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new opening and so it's lovely to see all of your smiling faces here this evening for what we have quite grandly I hate to say called the transhumanism debate so other debates are available
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I hope perhaps this might be the best one um some housekeeping before we start um downstairs at the oqs cafe they will continue to serve drinks and in fact food for the rest of the evening so if
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you are peckish or just looking for a bit of conversation after the event then do go down and stay there because we'll all come and join you um there's plenty of time for questions at the end of the debate so what we'll
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do is we'll start with two five-minute opening statements from our two fabulous speakers tonight and then after that we will have a conversation up here on the stage and then there'll be plenty of time to hear from you and also obvious
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online hello to everyone who is joining us over the waves and we'll be able to create a kind of hybrid cyborg event um using all of these different kind of cameras and and fiddly things that we've got in the room so
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the one thing I should say to you before we start is that you must subscribe to unheard I mean it's an obvious thing to say but you should do it because you will be the first person to hear about these events at Old Queen Street and
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also read all of our fibers articles um including by people like Marion Elise who we have every day posting incredible philosophy politics culture and commentary about all the things that no
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one else really wants you to hear about so join us if that's your kind of thing which I hope if you're in this room then it is let me get to our guests we have an incredible pair of guests here
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tonight uh first Elise Bowen who is a self-professed transhumanist perhaps a dirty word for some and for others a badge of honor she is a senior research scholar at the University of Oxford's future of humanity Institute which is
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quite a grand name itself um which is part of the faculty of philosophy and she's also the author of the world's first history of transhumanism future superhuman our Channel human lives in a make or break
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Century so there's a lot to play for here if you're a release Mary Harrington is a regular unheard contributor who you might have met before at one of our other events or perhaps read her work on
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the unheard magazine she is probably the least transhumanist person I know which is why I called her up when we were thinking about this event she's a contributing editor here unheard and also the author of a very exciting
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upcoming book feminism against progress which is published by Swift press so get excited for that so the question we're here to discuss tonight is a pretty big one is transhumanism a Force for good
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now that of course begs the question what the hell is transhumanism and that is something that we want to get into and everyone has slightly different definitions but I wanted to start so bear with me here to bore you for a
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second with a little bit of a definition of my own so at least we have something to go from um transhumanism was popularized as an idea by the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley in the 1950s
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and it's basically an idea that we should adapt human bodies and brains with the aid of Technology I'll just read you a short quote from his original essay which was called transhumanism coining the term
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it is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all the business of evolution appointed without being asked if he wanted it and without proper warning and preparation what is more he
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can't refuse the job whether he wants to or not whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth that is his
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inescapable Destiny and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it the better for all concerns so it's a fairly big job we've got on our hands today transhumanism can cover a lot of things it can include genetic
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engineering artificial intelligence even cryonics an area I'm not sure I'm exactly an expert in but transhumanists hope that we can do amazing things with technology reverse aging increase
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lifespans quality of life and enhance the cognitive capacities of the human Spirit which all sounds pretty good to me but what was once science fiction and has now become science fact for people
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with disabilities new technologies are unarguably an amazing thing imagine being someone who has an amputation in an age without Prosthetics or someone with a heart condition in an age without pacemakers but companies vying for
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market dominance are taking phrase into leveling up able-bodied people as well into human hybrids traditionally known as cyborgs so we're talking about things like artificial wombs brain computer
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interfaces like Elon musk's neurolink which has been in the news a lot recently so should we draw a line when it comes to optimizing The Human Experience could Our Endless search for eternal life lead us down some dark and
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dangerous roads will these small tweaks create a new class of human or adapted human or even post-human that's what we're trying to find out tonight so is this just the natural step in evolution or are we going down a very dangerous
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path indeed let's begin by turning to Elise who's got our optimistic pitch for embracing a trans human future I'll ask Elise to step up to the lectern and could you all welcome her to the stage thank you okay thank you everyone for coming along
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to be here tonight I'm really excited about having a debate in a forum like this because I think there is such a dearth in our world of people coming from different sides trying to come
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together not necessarily to cohere on a single Vision but actually to explore how the tension between their ideas can help us think more clearly about complex issues
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that face Us in the modern world and I'm particularly excited because I think that Mary and I actually agree on an awful lot as far as I can glean we both agree that
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we're living in the anthropocene and that this matters we seem to agree that there is a transitional moment happening for Humanity right now there is this
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infusion of Evermore technology in our world and that this is clearly having disruptive ramifications on so many of us some of those forms of disruptions you
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might frame in terms of the idea of collateral damage which is a is a scary and emotionally confronting word but we can think of some examples of that of increasing disruption of our
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life scripts of atomization of increasing mental illness and I think as Mary May raise later on the issue of more and more people particularly young people
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struggling to find really rich forms of emotional sexual and romantic fulfillment in this world I'm also someone who really believes in the wisdom of chesterton's fans
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I do think that we should be reluctant to dismantle systems and things in our world until we know what they're for every tweak you make in a complex system inherently will come with trade-offs
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and I expect that Mary is going to really foreground for us some of the valid reasons that we might worry about the encroachment of transhumanist Technologies in our world
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I also think there was wisdom in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens who wrote in the wonderful book Letters to a young contrarian beware the irrational however seductive
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Sean the Transcendent and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish picture all experts as if they were
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mammals never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity seek out argument and disputation for their own sake the grave will provide plenty of time
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for silence cool there is so much about this quote that resonates with me as with most things there is wisdom on both sides
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while there is validity to a warning to shun the Transcendent when somebody is inviting you to subordinate yourself I would also say beware of anyone who tells you that you
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and your familiar life Scripts and ways of being are both special and superlative and that they must be clung onto for dear life in perpetuity because they are
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the right ways the best ways and indeed the only ways whatever else you might think of it transhumanism brings something incredibly valuable to the modern
