Authors: Jamie Bartlett
Computing in the 1960s and early 1970s was often endowed with a magical, mysterious power. Anarchists dreamt of a world in which humanity would be liberated from the drudge of labour, ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’, while counter-cultural writers like Marshall McLuhan were predicting a ‘global village’ of connectedness as a result of modern media, and even a ‘psychic communal integration’ of all humankind.
As the internet became a mainstream form of communication for millions of people there was a surge of techno-optimism. The early nineties were ablaze with utopian ideas about humanity’s imminent leap forward, spurred by connectivity and access to information. Harley Hahn, an influential technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birth-right’. Meanwhile the technology magazine
Mondo 2000
promised to give readers ‘the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen . . . The old information élites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls. This magazine
is about what to do until the millennium comes. We’re talking about Total Possibilities.’
Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred. Nicholas Negroponte – former Director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab – declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace, and the end of nationalism. For some, like John Perry Barlow, author of the ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, this new, free world could help to create just, humane and liberal societies – better than those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’.
But it was not only the optimists commenting on the possibilities presented by this strange new world. For every starry-eyed vision of future utopias there was an equally vivid dystopian nightmare. As Licklider dreamt of a harmonious world of human–computing interaction, the literary critic and philosopher Lewis Mumford worried that computers would make man ‘a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal’. In 1967, one professor warned presciently in the
Atlantic
magazine that network computing would create an ‘individualised computer-based federal record-keeping’. As the optimism about the possibilities of the internet reached its zenith in the 1990s, so a growing number worried about the effect it was having on human behaviour. In 1992, Neil Postman wrote in
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
that ‘we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo . . . They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.’
Others were concerned that we would become ‘socially immature’, ‘mentally poor’ and ‘isolated from the outside world’. Worried by the proliferation of pornography – including child pornography – and the growing amount of criminal activity taking place online, governments around the world began to pass legislation designed to monitor, control and censor cyberspace.
This divide, between the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists, is one that stretches back to the birth of the internet, and one that is widening as technology becomes omnipresent, faster and more powerful. There are, today, two movements that are extreme versions of these opposing views about technology. The transhumanists embrace technology; the anarcho-primitivists reject it. Both groups have existed in some form since the early days of the internet, and both have been steadily growing in popularity in recent years, and as technology comes to play a more central role in our lives. Both exist across the dark net – from forums on the deep web to highly polished websites on the surface web, with a host of portals, blogs and social media groups in between. But which side is right? Does connectivity bring us together, or supplant real-world relationships? Does access to information makes us more open-minded or committed to our own dogmas? Is there something about the internet, or perhaps technology itself, that shapes and constrains our choices, prodding us to behave in certain ways? And what do their prophetic visions of our technological future – one bright, one bleak – say about the dark net and how we utilise the internet today?
Zoltan Istvan wants to live for ever. Not in the metaphorical sense – in the memory of his children, or in the words of his books – but in a very real, practical sense. And he believes that technology will soon make it possible. Zoltan is planning to upload his brain, and all its billions of unique synaptic pathways, to a computer server. ‘Based on current trends, I hope to upload my mind at some point around the middle of this century,’ he confidently informs me. Zoltan – that really is his name – is a transhumanist. He’s part of a growing community of people who believe that technology can make us physically, intellectually, even morally, better. Like all transhumanists, Zoltan believes that death is a biological quirk of nature, something we do not need to accept as inevitable. Transhumanists seek the continued evolution of human life beyond its current form. They believe that we should use technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage – especially mortality and physical and mental limits – thereby exceeding the constraints of the human condition, which they regard as changeable. ‘By thoughtfully, carefully and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves,’ writes Max More, a leading transhumanist philosopher, ‘we can become something no longer accurately described as human . . . [who would] no longer suffer from disease, ageing and inevitable death.’
Transhumanism’s roots are found in the ideas of science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and the futurist biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term ‘transhuman’ in 1957. (Nick Bostrom, a well-known transhumanist, says the desire to transcend human limitations
is as old as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.) Transhumanism first became prominent in California in the early nineties, the watermark period of techno-optimism. In 1993, Vernor Vinge popularised the idea of the ‘Singularity’, the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to produce new and ever more advanced versions of itself, quickly leaving us mortals behind. Vinge hoped that transhumanists would ‘exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool . . . progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else.’
