Apocalypse and Transhumanism

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher who had his breakthrough with the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Grand and sweeping in scope and at the same time very easy to follow, this is a book that I will probably have the opportunity to revisit many times on this blog. But not too long ago Harari released a follow-up: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In this latest title (which translates to "Divine Man" in Greek) Harari suggests, in his easily accessible, pedagogical style, that humanity has largely overcome the three great problems of the past: war, famine and disease, thus having achieved, on the whole, peace, reliable access to food and good health. Whether or not these achievements will stand the test of time, Harari suggests that there are today three other ambitions that will shape human action in the 21th century: the achievement of happiness, non-mortality and divinity. The first one is hardly controversial; as for the second one, non-mortality simply means the possibility of living forever, rather than being unable to die (immortality). This would be achieved by "curing" aging, or at least significantly halting it. The third ambition, divinity, would consist in human enhancement through some combination of genetic engineering and cyborg technologies to transform (some) human beings into post-human demigods.

This brings me back to my last post, where Rushkoff (as in my quoting him) noted that the desire of the super-wealthy for escape havens concurs, at least in the example he gives, with a desire to transcend human limitations altogether. After all, if temperatures rise by 6 C or more, where's the fun going to be in remaining as a human being in this world, whether you are among the poor, starving masses trying to get into a lifeboat or a privileged individual beating anyone trying to enter your lifeboat in the head with a paddle? The world is starting to seem old, and the whole concept of "humankind" is starting to be seen as a burden to be handled, a problem to be reined in and rendered relatively harmless by some future technofix. I am not saying that transhumanism only, or even primarily, owes its existence due to such sentiments; yet such sentiments would seem to bring water to the transhumanist mill, particularly if the vision of a transhumanist future can be conceptualized as an individual rather than a collective matter. A couple of more quotes from Rushkoff's article can perhaps be sufficient for summary:

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

The idea that everything can be reduced to databits is also something raised by Harari in Homo Deus: he calls it a religion and terms it "dataism". Finally:

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Thus onwards, ever onwards, until we have achieved the complete and utter quantification of everything. Some utopia!