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intellectual landscape it is ballsy in a way that few modern types of thought are and of course I know that being ballsy is not an inherent virtue but being able to contemplate
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possibilities Beyond yourself and your species is I really think a sign of a deep curious active intelligent mind take note that I am not saying an
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unimpeachable mind and that I don't think every extension of that line of thinking is something that should be acted upon but transhumanists do at least help bring us back from the brink of that
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sometimes very rigid anthropocentrism that we get locked into where we can only think within the orbit of ourselves and our species now why can it be dangerous to not be
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able to look Beyond who and what we are well as any macro historian like myself or any complex systems thinker or even any environmentalist will tell you human beings just simply don't exist in
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a vacuum we are an emergent property of billions of years of evolution we weren't here in the beginning we will not be here at the end
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and we clearly aren't the be-all and end-all of existence where the result as we know of single-celled organisms appearing on a rock in a spiral galaxy
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and not standing still at any evolutionary transition in history you could say well why not freeze it there isn't that enough how much is too much isn't it
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sort of ticking along just fine why do we need to add new stuff like multicellular life the emergence of sexual reproduction nervous systems
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spines brains all of these new additions the Cambrian explosion there was always a point where hypothetically you could say why not hit pause and we're at another one of those
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transitional moments today but if I asked you do you really think it would be better if we paused Evolution sometime before hominids emerged and the planet was only ever populated
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with microorganisms and plants would you say that it would be good overall that humans never evolved and never had the chance to do something wonderful and big and remarkable with
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these flawed yes but very unique and incredible and Powerful brains that we have if you leave plants alone for millions of years you're probably not going to get
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libraries self-awareness the richness of philosophy or the beauty of love yet in far less time humans have taken their self-awareness and discovered
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astonishing things like the workings of DNA they've looked into the cosmos they've discovered Concepts like what it might be like inside of a black hole we've built pyramids in the desert we've
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sent Rockets to other worlds there are those Among Us who were capable of doing things like painting the Mona Lisa and of course we can now store our Collective wisdom in ways that no other
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species can through storytelling writing and printing books and now we're storing information in the cloud what that amounts to is that we're giving rise we have already given rise
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to a global digital brain and that brain looks poised in this Century or not long after to take on a life of its own so you might say that we're kind of the
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means but not the end of this transition because no evolutionary phenomenon and humans by the way are an evolutionary phenomenon is an end
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obviously no organism wants to be superseded and give way to the next big thing but wouldn't we argue that at least in some respects we're an improvement on a
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bacterium a tree frog or a cockroach and surely it behooves us to entertain the possibility that a post-human form of intelligent life would think that they were an improvement on us
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and for all the Wonders that I've just cited about the human brain and the edifices that we've built if we think about the horrors past and present if we think about slavery and
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female genital mutilation and how badly we handled covert how much we failed to prepare for the big threats on the horizon how much we're still to this day dropping the ball on climate change
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the fact that we have myopia and tribalism built in to our brains and the design of what we are could we really say in good faith
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that they don't have a point the big picture perspective here is the Long View from modern science it's the evolutionary View and the thing is it's not either or I'm not here today as the resident
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technological Zealot who's trying to convert you to a card-carrying movement I'm not a part of a transhumanist movement I think the philosophy broadly speaking is really valuable because it helps us think about weird stuff that
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often we're afraid to think about but it doesn't follow that you can't think about post-human futures or take them seriously without having to sign up to this kind
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of ideological zealotry what this big picture really says is that this too shall pass and that doesn't preclude thinking very deeply about the things that are going wrong in the present and causing many of
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us grief I absolutely believe that in the short term and especially the next decade we need to get a lot better at humaning we need to shore up our institutions
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we need to rethink our education systems we need much more focus on raising kids to be connected strong communicators empathetic divorced as much as possible
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from this arms race of exams and credentialing and higher education and as well divorced from the brain drunk of smartphones and tablets I absolutely believe in fighting for
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this and fighting for the human world for as long as we're still human but I also wager that given what human beings are given that corruption and perverse
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incentives will win the day most of the time in this environment it makes sense as well to have one foot one foot in the human camp but another somewhere near that transhumanist camp
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as well I don't think it's necessarily bad that in the long run we end up seeding forms of digital intelligence that might be smarter than us this has happened before with our big
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brains we proved to be better adapted to life in the Holocene than many of our competitors with their new different and perhaps bigger brains the AIS of the future may prove themselves to be better adapted to
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life in this transhuman world that we're in now yes there is so much wrong that could go wrong in these transitional times and some of it already is there's a lot of
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good reason for anxiety foreign but I'm not a utopian I don't want to stand here wave my hands and say technology will make everything great again because it's going to make some things better and it's going to make some
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things worse but looking at the big picture I would rather some intelligence survives than none and it's not at all clear to me that humans can survive in this niche as we
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are unaugmented for much longer in an Ideal World I do think we probably would slow this transition down it's not clear to me that we definitely should but it's relatively clear to me that
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we're not going to because every incentive pulls Us in the other direction so my challenge to Mary and to the members of the audience who are sitting here thinking
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I really don't like it when I hear about this transhumanist stuff I want to get off the train I get that but where do you want to go and start
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and how do you propose that we get there thank you very much [Applause] many thanks Julie's and now for Mary for
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the the voice of anxiety um in this and a few words of caution welcome Eric [Applause]
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thank you Elise that was very interesting and very measured and very enlightening I hope you'd agree Elise broadly speaking with the working definition of
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transhumanism I'll offer here just very very succinctly a world view in which human nature has no special cultural or political status would you um and where it's not just legitimate but sometimes morally necessary to
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employ technology especially biotechnology to improve on that nature where it's appropriate would you say that's acceptable I've never heard it phrased in such a way um
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Loosely speaking yes okay so that's that we can we converge well enough on that okay and when we talk about transhumanism the Temptation is to depict it as an exciting or frightening possible future you know something which happens out