By 1998, the burgeoning group came together as the World Transhumanist Association. Soon after, a number of influential transhumanists published a declaration of intent: ‘We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of ageing, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology and our confinement to planet earth.’ In 2008 the World Transhumanist Association was renamed Humanity+, and remains the largest formal organisation of transhumanists, publishing a glossy, quarterly magazine and organising a number of conferences and academic events. Today there are around 6,000 members from more than 100 countries – an eclectic mix of self-confessed technology geeks, scientists, libertarians, academics and activists like Zoltan (who describes himself as a writer, activist and campaigner all-in-one). Together they work on a dazzling array of cutting-edge technology. Everything from life extension, anti-ageing, robotics, artificial intelligence (Marvin Minsky, considered one of the inventors of artificial intelligence, is a prominent transhumanist), cybernetics, space colonisation, virtual reality and cryonics. But most transhumanist technology focuses on life extension, and technological upgrades to the brain and body.
It’s the possibility of a tech-powered ‘great leap forward’ that excites transhumanists like Zoltan, who believes the possible benefits of near- and medium-term technology are too important to ignore. In addition to the personal goal of immortality, he believes synthetic biology could solve food shortages, genetic medicine may help cure diseases, bionic limbs already do transform the lives of disabled people. (Zoltan explains that, as a computer file, his carbon footprint would be greatly reduced.) They believe that connecting our brains to computer servers would dramatically increase human cognition and intelligence, which would help us solve the sort of problems we humans are likely to face in the future. For transhumanists, not to pursue every avenue to improve human capability is irrational, even a derogation of a duty to relieve suffering and improve well-being.
Dr Anders Sandberg, a softly spoken computational neuroscientist and transhumanist, is one of the world’s leading experts on ‘mind uploading’. He is one of the few people working on how Zoltan might realise his ambition of turning his brain into a computer file. In the nineties, Anders ran the Transhumanist Society in his native Sweden, and is now a research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he grapples with the problems of rapid human evolution.
As I meet Anders – a tall, smartly dressed man in his early forties – for lunch on Oxford’s bustling high street one Saturday afternoon, I notice he is wearing a large silver medallion round his neck. It reads:
Call now for instructions. Push 50,000 U heparin by I.V. and do CPU while cooling with ice to 10C. Keep PH 7.5 No embalming. No autopsy.
‘It’s for whoever finds me first,’ Anders says. ‘I rarely take it off when I’m out in public.’
I am none the wiser.
‘The critical period in cryonic freezing,’ he explains, ‘is during the first two hours or so. As soon as I’m in the nitrogen tank and my body is cooled down to 77 Kelvin, I’ll be fine. The heparin is in order to help thin the blood so it doesn’t clot, and so it can freeze faster.’
Anders is one of 2,000 or so people around the world currently paying between £25 and £35 per month to ensure his body is preserved when he dies.
fn1
It’s surprisingly little to pay for a shot at immortality. ‘On current trends, I estimate a 20 per cent probability that I’ll be woken when the science catches up,’ says Anders.
My first impression of Anders is of a genius but slightly madcap nineteenth-century scientist (an impression that is helped by his soft Swedish accent and precise, clipped sentences). He recently experimented with the cognitive enhancing drug modafinil, an experience that he claims was positive, and tells me he also plans to have magnets surgically inserted into his fingers so he can feel electromagnetic waves. But his main area of interest is mind uploading (what he calls ‘whole brain emulation’). In 2008, Anders published a 130-page instruction manual setting out exactly how the brain’s content, its precise structure, pathways and electric signals, could be transferred on to a computer chip. If it was perfectly copied, it would, thinks Anders, be indistinguishable from the real thing.
