CNN reported briefly on a conference which took place at Oxford University from July 16 to July 20 called the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference. The focus of the article, entitled “Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future,” was mostly on the viewpoints of two participants of the conference, Drs. Nick Bolstrom and Ray Kurzweil, whose perspectives were distinctly geared towards the inevitability of this human-technology merger and provoked fear in the reader about a foreseeable possibility of “the extinction of the human species” if something goes catastrophically wrong as we get closer to being “posthuman”–or “beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced [as a result of technology] they no longer can be classified simply as humans.” Bolstrom and Kurzweil describe themselves as “transhumanists“–part of “a movement that advocates not only the study of the potential threats and promises that future technologies could pose to human life but also the ways in which emergent technologies could be used to make the very act of living better.” Transhumanists, Bolstrom tells us, “want to preserve the best of what it is to be human and maybe even amplify that.”
But what is the “best of what it is to be human?” Who decides what this “best” is? According to Bolstrom and Kurzweil, this isolation and amplification of the best of being human includes a longer lifespan and superintelligence which “could be capable of solving many of our biggest threats, like environmental destruction, poverty and disease.” But, as can be observed in readers’ commentary at the bottom of the page, this is not everyone’s “best.” One reader remarked that “with our world in such rapid demise due to overpopulation, environmental over-extension and human self-interest, we need to focus on restoring the natural balance, not escalating the technological divide between ourselves and nature.”
Additionally, Kurzweil’s emphasis on eventual and inevitable human superintelligence in parallel with the advancement of technology as the solution to all of our current problems (ie: environmental destruction, poverty, and disease) highlights a frequently and strongly held belief: that science will solve all of our problems. But what happens when we call environmental destruction, poverty, and disease “solvable problems?” Are such problems really “solvable,” like a mathematical equation is solvable? These human and geological realities have infinite externalities and particularities in a world of more than 6 billion people, with different cultural norms, political systems, and environmental perspectives. Describing them as solvable problems creates a frame around them which implicitly decides unthinkable parameters: What would these “solutions” look like? What would the world look like after such “solutions” were implemented and when could we say that the problems are solved? Who would decide on these solutions? Who would benefit? Who would be overlooked?
For example, tying this to the “best of” question, aiming for increased life expectancy of populations in Namibia certainly avoids the question of what the quality of those lives would be–another “problem” (quality of life) not even approached by Kurzweil in his assessment of the main problems of humanity. Or perhaps he is tying quality of life to the “solvable problem” (that is, with our superintelligence) of poverty. It is here that we see the biggest fault with this argument: the technologies that he and other transhumanists see as inevitable are born into a world with established power structures–with those who choose which problems will be “solved” being those who will find those “solutions.”
We can see parallels of this in the world of synthetic biology, a field which is mandated to “solve real-world problems through the design of novel organisms and biologically-inspired systems.” There is no separation between the research done under the banner of synthetic biology and the “problems” in the “real world” its leaders and funders have decided are approachable and “solvable.” Sythetic biology forefather Drew Endy discussed what he saw as the foreseeable possibilities of catastrophic risks (framed as the only real problems involved with doing research in the synthetic biology field), which could be consequences of synthesizing DNA into novel or manipulated organisms, as the possibilities of “nefarious forces” getting a hold of the means to make dangerous organisms. Overlooked are questions of accidental contamination or manipulation and questions of how these “solutions” will actually impact the populations they seek to impact.
Restricting the frame of problems and solutions is a direct result of writing proposals for funders, but mediating questions of consequences goes far and away beyond questions of how to keep “nefarious forces” from gaining access of tools of DNA manipulation.
