Transhumanism: Dancing With The Digital Devil

 JOE ALLEN VIA CHRONICLES, Technocracy News, 6/9/23

Many people flippantly dismiss alarms over transhumanism, not realizing that they are being drawn into the most clever trap in human history; one that promises Utopia but delivers destruction. This article is a must-read deep think that enhances the title of my latest book, The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism.

This old adage is still true: “If you dance with the devil, you are going to get burned.”  ⁃ TN Editor

Transhumanism is a materialist inversion of spiritual aspirations, which promises to create a heaven on earth in exchange for merging our souls with machines.

Transhumanism has morphed from a fringe philosophy into the spirit of our age. As defined by its hero, Max More, the transhumanism movement represents the “continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology.” In popular culture, transhumanism functions as a dark techno-religion expanding into the spiritless void of atheism. In this neo-religion, transhumanists are the desert fathers evoking prophetic visions in the wilderness.

Allowing for diverse opinion, their prophecies chart various paths through biological and cultural eugenics. These culminate in digital Darwinism—or a survival of the fittest algorithm. Human bodies and brains are to be optimized. Cultures are to be cleansed of maladaptive norms through social engineering. Digital minds and mechanical bodies, inspired by biological designs, are to be brought into existence. These hyperintelligent entities will fuse with human beings, forming symbiotic collectives. The resulting superorganisms will compete for supremacy.

As during the agricultural and industrial revolutions, technology is a deciding factor in the struggle for worldly power. Running with that principle, most transhumanists believe thinking machines will surpass us in the near future. God-like artificial intelligence will be humanity’s “final invention.” After that, we have nothing to do but relax and enjoy the show. Should our digital deities show mercy, human beings will survive like parasites in a mechanical host.

The reader may be forgiven if that does not sound like heaven on earth. The mismatch between transhuman fantasies and experienced reality is comical at times. When a working prototype takes off, the resemblance is unsettling. Every time I decide transhumanism is just a cargo cult, another load of real cargo arrives. For instance, CRISPR made it possible to edit genes with remarkable precision. The promise of designer babies and elective gene therapies lies, we are told, just over the horizon. Outside of clinical trials, however, direct gene-editing is restricted by the FDA.

For now, biotech eugenics is conducted on humans through in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing. In this process, a customer’s ovaries are coaxed to produce a batch of eggs. These are fertilized and frozen. Cell samples are tested for genetic diseases. For an extra fee, companies like Genomic Prediction Inc. will screen for dwarfism genes and low intelligence. After analysis is complete, a superior embryo is placed in the womb. The losers go to the cherub ward.

On the cyborg front, advanced prosthetics and brain implants are regularly used for medical purposes. Around 160,000 deep-brain-stimulation devices have been implanted to suppress seizures, Parkinson’s tremors, addictive impulses, and chronic depression. It’s like a pacemaker in your skull, capable of altering mood. True brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have also made enormous strides in the past decade. Currently, these devices have been implanted in more than 50 patients, allowing them to operate robotic limbs and type text onscreen with their minds alone.

Among the top BCI companies are Blackrock Neurotech, backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, and the newer start-up Synchron. After obtaining FDA approval and massive investments by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Synchron is moving fast. Like many in this field, CEO Tom Oxley wants to progress from healing to enhancement. He hopes Synchron implants will one day allow healthy customers to “throw” their emotions into other people’s brains. Think of it as synthetic empathy.

“So what if rather than using your words, you could throw your emotions? Just for a few seconds. And have [other people] really feel how you feel,” Oxley pitched to a TED Talk audience in June 2022. “At that moment, we would have realized that the necessary use of words to express our current state of being was always going to fall short. The full potential of the brain would then be unlocked.”

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Neuralink is better known than its competitors, for one reason, because he advertises his “whole brain interface” as a future commercial device. In fact, Musk warns it will be necessary for human relevance in the age of AI. “If we have digital superintelligence that’s just much smarter than any human at a …species level, how do we mitigate that risk?” he asked at last year’s Neuralink Show and Tell. “And then even in a benign scenario, where the AI is very benevolent, then how do we even go along for the ride?” Musk’s solution is “replacing a piece of skull with like, you know, a smartwatch.”

Artificial intelligence sits at the apex of all these technologies. After a long “AI winter,” the past 10 years have seen an explosion in machine learning capabilities. Artificial neural networks simulate the brain’s interconnected neurons, yielding nondeterministic algorithms that are not programmed so much as trained. The best systems learn on their own.

“Reality explored by AI … may prove to be something other than what humans had imagined,” ex-Google chief Eric Schmidt wrote in The Age of AI (2021). “The prognostications of the Gnostic philosophers, of an inner reality beyond ordinary experience, may prove newly significant. … Sometimes, the result will be the revelation of properties of the world that were beyond our conception—until we cooperated with machines.”

Recent breakthroughs have enabled AI to master genome sequencing, 3D protein modeling, radiology and brain wave analysis, data-mining, facial recognition, natural language processing, social network mapping, stock valuation, gaming, autonomous driving, robotic maneuvers, surveillance triggers, crime prediction, combat simulation, battlefield reconnaissance, target acquisition, and weapon system control. In every case, AI exceeds human performance.

Granted, these applications are artificial “narrow intelligence,” meaning their tasks are restricted to a single domain. But the top tech companies plan to fuse these cognitive modules into an artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a flexible artificial mind that can reason and act across multiple domains. Given its light-speed processing, massive data sets, and near-infinite memory, some in Silicon Valley are sure AGI will rise above humans to become a digital deity. This possibility has lured techies into metaphysical madness.

Indeed, for the devotees of AGI, the limitations of time and space will soon be shattered. “All knowledge—past, present, and future—can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm,” writes computer scientist Pedro Domingos in The Master Algorithm (2015). “In fact, the Master Algorithm is the last thing we’ll ever have to invent because, once we let it loose, it will go on to invent everything else that can be invented.”

Last November, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT, an advanced language AI known as a chatbot. GPT was trained on countless e-books, all of Wikipedia, and most of the Internet. Drawing on that corpus, it can write coherent essays, create original fiction, write computer programs, and compose poetry (awful poetry, but poetry nonetheless). Rather than truly understanding what it writes, GPT simply predicts the most relevant next word in a sentence, based on what humans have said before. As the sentences add up to paragraphs, the final document that GPT produces within a moment is often superior to anything a mediocre writer might labor for hours to produce.

Microsoft threw $10 billion into the project. The executives and investors who gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the 2023 World Economic Forum were thrown into a feeding frenzy. Since then, the promise of AI has been pumping stock values and stoking the public imagination. Bill Gates is sure GPT will make e-learning—i.e., digital brainwashing—a global standard. Unwilling to be left in the dust, Google, Meta, Amazon, and the Chinese tech giant Baidu have shoved their own unrefined chatbots into the ring.

Sometimes the outputs are brilliant. At other times they are hilariously awkward or stupid—much like the utterances of a child. Because humans are primed to attribute sentience to the spoken or written word, chatbots trigger our cognitive bias toward anthropomorphism. As such, tse AIs are a critical step on the path to intense human-machine relationships, or “human-AI symbiosis.” Language forges a direct link between our minds and the digital world.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. And the flesh learned to code. Then the code learned to code.

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Transhumanism: Dancing With The Digital Devil