Jaron Lanier on Transhumanism

I first encountered Jaron Lanier’s work when I taught his essay “One-Half of A Manifesto” (2000) to computer science students at the University of Texas at Austin. In it he argues, against most of his fellow computer scientists, that humans are not digital or biological computers and are unlikely to be replaced by them anytime soon. Lanier rejects what he calls “cybernetic totalism,” which

has the potential to transform human experience more powerfully than any prior ideology, religion, or political system ever has, partly because it can be so pleasing to the mind, at least initially, but mostly because it gets a free ride on the overwhelmingly powerful technologies that happen to be created by people who are, to a large degree, true believers.”1 

Here are the most important beliefs of cybernetic totalism:

1) That cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

2) That people are no more than cybernetic patterns.

3) That subjective experience either doesn’t exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.

4) That what Darwin described in biology, or something like it, is in fact also the singular, superior description of all creativity and culture.

5) That qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be accelerated by Moore’s Law.

And finally, the most dramatic:

6) That biology and physics will merge with computer science (becoming biotechnology and nanotechnology), resulting in life and the physical universe becoming mercurial; achieving the supposed nature of computer software. Furthermore, all of this will happen very soon! Since computers are improving so quickly, they will overwhelm all the other cybernetic processes, like people, and will fundamentally change the nature of what’s going on in the familiar neighborhood of Earth at some moment when a new “criticality”is achieved- maybe in about the year 2020. To be a human after that moment will be either impossible or something very different than we now can know.

Lanier concludes his piece by reiterating that while he is no Luddite, he disagrees with many of his colleagues.

I share the belief of my cybernetic totalist colleagues that there will be huge and sudden changes in the near future brought about by technology. The difference is that I believe that whatever happens will be the responsibility of individual people who do specific things. I think that treating technology as if it were autonomous is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.

Lanier’s biggest worry is that cybernetic totalism will transform into ideology or dogma which inevitably causes suffering, echoing a concern of Bertrand Russell who opposed: “the arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt.”2  Remember too that models of reality, like cybernetic totalism, are always just models. In fact all of the six basic components of cybernetic totalism are either philosophical or scientifically problematic. Lanier is right, a healthy skepticism always serves us well. Now none of this means that I reject transhumanism; I do not. But we don’t confuse what we want with what we can have; we don’t want to abandon good thinking and a healthy skepticism. 

Of course most find no affinity with our vision–which is fine–as long as they don’t oppose our efforts to use technology to overcome our limitations. They can live as Amish or hunter gatherers if they’d like, but don’t prevent the rest of us from availing ourselves the use of technology. As I’ve argued before in this blog and in my books, technologically guaranteed immortality will end religion as we know it anyway. When immorality is real, most will choose it rather than death with the hope of heavenly reward.

But for now I probably have to die. Marcus Aurelius’s words from almost two thousand years ago, written during military campaigns in the far flung reaches of the Roman empire, are still true for at least a little longer, “…life is warfare and a strangers sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.”

This leaves us with the task of creating a world where others, and possibly ourselves, won’t suffer this fate.

1. http://edge.org/conversation/one-half...

2. http://www.ditext.com/russell/rus15.html