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there in the future or may come but in any case one that hasn't entirely happened yet but another point on which I think you and I both agree is that that's the wrong way of looking at it
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um in fact transhumanism is already here um I go actually further I think than Elise in saying it's so well established that there's arguably no point in having this debate you know congratulations Elise your side already won okay we can
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all go to the bar that's it we're done I'm joking of course there's lots to talk about loads to talk about not least what we can infer from how the transhumanist era is going so far
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to my eye this era began in the mid-20th century before you and I were born with a biomedical Innovation that radically changed what it is to be human in the human social order reproductive
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technology the pill was the first transhumanist technology it set out not to fix something that was wrong with normal human physiology you know in the ameliorative sense of medicine up to that point
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and instead it it introduced a whole new paradigm it set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom at one point Elise in in your book in your excellent well-written book which I encourage everybody to buy because it's
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got some very spicy takes in it and it's very very very well written um Elise notes that a vowed transhumanist women are rarer than men which is an interesting point
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um which is which I've I've wondered about as well and if I remember right you postulate that this is because men are typically you know systems thinkers are typically more prevalent among men than women I'm paraphrasing yeah is that
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okay yeah um I'd say on the contrary the reason transhumanist women seem rare is that they're so common they don't read as transhumanists nearly every adult woman in the developed world has implicitly accepted
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the belief that full adult female personhood is structurally reliant on technologies that interrupt normal female fertility and by the definition I opened with that makes nearly every adult woman in the
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developed World a transhumanist so how's the transhumanist era going well the pill was legalized in 1960 in America 1961 in Britain so we have more than six decades worth of data on how
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transhumanist practice in that context measures up to transhumanist Theory what I suggest we can infer from the story so far in that instance is that trying to re-engineer our physiology our
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nature if you will in the interests of Freedom progress or whatever other name you give I you you don't I realize you say you're not a utopian but that many utopians would give doesn't in fact
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deliver Utopia or rather it does kind of but it happens asymmetrically Utopia arrives asymmetrically depending on where you sit in the socioeconomic hierarchy and where technology is used to liberate
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us from the kind of Givens such as normal female fertility that were previously managed pragmatically by social or legal Norms what replaces it isn't a human person free from nature but a market in which that nature
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becomes a set of supply and demand problems in the case of sex the transhumanist pill Revolution didn't deliver as the feminist Schuler myth Firestone imagined a polymorphous liberation of human
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sexuality or it did kind of but under the sign of Commerce we got the so-called sexual Marketplace in which normative asymmetries in male and female mating preferences reappear
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in cartoon form as Market opportunities or a strategic weaknesses to be weaponized in a contest for personal gain or straightforwardly as Commodities to buy sell or exploit meanwhile if those at the top of the
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food chain are relatively well placed to thrive in this quote-unquote Marketplace those at the bottom impoverished racialized trafficked or otherwise vulnerable people specific particularly women are far more likely to become
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Commodities themselves I would argue further that the same logic will be likely to hold for any other embodied limit you destroy via biotech I predict that should we find a cure for
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Aging for example it won't be universally available it will be prohibitively expensive and it will serve primarily as a tool for further consolidating wealth and power among those who can access it perhaps it will require harvesting
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tissue from others the fertility industry already has a thriving market for gametes or indeed Reproductive quote-unquote Services also known as renting somebody's work but so far it's not rich well-connected
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people who sell themselves in this way who sell parts of their body research is already being done into blood transfusions as an anti-aging treatment and you can be sure that should it flourish it won't be rich people selling their plasma
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you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely Market marketize over greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new Vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation
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and it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well protected against such risks by moral safeguards at least not within a transhumanist paradigm because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the
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humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards you can't have transhumanism without throwing out humanism and by this I mean with the greatest respect the the the assertions that you've made some of
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which I would I would dispute or at least want to complicate Elise about the fact that we're nothing but cells which have become slightly more complicated by a series again I'm paraphrasingstances what that's quite a
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paraphrase okay well we're going to come back to this okay um but you can't throw out transhumanism you can't have transhumanism unless you throughout humanism and and here here I do quote directly from you you if people
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are just eight brained meat sacks oh and you're extraordinarily spicy phrase eight range meat sacks everybody Elise is a wonderful coiner of phrases and we're urgently in need of upgrading our
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eighth brain meat sat what possible reason could we have for objecting to a market in human organs or infanticide or genetically engineering the masses to be more docile all of these are only repellent when you hold them against a
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humanist anthropology so if you're assaulting that anthropology in the in the name of humanist values are grading us so for in in the name of compassion or kindness or Freedom or lives lived in Greater
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dignity I submit that the project is unlikely to work out the way you think so in some we're already well into the transhumanist era but the story so far suggests that far
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from delivering Utopia what it mostly delivers is a commodification of the human body that disproportionately benefits those who already have power and privilege I don't think we can put this back in
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its box in that again I agree with you but to my eye the proper response to this era is not stamping our foot on the accelerator but two-fold resistance and a two or perhaps even just a two-fold note of caution firstly in retaining a
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humanist anthropology in defiance of all those currently sawing away at the branch we're sitting on and secondly in mounting a vigorous defense of those without power now increasingly at the sharp end of
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biotech's unacknowledged glass politics thank you [Applause] thank you thank you so much Mary for
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that I think there's only one place we can really start there and it's got to be the ape brained meet sat um so I will allow at least to come back with some response to that
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um distillation of your view I'm sure there are more complexities there to be found so tell us a bit about how you respond to what Mary's just said do you feel that there can be no transhumanism unless we do away with humanism entirely
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I'm not sure because historically I I think if transhumanism as very much an outgrowth of Enlightenment humanism so you're taking this world view you know initially we've got this kind of religious humanism
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we're still kind of thinking about the the elevation of the human spirit this transitions into Enlightenment humanism where we're thinking about increasingly using Science and Technology but particularly education and cultural
