computers has meant “the minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars at most, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero” (p. 199).

The vision made possible by books like Kevin Carson’s might be that one day, not only information products but physical products – everything – will be free. The phrase “knowledge is free”, a slogan of Anonymous hackers and their sympathizers, is true in two senses. Not only does “information want to be free”, the origin of the phrase explained by Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants (2010), but one can acquire knowledge at zero cost.

If the “transferrability” of individual creativity and peer production “to the realm of physical production” from the “immaterial realm” is a valid observation (p. 204–227), then the economic singularity means one thing clear. “Knowledge is free” shall become “everything is free”.

“Newly emerging forms of manufacturing”, the author indicated, “require far less capital to undertake production. The desktop revolution has reduced the capital outlays required for music, publishing and software by two orders of magnitude; and the newest open-source designs for computerized machine tools are being produced by hardware hackers for a few hundred dollars” (p. 84).

Open source hardware is of course also central to the advocacy in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, especially as it relates to poorer peripheries of the world-economy. It is through open source hardware libraries of the kind advocated by Vinay Gupta that plans for alternative manufacture as the starting point in an alternative economy for the good of all become feasible.

As I argued in my 2013 Catalyst booklet, not only informational goods will face the scandals of being “leaked” or “pirated” in future. The right generation of 3D printers, robots, atomically-precise manufacturing devices, biotechnology-derived medicines and petrochemicals will all move “at the speed of light” as the father of synthetic biology J. Craig Venter predicted of his own synbio work.

The fuel of an economic singularity, those above creations should be of primary interest in the formation of an alternative economy. They would not only have zero cost and zero waiting times, but they would require zero effort. Simply shared, they must be allowed to raise the living standards of humanity and allow poor countries to leapfrog several stages of development, breaking free of the bonds of exploitation.

One area to be criticized in the book could be a portion in which it reflects negatively on the very creation of railways or other state-imposed infrastructure and standards as a wrong turn in history, because these created an artificial niche for corporations to thrive (p. 5–23). It seems to undermine the book’s remaining thesis that the right turn in history consists of “libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms”. “Network” technologies and organizational forms only exist due to that wave of prior mass production and imposed infrastructure the author claimed to be unnecessary. Without the satellites and thousands of kilometers of cable made in factories and installed by states, any type of “network” organizational form would be a weak proposition and the internet would never have existed.

Arguably, now the standards are set, future technological endeavors that connect and bridge society won’t need new standards imposed from above or vast physical infrastructure subsidized by states. The formation of effective networks itself now produces new mechanisms for devising and imposing standards, ensuring interconnectivity and high living standards should continue to flourish under the type of alternative economy advocated in Carson’s book.

Abolish artificial scarcity, intellectual property, mandatory high overhead and other measures used by states to enforce the privileges of monopoly capitalism, the author tells us (p. 168–170). This way, a more humane world-economy can be engineered, oriented to benefit people and local communities foremost. Everyone in the world may get to work fewer hours while enjoying an improved quality of life, and we can prevent a bleak future in which millions of people are sacrificed to technological unemployment on the altar of profit.