Salvation and Apocalypse, but only if you have the Right Technology Chris Toumey Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity. By R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser. 268 + xiii pages. When I began studying societal and cultural issues in nanotechnology in 2003, one topic surprised and perplexed me more than any other, namely, the expectation of some people that nanotech would serve as a cornerstone of the transhumanist agenda. Before that I had never heard about transhumanism, so I had to learn about it very quickly. This book, Transcendence, would have been valuable to me if it had been available at that time. As I discovered more about transhumanism, I thought, uh‐oh, it would not be good to measure nanotechnology according to how well it corroborated the expectations of transhumanists. Here we need a definition: transhumanism is a vision of the near future in which certain powerful emerging technologies will give us all the tools to master the material conditions in which we live, especially our bodily health. “Humans transitioning, via technology, into something grander,” as this book puts it. Those technologies will then banish fear, fatalism, cynicism, and every other alternative to technological optimism. And that vision has a passionate movement that intends to make it credible and make it happen. Transhumanism has two principal themes. The first is that emerging technologies will soon eliminate aging processes and thus death from old age. Our flesh‐and‐blood bodies will not wear out for two hundred years or more because amazing medical technologies will defeat the usual ways that we age. As the co‐authors of this book say, “living beyond the perceived limits of an individual human life seems to be the central obsession of transhumanist culture.” This optimism—or fanciful obsession—became especially vivid to me when I heard the following story: one of my colleagues, a middle‐aged professor of philosophy, went to a transhumanist conference to learn more about this movement. A young fellow, less than half my friend's age, said to him, “what a shame it is that you are in the last generation that will experience bodily death.” Thank you very much, young man. I wish you long life, but it might surprise you some day to find that you too will face the same end of earthly life that my colleague and I expect to face eventually. And there is another variation on the transhumanist idea of defeating death. According to the idea of cyber‐immortality, one's spirit will live forever when we have information systems that can upload our thoughts, our feelings, our values—all the intangibles that make a person unique—into information systems, for example, computers, servers, robots, and other storage devices. Spiritual immortality, if you like, or your soul on a silicon disk. This way the (trans)humans of the future can know us as intimately as we know ourselves, at least as long as servers never crash, robots never fail, our descendants have nothing to do except binge‐watch thousands of hours of our digital spiritual records, and, finally, today's software never becomes obsolete. Software that never becomes obsolete? Perish the thought. But how many readers of CrossCurrents remember WordStar, WordPerfect, and other kinds of software which were once so fine that we could not imagine that they would ever be left behind? The second principal theme of transhumanism is the Singularity. This is an event that is expected to arrive in our lifetimes when a synergy of all transhumanism's favorite emerging technologies will quickly change the material realities in which we find ourselves. Everything important will suddenly become drastically different and profoundly better. The Singularity is also expected to be the end of economic scarcity, and wouldn't that be nice. As we aspire to know what our lives will be like after this new reality arrives, there is a trick: even if the moment of the Singularity can be accurately predicted, everything will be so different from the realities before the Singularity that no one can say precisely what it will be like. The words, the descriptions and the visions that we use today...
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Mar 30, 2016
I Made Budi Suksmadana + 2