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tools to draw out the better angels of our nature to bring out the best of what's inside us and to the extent that Mary is asking us to do that I'm totally on board with that as I say I think we
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do need to get better at humaning but I think we cannot turn a blind eye to all of the ways when I use a phrase like eight brained meat sack yes there is shock value in that but part of it is to
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try and bring us back to some of the things we're determined not to see about ourselves so there's a chapter in my book called what's so great about Humanity anyway and we all know that there's lots of
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things and I've cited many of those things in my opening talk but we're so much more reluctant to come to terms with the fact that a hundred thousand people die every single day from age-related causes
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the fact that we do slowly Decay and fall apart often much before we feel we've had enough time with our loved ones and particularly those of us who relish time spent in our minds and time
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spent learning there is never enough time to read all the books to learn and the tragedy of that I think is also that when people do die it is almost like I think a colleague of mine under Sandberg
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says that when somebody died the library Burns because all of that wisdom that they're carrying around in their minds that it took decades and decades to build up inside of them gets extinguished
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and I think there is something about this idea of we need to bring back those humanist values that is so tempting because I have spent most of my youth and most of
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my life championing those and and believing in those and I still do to some extent but the fact that when we're talking about the commodification of the body the fact that there is just this kind of
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uh naive perhaps capitalistic encroachment on parts of us that feel like they are dehumanizing I think Mary's right about that to the extent that that's not
00:32:17
putting words in your mouth um I really really worry about I agree that the contraceptive pill was an incredibly disruptive innovation I personally think it's insane that we're routinely put
00:32:30
teenagers on it that it's taken as a substance that is just so blindly accepted without really understanding and that's where I would push back against some of the framing with Mary as
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just this you know women are women are innately transhumanist partly I'm assuming there's a glibness there but um the idea that innately because women are sort of like
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great we love controlling our reproductive systems in this way what I really think is happening there is just Mass naivety I think the average person who gets a prescription from the pill for a doctor who barely has a 30 second
00:33:10
conversation with them before they prescribe it is not an Ardent champion of technology is not an Ardent believer in some kind of modern philosophy that's co-opted their
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minds that make someone to expunge their bodies they genuinely don't understand the trade-offs they genuinely are so detached from the sense of themselves as an embodied being that I do think we're moving further and
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further away from that but where I can't just sit in humanism where Mary sits is that when I talk about the eight brand meat sack the idea there is that
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there is this growing Chasm between our Paleolithic brains and what we're designed for and the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in we have changed our environment so rapidly
00:34:02
and so radically and we have not kept pace with that change so either we keep changing the environment or we change ourselves to fit the environment and I think the fact that
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we're consistently making these commodified decisions in which we do expunge more and more of our of our Humanity in favor of profit in favor of short-term decisions in favor of such
00:34:27
abysmal thinking when it comes to complex systems like the human body it is a testament to the fact that these brains are not built for this world we are not going to be adequate stewards of
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this system that is now so complex that to keep it held together you actually need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are so in your speech Mary you started by saying that it's kind of too
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late for us to roll back the clock here we're already in an age of transhumanism so if we take what Elisa's just said there how can we argue against adapting our kind of ape frames if if the system has already moved on without us well
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you're assuming that we can adapt or eight brains or you're assuming that I mean but that this this is assuming that we're going that we have the capability to do so in and to produce
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results which are predictably what we want to be um and I think where I started with the worked example of the pill is the first transhumanist technology was in order to suggest that the the theory and the
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practice or at least the the feminists the the various feminists who hailed this as a as a great innovation in human freedom and the the Futures that they envisaged off the back of this great Innovation are not exactly what we ended
00:35:44
up with and I would submit that were we to find ways of engineering our quote-unquote ape brains um what would all what what would be very likely to happen would not be um
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some some sort of putative human better equipped to deal with the complex world that we have it would instead be something more like um a cartoon very much very very much a
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repeat of what we've had with the pill which is to say you know on a I'm just skeptical that we can re-engineer our human nature I don't think it works like that I think I I think what happens when we try and emancipate ourselves from
00:36:21
Human Nature via technology is is that it just comes back in cartoon form by the market or it comes back in cartoon form via VIA some unexpected means in a sense we can't evade Our Fate you know there's a track and I think that that
00:36:34
fundamental I think to me there's a tragic quality to that which we just have to embrace and we have to lean into you know the sort of the The Human Condition is in the sense a tragic one and and trying trying to trying to argue
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our way out of that via technology you know is is hubris which you know as the Greeks would suggest to us you know from from a long time ago ends up with Nemesis we're too optimistic then is there too
00:37:00
much hope and Technology are we are we searching for that answer that Silver Bullet that's actually not there well I mean it's really enticing um you know that at the end of the day you know I'm as I'm as cyborg as they come I'm permanently Bluetooth to the
00:37:11
internet yeah I'm a fully paid up cyborg um I mean at least you say in your book that actually we've got a whole generation of young people who are already hybrid cyborgs they live half their life on the internet I mean Mary's someone who lives a lot of real life on
00:37:25
the internet you know there are many people who work on her who sit all day on the internet yes said to me earlier Mary get off the internet and I was like you cannot be serious
00:37:37
you know because I mean it's yeah you know so so in a sense you know when I say I I'm skeptical about being able to re-engine our human nature I don't I don't you know I just to re-emphasize I don't think we can put the cyborg error
00:37:50
back in the box I think that's where we are and it's where we've been for you know more than half a century um but I I am skeptical of this idea that we can escape our human nature I think that's a
00:38:01
that's that's a hubris that that that's the sort of hubris which and you know the ancient Greeks had had a very clear idea of where that ends up see I actually agree with you there's a wonderful C.S Lewis quote from A Treatise he wrote I think in the 50s
00:38:14
maybe the 40s called the abolition of man and he was really pushing back against the technomaliers of his age and he said one of the most beautiful lines from it is that man's conquest of nature is really in the end only Nature's
00:38:27
conquest of man yeah I think it's absolutely true but I think there's a distinction that I would make here in terms of the vision of us becoming cyborgs and
00:38:39
literally changing our brains I mean our brains are just ridiculously complex I don't discount the possibility that maybe Advanced Technologies in the future could map it
00:38:51
in incredibly precise ways and there could be things like brain up learning but I'm I am deeply skeptical of all that when I talk about a post-human future and I talk about the thing that evolves from Humanity it's not actually
00:39:03
us the people in this room coming along for the ride we get told that by transhumanist a lot and I think that's the wrong message it's not about you get to upload your brain and live forever stick your head
00:39:15
in a van of liquid nitrogen and will resurrect you in the Glorious future I agree with Mary skepticism there but I do think it is eminently plausible that from this Global digital brain we have
00:39:27
created we will build up artificial intelligence that is generally intelligent it's not going to think in the same ways as you or I because it doesn't have a brain but it's going to think and it's going to claim to have
00:39:40
