Abstract
Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of silicon-based digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is ‘convergence’ – used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the ‘project of convergence’, tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms.
Highlights
Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures
Sometime in the mid-2000s, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent named Bina48 was sold to Charlie Fairfax
At the trial held on 10 December 2007, the presiding judge saw the case as turning on the question of personhood: could Bina48 be considered ‘competent’ to stand trial, or, as he asked, was this the legal equivalent of ‘suing a toaster oven’?. It was presided over by a real judge, the trial was not real: Fairfax and Bina481 were fictitious characters made up for the third mock trial designed and hosted by Terasem, a prominent transhumanist group that describes itself as a social movement devoted to ‘diversity, unity and joyful immortality achieved through exponential growth of geo-ethical nanotechnology’ (Terasem, n.d.)
Summary
I take the concept of the carbon barrier from Alan Goldstein, a professor of biomaterials engineering at Alfred University and an early member of the Committee to Review the National Nanotechnology Initiative. In a video presented by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in 2008, entitled Racing to Break the Carbon Barrier, Goldstein declares: ‘That will be the true singularity point in human evolution, because carbon will no longer have sole hegemony over the living world’ Extending this logic, transhumanists speak of persons existing on a silicon substrate, or as a T-shirt at a singularity conference put it, ‘Homo sapiens siliconis’. With big Silicon Valley players – the cofounder of Oracle, Larry Ellison; transhumanist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel; transhumanist and Space X founder Elon Musk; Ray Kurzweil and many others at Google – adopting the label of transhumanism and initiating their own immortality ventures, it has become normal to see magazine covers like the 13 September 2013 This logic seems clear to many bioethicists, including those who oppose any attempt to eliminate death from human life. When I visited the much-ballyhooed Singularity University, set up by Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis of Space X at NASA’s Ames Research Center, to interview the director of the university’s Exponential Medicine section, Daniel Kraft, MD, he confirmed the preferred direction of these projects: ‘The future of health is convergence’
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