Accelerating Future

“…the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

— Oration on the Dignity of Man, Giovanni Pico (1486)

H/t PlusUltraTech

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“Balancing the Trichotomy”
Jaan Tallinn

Individual rights vs collective good: historically, to promote these competing values, societies sought balance between the two. Powerful technologies, however, are turning this dichotomy into a trichotomy. Today, we must consider the interests of individuals, modern society, and future societies that our actions will affect. Present and future societies interests’ clash most famously in matters of pollution and global warming, but the stakes are much higher that these slow-moving crises would suggest. Emerging technologies may prove so disruptive that future societies cannot control their impact. I will discuss the reasons that people are ill-equipped to manage the trichotomy and propose ways to address this pivotal problem.

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In Sonia Arrison’s book 100 Plus, in chapter 8, she discusses two groups of people spreading the longevity meme: “salespeople” and “mavens”. Let me pull the quotes that define these terms, starting with “salesperson”:

“‘All over the world and right in your backyard, there are people who are steadily pushing back the frontier of aging. They are not content to simply wither away, becoming frail and feeling worthless,’ says CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Dr. Gupta is one of the people leading the charge in spreading the meme that healthy life extension is not only a possibility but is also worth fighting for. A neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN, he is on the front lines when it comes to discovering and explaining cutting-edge science. Former president Bill Clinton calls him “the world’s doctor,” and the public relies in him to separate medical fact from fiction. Aside from his regular news reports, Dr. Gupta has written a couple of books that explain how advances in science are promoting health extension. His messages is that there is a tsunami of longevity-related research in the works and that “there is nothing more important.” Dr. Gupta might think of himself as simply a doctor who is informing the public about new advances, but when it comes to explaining how the longevity meme has caught on, we could call him a “salesperson.”

Labeling Dr. Gupta a salesperson is not derogatory. He is obviously not trying to “sell” a product in return for money. Rather, the term is derived from Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book The Tipping Point, in which he explains how certain people and circumstances come together to make an idea unstoppable. In this context a salesperson is someone who exudes energy, enthusiasm, and charm, someone who can effectively and charismatically explain concepts and ideas. Of course, Dr. Gupta isn’t alone in this role. Society has reached a longevity tipping point because many players are involved.

Now, “maven”:

“While salespeople work to popularize a new meme, those who help build it can be called “mavens.” These are the people who are committed to collecting and disbursing information. They are like databanks, almost compulsively collecting and offering data to others who show interest. In the longevity movement, there are a lot of these types of people, ranging from those who are seen as either cutting edge or “fringe” to those who are more mainstream.

One well-known maven is Aubrey de Grey, whom we learned a bit about in Chapter 2. A computer scientist turned gerontologist, de Grey describes himself as a “fighter at heart.” He battles aging, he says, because of the suffering it causes. “Aging is just like smoking: It’s really bad for you. It shortens your life, it typically makes the last several years of your life rather grim, and it also makes those years pretty hard for your loved ones.”

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Although physical enhancement is what most people associate with transhumanism, it’s not particularly interesting. A man with tentacles and wings who can fly and breathe underwater is still just some dude. Humans are primitive beings, with conspicuously primitive minds — we just recently evolved from un-intelligent apes that used the same stone tools for millions of years.

Everything truly exciting about the transhumanist project lies in the mental realm. Only through opening up and intervening in the brain can we really change ourselves and the way the world works. Anything else is just the surface.

What approaches can we take to cognitive enhancement?

First, take brain surgery. It is extremely unlikely that cognitive enhancement will be conducted through conventional brain surgery as is practiced today. These procedures are inherently risky and only conducted under necessary circumstances, when the challenges of surgery outweigh the huge cost, substantial risk, and long recovery time of the procedures.

More subtle than brain surgery is optogenetics, regarded by some as the scientific breakthrough of the last decade. Optogenetics allows researchers to control the precise activation of neurons through the introduction of light-sensitive genes to animal brain tissue.

Optogenetics is unlikely to be applied to humans before 2030-2040, for two reasons. The first is that it involves the introduction of foreign genes into human brain tissue, and gene therapy is in its infancy — treatments derived from gene therapy are extremely rare and highly experimental. People have been killed by gene therapy gone awry. When gene therapy research moves in the direction of human enhancement, a massive backlash seems plausible. It may be banned entirely for enhancement purposes.

At the very least, the short-lived nature of gene therapy and problems with viral vectors ensure that gene therapy will stay experimental until entirely new vectors are developed. Chromallocytes are the ideal gene delivery vector, but those are quite far off. Is there something between current vectors and chromallocytes that produces safe, predictable gene therapy results? That is a great big question mark. What is needed is not one or two breakthroughs, but a long series of many breakthroughs. I challenge readers to find anyone in biotech who would bet that gene therapy will be made safe, predictable, and approved for use in humans within 10 years, 20 years, or 30. Developing new basic capabilities in biotech is a long, drawn out process.

The second reason optogenetics will not bear fruit for cognitive enhancement before 2030-2040 is that it requires slicing off part of the scalp and mounting fiber optics directly on the skull. This is all well and good for animals, which we torment with abandon, but it seems unlikely to be popular among the Homo sapiens crowd. Mature regenerative medicine would be necessary to heal tissue damage from this procedure.

According to Ray Kurzweil’s scenario, “nanobots” will be developed during the late 2020s which will be injected into the human body by the trillions, where they can link up with neurons and augment the brain from the inside.

However, given the near complete lack of progress towards molecular nanotechnology since Eric Drexler wrote Engines of Creation in 1986, I find this hard to believe. Nanobots require nanofactories, nanofactories require assemblers, and assemblers would be highly complex aggregates of millions of molecules that themselves would need to be manufactured to atomic precision. Today, all objects manufactured to molecular precision have negligible complexity. The imaging tools that exist today — and for the foreseeable future — are far too imprecise to allow for troubleshooting molecular systems of non-negligible size and complexity that refuse to behave as intended. The more precise the imaging method, the more energy is delivered to the molecular structure, and the more likely it is to be blown into a million little pieces.

It is difficult to understate how far we are from developing autonomous nanobots with the ability to perform complex tasks in a living human body. There is no reason to expect a smooth path from today’s autonomous MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) to the “nanobots” of futurist anticipation. Autonomous MEMS are early in their infancy. Assemblers are probably a necessary prerequisite to miniature robotics with the power to enhance human cognition. No one has designed anything close to an assembler, and if progress continues as it has for the last 25 years, it will be many decades before one is developed.

So, that is three technologies that I have argued will not be applied to cognitive enhancement in the foreseeable future — brain surgery, optogenetics, and nanobots.

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Sonia Arrison is kicking ass everywhere these days with her new best selling book, 100 Plus. Her book made the Post’s bestsellers list weeks ago, and she’s had good coverage on WSJ.com. Go, Sonia, go!

Relatedly, Reason has a post up on how “A Great Deal of What People Say About Radical Life Extension is Utterly Divorced From Reality”. Check it out.

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