feelings and it's going to claim to have personhood and it's going to resemble something we would recognize as personhood and it is eminently plausible that that thing goes on to be a Consciousness that explores the stars
00:39:52
that unravels the mysteries of the universe again never perfectly and never without unexpected things that go wrong as a result of all of that but something that goes on from Beyond us I do find Hope in
00:40:06
that even though I'm not going to be a part of that because as I say I would rather intelligent life persists to keep the torch of knowledge and Enlightenment alive then kind of sinking into this I'm
00:40:18
a digital cyborg it's coming for me there's nothing I can do but I'm angry about it that's this brings us on to the question of long-termism though doesn't it which is something a word that I don't think many
00:40:30
of us had heard before about three months ago and then suddenly we all found out about these people called the effect of altruists and figures like sandbankment freed and the disaster that happened there with this desire to
00:40:44
create long-term solutions to massive Global problems of inequity climate change whatever you want to call it and I suppose the question there is does
00:40:56
that come at a huge material cost to the people who live now and and what would that cost be and and what could the the risks of that long-term thinking be for people who have to live in this moment
00:41:08
where we are I suppose what I would say to that there's something my dad always used to say if I was going to Dublin I wouldn't start from here but by that I mean
00:41:23
um I don't know that we can assume that some point A Thousand Years in the future is going to have the same moral political economic or social priorities
00:41:36
as we do it's very very clear you know even the most rudimentary grasp of history or literature ought to make it clear that people a thousand years ago didn't have the didn't have the same priorities as us now and if you can you can frame that difference as progress in
00:41:49
our favor or as decline in their favor As You Wish um but it's it's very clear that Consciousness you've evolved it's clear enough to me that Consciousness and culture evolves over time you know and there are there are threads of continuity and that's I think something
00:42:02
that you and I both have in common is tracing some of those lines but but it's very clear that what how people think about what's important um changes tremendously over over even a century
00:42:13
um let alone over a thousand years so I I question the hubris of any movement which claims to have a have any kind of cohere any any kind of handle
00:42:25
on on what might matter in 25 000 years time you know I I just don't see how you can do that it's it's absurd I suppose which brings us on to the moment we're in which is a very strange mixed World a hybrid world you might say where we have
00:42:39
some people who do have access through Capital um and immense amounts of privilege to these kind of transhumanist developments many many the most who don't and then we
00:42:51
also have large amounts of people who are living in a way that uh transhumanist in 500 years might think as as almost medieval um with extremely strong religious beliefs and traditional Lifestyles so
00:43:04
how do we kind of make sense of this mixed World perhaps we are leading into a completely cyborgian future but we have to live right now where we are what happens to the idea for example of the
00:43:15
human soul dare I say it in a world that's starting to transition into this kind of techno future short answer is we don't know but it seems like in the short term there is some degradation of how much weight we
00:43:31
place on if you will spiritual fulfillment and connection I think some of that is slipping in our world and to our detriment and that we do need to bring that back
00:43:43
um in terms of inequality though I think we are very good at honing in on the ways in which the world remains imperfect and there are ways in which it is egregiously unfair today
00:43:57
but we discount the fact that so many of the gains of the last 100 to 250 years have been enabled by the Industrial Revolution have been enabled by harnessing the hubris of harnessing
00:44:11
fossil fuels harnessing more energy from the environment allowing us to agglomerate in cities which when you do this when you collect all of people in a room like this you're actually creating a more powerful hive
00:44:24
mind by bringing intelligence together so that it can share ideas at closer range and it can innovate faster and through that for all the trade-offs which are undeniable there's many
00:44:37
negatives that have come from that we're very quick to Discount when we talk about future biomedicine very quick to Discount things like polio vaccines and the virtual eradication of that disease along with smallpox of the fact
00:44:49
that we have got so many infectious diseases under control we struggle with the big Killers like cancer and heart disease at the moment those are sort of like the biggest Global threats
00:45:02
um but through basic Innovations through Modern Sanitation through better housing all of which the Industrial Revolution enabled we have lifted so many people out of poverty and yes we created new
00:45:15
tears of poverty but overall fewer people are living in abject poverty today than in the past we have the higher average global life expectancies child mortality is
00:45:29
plummeted the fact that you can give birth by cesarean section rather than in the case of my mother giving birth to a dead child which is what would have happened to me because my umbilical cord was wrapped twice around my neck the
00:45:43
fact that technology can intervene and bring us so many of these Spoils of modernity that we readily take for granted I don't know where there's obviously attention but I don't know
00:45:57
at what point you say we want to hit pause or indeed we want to go backwards again the challenge sort of remains like we agree we're barreling on this trajectory if we're not
00:46:10
going to get off it then we need to think about how we manage it as well as possible and that means we need to think about how AI becomes a healthy part of our world or indeed if it can cut it can we co-exist with AI is that
00:46:24
or should we be pulling the brakes well we already are coexisting with AI you know we've all been training the Google search algorithm for 20 years I mean I've had a gym I've been personally training the Google search algorithm through my by letting it scrape my email
00:46:37
account for 20 years you know we're we're doing that um you know whether it's a healthy thing or not I think it's quite a complicated question we'll probably be here for a whole other evening yeah um for the soul here I mean you know we
00:46:52
talk about the idea that we can maximize the length of life and you speak you spoke a bit about the library that burns when someone dies I mean you know you could just replace the word library with the word soul and what you'd have there
00:47:05
as an idea that there is something ineffable about the human spirit that that leaves but is a longer life always a better life and and you know where should we kind of draw that line I'm I'm unconvinced that a longer life is always a special life
00:47:18
um I I don't I don't see why that's self-evident um I think about my grandmother who was a doctor and a farmer um and among and a mother among many other things over the course of her 97
00:47:31
year life um so you know and having been all of those things she had a very pragmatic um grounded view of what what should be done and when and I remember witnessing her living will that she wrote when she
00:47:44
was when she was in the care home and that went through you know scenario after scenario what she wanted under what circumstances you know do I want to be resuscitated if I'm injured in this way or that way and you know it was it was not a it was not a fun afternoon put
00:47:56
it that way um and by the end she needed us she needed a Sherry or two because she was looking a bit green around the girls but but it was also a blessing because later she developed dementia and she fell out of bed and she broke her finger and had
00:48:09
she been taken to the hospital as the ambulance which they were obliged to call wanted to do um she probably would have died confused and miserable in hospital as it was should they the the nursing home cared for her they splinted her finger and she
00:48:22
was fine um and when when she when she died she but she made it very clear that she wanted to go she didn't want to be artificially kept Alive by a thousand and one different means she was when she
00:48:33
wanted when she went she wanted to go um and she wanted awake we we sat we sat with her body in my mom's front room in the middle of a heat wave with ice packs around it for three days and watched with her in the old-fashioned way
00:48:46
um because that was what she wanted um and that that memory I Was preparing for my wedding at the time I was making wedding favors at the table while with with Grandma in her coffin in the Next Room it was a very strange time
00:48:57
um and that the proximity of um a new a new phase of my life with the death of my grandmother and my sense that she was with us in that she was very present it felt to me it was an extraordinarily Rich
00:49:11
um very strange intense time um but it in a sense it was her last gift um and I'm not I don't see that her
00:49:23
having her life having come to an end was in in any in any way diminished the life that she had and I'm not sure that trying to prolong it in the way that she very clearly didn't want it
00:49:36
prolonged um would have would have been in any way better I mean it does a huge amount more that we could say about about the the attempt to prolong life infinitely but I suppose I think about the you know the the kind
00:49:49
of the the low-level War the low-level intergenerational Warfare which is a foot in pretty much every developed world country over property ownership um and the cost of living um which is you know again and again and
00:50:03
again skewed in favor of the generation which benefited from the post-war economic boom um in in you know in in its totality perhaps argues against the idea that we should allow a privileged class to
00:50:15