Once you’ve got a file, you needn’t fear death – you can always be re-uploaded into a synthetic human body, or, he says, ‘some kind of robot’. It doesn’t matter what the vessel is, according to Anders, because it would experience consciousness in exactly the same way as we do. As he describes why he thinks this is a fantastic idea, I begin to choke on my noodles, much to Anders’ delight. ‘Ha! You see?’ he laughs, as I struggle for air. ‘You need a back-up. Everyone needs a back-up. What a waste of human life and potential, to die choking on noodles! Ha ha!’ (For a brief moment, I agree.) Ray Kurzweil – a director of engineering at Google, and probably the world’s most famous transhumanist – thinks that mind uploading will be possible in 2045, as Zoltan predicted. Most mainstream scientists are less convinced by Kurzweil’s estimates. (Anders is a little more conservative, which is one reason he’ll be putting himself in the nitrogen tank.)
Anders explains that he now spends much of his time working through the social implications of mind uploading, rather than the technology itself. He hints at the terrifying prospect of a computer hacker being able to access your brain and change it – ‘we really need to start thinking about these questions,’ he warns, looking slightly worried. ‘There are as many legal, political and social questions as there are technical ones at the moment.’
Zoltan, however, is extremely excited about living for eternity as a data file. Then again, Zoltan has already packed an awful lot into his forty or so years. In his twenties, he circumnavigated the world by boat (well, almost – he made it three quarters of the way round), became a war correspondent, invented a sport called ‘volcano boarding’, and headed a militia group in South East Asia protecting
wildlife. While covering a story for the National Geographic Channel in Vietnam’s demilitarised zone, Zoltan almost stepped on a landmine – his guide pushed him out of the way of the mostly buried device at the last second. ‘From that point I decided to dedicate my life to the transhumanist cause,’ Zoltan explains. He has a wife and two young children – but makes time, he says, for twelve to fourteen hours a day of transhumanist-related work. His ultimate aim, he tells me, is to live for ever, or as long as possible – 10,000 years or so. ‘If you and I were offered the chance,’ he tells me over Skype from his home in California, ‘we’d certainly try it. We’d have awe-inspiring superhuman powers.’
‘But what would you do?’ I ask. ‘Ten thousand years seems like an awfully long time.’
‘I can only answer this based on my current brain,’ Zoltan patiently replies. ‘One day we’ll have brains the size of the Empire State Building, connected to thousands of servers. The possibilities of what we could do, see and imagine would be endless. So no, I don’t think I’ll get bored.’ He pauses. ‘Well, I guess I haven’t been bored yet.’
Transhumanists might be small in number, but they are, for the most part, extremely committed to the cause. Zoltan tells me he is planning a number of publicity stunts in the next couple of years to bring the movement to a wider audience. This includes marching with a group of robots and a large coffin to Union Square in San Francisco to protest against what he sees as a lack of government investment in life-extension science. Many transhumanists are ‘biohackers’ – who, like Anders, experiment with introducing new technology into their own body directly. In 2013, transhumanist Richard Lee became the first person to have implanted a headphone in his ear. In 2012, in Essen,
Germany, Tim Cannon, a tranhumanist biohacker, implanted a small computer and wireless battery inside his arm. A number of American transhumanists have recently collaborated to crowdfund a ‘seastead’, a floating community located in international waters, outside of legal jurisdiction (in 2013, they became one of the first charities to accept Bitcoin donations). Why? Possibly, thinks Zoltan, who is an ambassador to the Seasteading Institute, to escape domestic laws that prevent certain types of research such as human cloning research, which is illegal in most US states, but would probably be allowed on a seastead floating in international waters. In Zoltan’s recent book,
The Transhumanist Wager
(which he assures me is fiction), transhumanists launch a Third World War from their seastead ‘Transhumania’, determined to realise their utopian plans for humanity. When I ask Zoltan quite how far he would go to pursue his philosophy, he replies: ‘Well . . . I would go as far as I need to go. The highest sense of morality for a transhumanist is based on how much time one has left to live. If there’s very little time due to old age, disease or war then drastic and revolutionary actions must be taken in an attempt to promote the transhumanist agenda, especially the aim of individual immortality.’ (Zoltan, I have come to believe, is mildly obsessed with the idea of immortality. At one point in our interview he told me that he has instructed his wife to ‘stick me in the freezer’ if he dies unexpectedly.)