BBC Profiles UK Transhumanists
There’s a debate raging at the Assembly House pub in North London.
Laurie thinks the future will see a class divide between those who can afford the latest technology and those who can’t.
Jay reckons computers will eventually become incorporated into the human brain.
Brett is suggesting he would be able to share Terry’s holiday experience if he were to wear a head-mounted camera.
Terry looks alarmed.
It’s the inaugural meeting of the London Futurist and Transhumanist Group.
While futurism involves trying to predict how technology will evolve over time, transhumanism is concerned with how that technology will change the fundamental nature human beings and the way we live.
The six people who have turned up all responded to an internet advert, brought together by Richie Arnold, who also happens to be the pub’s chef.
“We’re looking at new technologies that are coming out,” he said.
“ Technology is affordable only by the wealthy when it doesn’t work very well. By the time it is perfected it ends up being extremely inexpensive. ”
Ray Kurzweil“I am particularly interested in artificial intelligence and the ramifications of that.
“I’m just a normal guy, at the end of the day. I don’t really have a lot of scientific background.
“I think you need to be prepared for what is going on. Some of the things I have found out about are, in a way, quite scary and you don’t want to be the last person to hear about it.”
Trend spotting
In contrast to an informal pub-based discussion, a few days later, members of the UK Transhumanist Association are attending a talk entitled “Extreme Simulation Scenarios”.
The audience at Birkbeck College appear to revel in speculative talk of “virtual autonomous zones” and a “utility fog”.
Afterwards, speaker cognitive scientist and artist Amon Twyman explains the group’s core philosophy.
“At the moment, people live longer, healthier and for the most part happier lives than they used to because of medical technology.
“Particularly in the Western world they’ve got medical technology, transport, access to the internet. The whole idea is you look at those trends and extend them further.
“Whatever health problems are going to come along because of your genes, genetic therapy can change that.
“Some people imagine more far flung technologies, like nanotechnology, that you can use to change your body,” Dr Twyman said.
Among the futures envisaged is a world where human consciousness can be uploaded onto storage devices to live inside virtual environments.
The real world, they speculate, will also be enhanced with nano-robots, which live in the air and swarm together to form solid objects on demand.
Yet transhumanism is part only part science. Those who engage in it spend much of their time debating the philosophical implications of their predictions.
There is much talk about whether possible futures would actually be desirable.
But despite its occasional moral hand-wringing, transhumanism is a controversial field.
The term itself was coined by the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley in his 1957 essay of the same name.
Even more controversially, Huxley was also a leading proponent of eugenics – social engineering through selective breeding.
To this day, critics maintain that transhumanism will lead to a world where the wealthy have access to life extending and enhancing innovations, while the poor languish with unmodified, “Mark 1″ human bodies.
Dr Steven Novella presents a weekly podcast, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe”.
“There’s one end of the spectrum where transhumanist enthusiasts don’t really see any ethical limits or ethical problems with pursuing whatever they want to pursue,” he said.
“You could make a reasonable ethical argument for the freedom of individuals to do whatever they want with their own consciousness and their own bodies. It gets trickier when you start dealing with children and people other than oneself.”