prolong their lives indefinitely you know I just see I I see I I see the war between the the Zoomers and the Boomers on steroids you know globalized and I don't like I don't like that picture or the Boomers who might live forever right
00:50:28
you know that subset of Boomers who could afford to live Ultra Boomer yeah exactly the the sort of Maxi Boomer let's move on to something that you both spoke about a little bit there and
00:50:42
something that I think is quite interesting considering that you did say at least that there aren't many male uh female transhumanists who know and yet we are three women I assume here on the
00:50:53
stage perhaps wrongly there you go and there is a big question here about women's rights uh the role of women in a transhuman world and of course the the
00:51:05
thing that comes to mind is the idea of artificial wounds surrogacy you spoke a little about the um basically the abuse of of the poor in this kind of surrogacy trade well surely
00:51:18
I I suggest to you and perhaps at least you would agree that an artificial womb might be the cure for that um particular issue which is the manipulation of those with with less
00:51:30
material means um in in that kind of particular industry so let's talk a little bit about that um artificial room surrogacy how how does that kind of fit into this puzzle I suppose first thing I should say about
00:51:43
this is that once upon a time really yeah some when I was in my 20s I used to have recurring nightmares about accidental pregnancy it was I was that terrified um no I would literally wake up in a cold sweat because I dreamed that I
00:51:56
become I'm unwantedly pregnant with somebody who I didn't really love um it's a yeah and the the the idea terrified me at a visceral level the idea of losing control of my physiology and then being left with this sort of
00:52:09
18-year commitment to an uh a dependent creature it was terrifying um I don't I don't blame all of those women young I mean I'm knocking on a bit now but you're women younger than me who
00:52:22
are still at Peak fertility who who don't want who who view that as a nightmare scenario I have immense sympathy with every single one of them because I I know what that feels like um and from that perspective I
00:52:33
understand why it might feel immensely appealing to be able to just push all of that away into into a machine and say well actually we just don't have to deal with any of that at all because now we can just you know we
00:52:46
can press a button and the zygote will turn into a fully you know and then you can get out get it out of the packet in nine months and boom you know job done great um what I would say in response to that
00:52:58
I mean like I'm not going to drone on about this but I mean I'll just say about the experience of pregnancy it was very different to what I expected in the end I mean you know the downsides I nearly died my so did my daughter
00:53:10
um right exactly you know and if you know if we're talking about technological advances which I really wouldn't want to do without modern obstetrics is pretty near the top of the list um for very personal reasons
00:53:24
um but um gestation rewires your brain in fundamental ways um you it rewire it primes you for caretaking as a as a mother in a way
00:53:36
which is far more visceral and far it's it's pre-rational it's it's immensely transformative experience and it's permanent you know once you've been rewired for mummy brain you'd never really go back
00:53:49
um and that from the point of view of raising a child that matters um because when after a baby is born it's you know as winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone
00:54:00
there's a a baby doesn't exist as an independent entity until it's some years some years into its life arguably quite a few years into its life um and what I would say about artificial wounds is that you may be you may think
00:54:13
that what you're doing is creating a baby without the misery of gestation but what you're doing in practice is creating a baby without creating a mother because a pregnancy doesn't just create a baby it also creates a mother
00:54:24
and for the subsequent healthy beneficial you know well well regulated development of the baby that's as important as create as just dating the baby so that would be my that would be my note of caution about artificial in
00:54:38
your book release you have a whole chapter dedicated to the idea of no more babies which is a really scary thing for a lot of people to read but it kind of explain it to me a bit yes it for the record it's not a polemic where I'm
00:54:49
actually saying no one must have babies but yeah I really think artificial rooms is a red herring albeit a really interesting one because it challenges us to think about bioethical questions that
00:55:01
are relevant beyond that it kind of challenges us to think about where our values lie uh the decisions that we would make the things that we want to prioritize um but do I think we're ever going to replace surrogacy and live in a world
00:55:14
where like armies of women are just having babies via artificial worm technology no I don't think that's ever going to happen and I think the reason is not because we're not going to allow
00:55:26
it uh it is quite possible that this technology again it's that sort of last ten percent the first 90 is easy and then the last 10 the placenta is hard to master there are all these other
00:55:38
technological challenges but I also think Mary's dead right about all of the rest of it I think there are so many ways in which if we just preserved the world Circa 2022 this Paradigm remains
00:55:49
we're just living this kind of within this society and culture that we know and that's how children are coming into the world I think that would be horrendous it would be truly truly terrible so how do we resist it then if we're
00:56:02
kind of barreling towards this transhuman future and there are these different strands of transhumanism one of which is this kind of urge towards a future woman whether that's kind of sex
00:56:13
robots or surrogate surrogate wounds that exist outside of the body how do we pick and choose then which of these parts of this future we we do and don't like we're not going to so the way that history works is usually that far more
00:56:27
than any kind of King peasant great actor great man or woman we like to sort of think when we think about transhumanism it's like the Jeff bezos's and Elon Musk and the people in power they're driving this whole train they might like to think that they are
00:56:40
but they're just not they're the Pawns of larger evolutionary forces there's a reason that the the richest people on the planet in 1901 weren't sending Rockets to space weren't
00:56:53
getting involved in life extension companies and parobiosis the flood transfusion stuff wasn't possible and okay they might be vehement champions of it but there's an auto catalytic quality to this stuff it
00:57:06
evolves in feedback loops where almost where the Pawns of evolution we are like the the blind minions of natural selection just not being able to not eat the marshmallow kind of thing it's there
00:57:18
and we're going to eat it but in terms of like does that mean every technology that is theoretically possible is going to be both invented and implemented and rolled out and loved no and the reason I think
00:57:32
artificial wombs won't is because they will be leapfrogged by other Technologies I think that AI is going to potentially evolve so fast certainly faster than any tweaks
00:57:44
we could make to a biological meat sack if you will that it's going to become redundant there's just going to be a far deeper interpenetration of the internet in this like Circa 2022 scrolling and tapping
00:57:58
and liking and getting a little dopamine feed that's only like 10 years old the idea that in 10 years you're still going to be doing that it's going to go deeper there's going to
00:58:10
be new iterations of social media we will spend more and more time in what I call in the book Soma land which sounds very dystopian where we are kind of sinking into this
00:58:22
trend of being anesthetized by our own Technologies and Outsourcing a lot of cognition to this larger system and so I think in the short term it's the idea there's this big idea that's really important here is
00:58:35
that the wet in a transitional moment it's the same as being like a kid in the industrial revolution in a factory or a mine you are kind of the collateral damage of history and you feel that this
00:58:48
is but if you zoom out the overall Arc of benefit and progress that can be conferred by these transitions can be so massive but in the moment you're kind of stuck
00:59:01
in the tiny slice of time where we're still thinking about what policies do we have this year and what decisions are we making for the next couple of years and we do need to think about all of
00:59:13
that but I really think it's a message that no one wants to hear but I really think overall we're going somewhere different and we don't know what it's going to look like because it's kind of an event horizon you just hit this moment where
00:59:26
there's so much technological change it's so novel it's nothing our eight brains have ever seen before and the consequences are gonna be wildly varying and unexpected
00:59:38
but the idea that we're just going to sort of uh yeah I suppose like the idea that we're sort of still in this current moment of time where all we can do is
00:59:52
sort of think about this timeline of 10 or 20 years as if the world we inhabit today is still going to be there in 10 or 20 years I don't think it is going to be there no guarantees but for the first time in
01:00:05
history there is a chance that you're going to wake up in a new world in 10 or 20 years time you've already woken up into a new world from the one you were born in and there's nothing there's no evidence at this point in time that that
01:00:16
trajectory is going to get knocked off course is there something kind of stoically moral or virtuous then in letting the tide flow and flowing with it rather than trying to turn yourself
01:00:28
against it good Lord no no no no never Flow with it's like you have to have a mind that is able to conceive of things on two scales when you flow with it you succumb to this
01:00:42
idea of endless relativism nothing matters why do I even bother with my my life in the here and now and no I think we should bother with our lives in the here and now I think we should care
01:00:54
about the way we bring children into the world the ways we raise them the ways that we educate them the ways that we treat each other and still try to create environments as best we can so that we
01:01:06
can be healthy thriving happy loving human beings but I think you need to have one eye on the future where you're kind of prepared for the fact that at some point
01:01:18
before your life is over there might be something that just feels like a huge rug pull where you just kind of fall flat on your feet you're like what was that I have no I'm dizzy I'm disoriented I don't know what's Just Happening
01:01:32
and having some kind of reference point for a future that is just going to be destabilizing I think can be an Anodyne against Future Shock at least there's
01:01:43
this psychological preparation for I can really care about things in the present but I'm not making these 20 30 40 50 year plans where I just expect that the life arcs of the 20th century are going
01:01:58
to play them out in the same Rhythm so Mary just to kind of conclude there how what's the argument the kind of practical argument against bracing ourselves for Future Shock I don't think there's a practical argument is there
01:02:10
anything we can do well I mean listening to you at least I I suppose what what I I was actually thinking yes I I kind of agree with you in the sense that I think if there's something that we really do like fundamentally we both
01:02:24
have in common um it's an interest in Big Picture systems and also a kind of millenarian streak I mean I'm listening to you I'm like this is just the Rapture but without a spiritual world right that's what you're
01:02:36
talking about no no this is going to be good right but you know it's not the cerebral but it's the Rapture you know it's our Rapture anyway is it kind of yeah you know it's a sort of sort of upload to an unimaginable
01:02:49
kind of you know no not upload something else some some sort of we pass over an event horizon into some unimaginable I'm not saying you pass with it [Music]
01:03:07
we have the same millinarian streak in that I look at the future and I 100 agree with you that extrapolating out from the 20th century in the early 21st century is just as for the birds you know we are clearly heading you know
01:03:19
this it can't go on you know whether you look at whether you look at the extractive way we we relate to the natural world or you know the rate of the rate of Extinction of species worldwide or the rate of pollution into
01:03:30
the oceans I mean this idea that we can have infinite growth as David Attenborough put it on a finite planet is obviously nonsense you know something has got to change and where where we are as you say accelerating towards some
01:03:42
kind of adventurous I mean my in my in my sort of more gloomy slash optimistic moments I think we'll probably we'll end up with some kind of a Consciousness overhaul um whether that whether that involves
01:03:55
you know transition to some sort of superhuman AI or whether it involves the transit position to a different kind of Consciousness such such as such that we'll look back and think how on Earth could we have ever seen things in such
01:04:06
crude mechanistic terms I don't know you know because we're not there yet but but it's coming because things can't go on you know whether we get there via climate apocalypse or whether we get there via AI Rapture is is just you know
01:04:18
that's to be to be Co suppose yeah and that's what I really want to know then is how what's your prescription for how to live in the meantime oh honestly um I mean it depends it depends a lot on
01:04:32
scale um I mean you now right if you just think about us in this room we all have a kind of similar existence day to day how do we oh the personal scale um I think there's I I would make the
01:04:46
strongest possible case for remaining grounded and remaining human as much as possible you know maintaining some an intentional resistance against being absorbed into what you call Summerland
01:04:58
which you know even if that's just an hour a day wait that you spend doing something that's arduous enough that you can't squirrel at the same time I mean for me that's long distance running but different people have different um different things that they do you
01:05:11
know we have a very clear rule at home about screens at the table while we're eating you know these are these are small things but cumulatively they make a difference in terms of how mindfully you you integrate technology into your own life
01:05:23
um so so at the micro scale you know that's a that's a start maybe it's time to rehabilitate wokeness you know it's a way wake up from somalanders maybe that New Movement Euro right um and at the macro scale I mean there
01:05:36
are you know there are lots of different you know there's the there's the sort of DeVos idea that you know we can we can roll out a kind of top-down plan for terraforming humans such that we can all Coexist on this finite planet and we'll
01:05:48
all live in the Pod and eat bugs and that'll be great or I don't know what whatever it is that they're proposing but it's yeah so so there's that or you know there's the there's the Doomer optimists who think you know we're it's all going to go to but you know if you you collapse now and avoid the rush
01:06:01
and there's those guys yeah on that cherry note I think we will turn to some questions I want to hear from the room um I'm sure you have been reverberating with ideas so um I've got Robert at the
01:06:14
back there with a microphone please wait until the microphone is with you before you start speaking and please please please I pray that you will ask a question because we love questions here something that would end in a question
01:06:26
mark should you write it down um just over here in the black so sorry just at the front at the front here yeah thank you um hello hi um my name's Rosie K I'm a
01:06:37
choreographer and dancer and the new de Cartier sort of idea of chopping off the brain of the body deeply upsets me and I feel sad that that the particularly dance as an art form hasn't kind of
01:06:51
translated itself to show the opportunities of how the body can help inform the mind and and can be a dialogue between the two that's not my question um my question is around um I I've worked with the military for
01:07:04
about 15 years and I have friends that uh have benefited from uh advances in medical Technologies having lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan and
01:07:18
um my friend Harry Parker writing Captain talks about being a hybrid human rather than a sort of transhuman um an mod paper came out um I think it was 2010 I can't remember
01:07:30
the title but it was around the idea of the Future Soldier or the augmented Soldier and I think that's a really interesting front line of where this technology is is going to be tested and going to be used and the Army sort of accepts that that while driving
01:07:42
technologies have advanced to like strawberry degrees you still need an actual human on the ground and it talks through technologies that range from uh just sort of diet and data collection to
01:07:54
the use of drugs to it has an augmented Soldier aspect where it talks about like soldiers that can see in the dark or that won't need sleep or even in the future where information that's coming to a live human could immediately get
01:08:07
transferred to a base somewhere else so that the generals can see exactly what's happening through a real life human now we've already got issues around veterans being integrated back into society following Warfare
01:08:20
um that still exists sadly but it does still exist um one of the ethical questions the mod paper raises is how what do you do with a decommissioned cyborg or augmented Soldier one of the ethical implications
01:08:32
for that um do you take that technology out of them when they've got used to it or how on Earth do they adapt to life back as back into society or are they just Obsolete and I wanted if you talk about
01:08:45
that that part of the transhuman Soldier how do we rehabilitate the super soldiers when they come back from the field Jesus I didn't I didn't realize obviously the prosthetic limbs is something that's um you know talked
01:08:58
about a lot and that would be something to replace body parts that were lost in Warfare but I this concept of adaptations that are permanent in a
01:09:11
non-integrative sense is kind of new to me uh are you talking about sort of like things to do with vision that is yeah okay that sort of thing um yeah honestly like I I haven't sat
01:09:23
with this or thought about it um it it strikes me as an issue that clearly affects a very small niche of the population which doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about it or think
01:09:35
carefully about it but I imagine that the military is is the best cluster of people to think about them because they engineer the Technologies they actually know how the the training and the
01:09:46
systems of soldiers works and I imagine they have protocols already for maybe not the best protocols but of reintegrating soldiers back into society so it kind of it opens up this broader
01:09:58
question than of um yeah I suppose our forms of social welfare and caring for people in general um
01:10:13
yeah I I need to think about that more I don't have a great answer for you but it's it's fascinating thank you for raising it great can we have another hand um can I have one up here at the front gentleman at
01:10:26
the front thanks Robert yep that's great thank you hi um the discussion was making me think about uh Nita's idea that Christianity was kind of slave morality that sought
01:10:39
to sort of make a virtue of how week one was in order to kind of Shame the strong into being as weak as you are and shame them into being kind of equal with you uh is there anything to stop the transhuman just reveling in its own
01:10:51
strength will it be impervious to shame in that way no I don't think so I think there is Will To Power in transhumanism undeniably and it is worth saying that I think the phenomenon that all of us in
01:11:04
the room need to integrate into our map of reality is the one Mary has already sort of Taken on board which is that we're in this transhuman era that we are in this world of cyborg Technologies
01:11:16
transhumanism as a social movement as an ideology as a group of people that sort of cluster together and sort of proselytize from on high I'm fairly skeptical about that it's the
01:11:29
movements themselves never became hugely influential or powerful under the banner of their movements what I think really happened there is that they slipped the net of organizations like Humanity plus and the world transhumanist Association
01:11:41
and they kind of got spontaneously generated in the minds of lots of people who were sort of in that sort of rationalist big Tech world at the helm of a lot of those companies is there a Will To Power there and is technology
01:11:54
used as a vehicle to agglomerate power and are there blind spots where there is a propensity to dehumanize others under these times perhaps grandiose visions of where
01:12:08
we need to steamroll through to get to in the end yeah totally and I think it's it's quite possible to spend narratives where you do feel like that's that's a rich person that's a very clever person and they're
01:12:20
telling me this is great um I must be some kind of if I'm not getting it I might be some kind of trump uh well the ultimately the other thing you can think is that those people are in fact do not have your best interests at heart which is merely
01:12:33
leading on to something you said about Davos and Schwab and kind of what's happening now which is a group of people at the world economic forum who make big decisions about the way that we will all live and do you think if we if we take
01:12:47
that as one option which is you look at these people and you think oh I just am simply uninformed and that they know better than I there's an alternative which is that these people are in fact you know malign actors and that we
01:13:01
should kind of resist that and there is a massive kind of some people call it conspiracy movement against that kind of uh One World Government I idea do you have a sense that that's going to only
01:13:12
increase in the transhuman age I would say that um it's very rare that anybody sits sets out to be evil
01:13:24
um nobody you know so it's a great many historical atrocities have been committed by people who in the name of the greater good um yeah I I don't think I need to enumerate
01:13:37
there have been a great many of them um and I think if we take for ourselves whether under a sort of nietzschean rejection of slave morality or simply
01:13:50
because we can because it's there the power to remodel humans um there's no there's no question that especially if we abandon the humanist anthropology that says there is such a
01:14:03
thing as human nature and in fact this is a worthwhile thing that that we should embrace um there'll be people who say for the greater good um we should re-engineer humans not to
01:14:15
be better or smarter or or you know for for individual status or any of the other reasons but because we need to do something with all of the useless eaters I remember there was a bioethicist which is always a term that raises that makes
01:14:28
me nervous of bioethicist a few years ago argued that we should genetically engineer humans to be smaller or perhaps allergic to meat because that was a great way of um you know reducing carbon emissions
01:14:42
um you know from from this perspective I see no no obvious robust reason why we shouldn't genetically engineer all the useless eaters to be um does to be more docile to be less
01:14:55
intelligent perhaps um to be or or just to be sterile I mean you know you know let's go back to some of the some of the original
01:15:07
um eugenic Visions you know if we're going to talk about Progressive re-engineering of the human body you know like let's let's not forget that you know there have been there have been some worked examples on this before indeed the First transhumanist
01:15:19
Technology came straightforwardly out of the Progressive eugenicist Movement you know the original intent was to stop idiots um I mean the I'm not going to repeat the the appalling language used by figures such as Margaret Sanger or Mary
01:15:33
Stokes but the the in essence the idea was to stop degenerates from breeding and thereby to to improve the the genetic stock of the human race I mean this is you know it's the the the more
01:15:46
Technologies you have where by which you can attempt to do this the more the the more tempting it's going to be to do it um and unless you have a unless you have some kind of an anthropology
01:15:58
or some some kind of a consensus about what humans are um it's it's not clear to me that in fact you can mount any sort of credible defense against that at all um and I I have deep concern about about where
01:16:11
that takes us very quickly right but that's a case in point about eight brains right that when given all these levers of a complex system we routinely pull the wrong ones in the wrong ways with the best of justifications and
01:16:24
intentions it shows us that we we've kind of agreed that we're at this Tipping Point in history where there is so much complexity that needs to be managed and we don't have the brains that are fit to manage it we are the
01:16:37
wrong stewards to keep things ticking over in a world that is sustainable for the Long Haul but logically but based on what but what you're saying is that you know we can't possibly find the right button to press because of our eight
01:16:50
brains and so therefore we should find the right button to press in our eight brains in order to make that better but but surely by your logic if we if we're if we're root if we're guaranteed to pull the wrong lever we're going to end up pulling the wrong lever in the process of trying to ameliorate
01:17:02
ourselves what we're going to do is pull lots of levers and many of them are going to be the wrong ones okay this we agree yeah oh my God yes the result like again us just as the blind
01:17:15
minions of evolution more technology is going to evolve it's almost this is where the the Hail Mary comes in it's like it's almost just we kind of hope that what emerges out of the ashes of the old order that what
01:17:28
emerges from some of the Ace II systems that we've seeded you know blindly we don't understand them they're really confusing to us is that that goes on to evolve in a direction that might seed sustainable intelligence pick you up on
01:17:40
the blind millions of evolution because actually I can test that I can test the idea that there's anything blind or or stupid about Evolution I mean if we're going to talk about an immensely complex
01:17:51
adaptive system which incredibly sensitive to you know prevailing conditions in any given environment um and you know and that evolves over time you know in dialogue with an infant
01:18:05
even countless other factors and systems and material conditions and in our case cultural conditions Etc and so on and the IDE the idea of talking of describing that as something which is
01:18:17
blind or clumsy or incompetent just seems it seems to me mistaken oh and competent no so it's brilliant from a human standpoint it's blind in the sense that evolution is not conscious and so the blind watchmaker from Richard
01:18:30
dawkins's argument paley's watch like so complex a clock must have been designed by a great God in the sky designer no it's designed by a force that doesn't possess Consciousness that nevertheless
01:18:42
is selecting in a way that what a human brain would I mean you're assuming it doesn't possess Consciousness I mean we we can't establish I mean I've I said we wouldn't get into metaphysics but just to finish that thought yeah
01:18:55
um about Evolution you know it's just just to just to you know if we're going to talk about confronting ideas you know one possibly confronting idea is that in fact the entire kind of techno-optimist transhumanist trajectory is the
01:19:07
evolutionary blind alley and the fact that we're going to end up destroying ourselves and going up in a mushroom cloud or whatever is in fact The evolutionary feedback which will set us on the POS on the on the better future trajectory
01:19:20
I mean the question started with nature and we end with that so he would have been proud all right um let's go for someone at the back at the right at the back of the left thank you
01:19:35
uh hi um this um period of of exponential technological growth that we have described since like the mid 20th century up until now
01:19:47
um has partly been fueled by an equally rapid um uh population growth um and all the attendant brain power that comes with that and that's kind of really
01:20:00
springboarded this age of globalization that we all kind of now slightly take for granted um but if you look at you know birth rates are falling across the
01:20:12
uh developed world particularly in what I think is still the world's main manufacturing center uh uh China which is kind of on the verge
01:20:25
of uh an imminent and fairly severe population decline um uh there's certain sort of like um Global forecasters do you think we're
01:20:37
we're kind of at the tail end of this age of globalization and we're kind of going to transition into um economies which are more localized and realities that are more uh are more
01:20:50
localized uh so kind of we've talked about how it's too late to put this old transhumanist surge back in its box but is there a chance that those developments and the kind of world
01:21:02
that we could see in 50 or 60 years could uh for now at least put it back in the Box uh for us no um so what we're seeing almost with the the depopulation trend which is
01:21:14
absolutely true it is more than half the countries around the world have below replacement fertility rates so fertility rate means the average number of children born to a woman in her reproductive lifetime so we need a
01:21:26
replacement rate above two because one to replace mum one to replace dad not all children live to reproductive maturity so two 2.1 that's kind of The Benchmark all of the western developed
01:21:38
countries are below that Benchmark so is China so is Taiwan so is India and on and on that's kind of the trajectory around the world what this what this poses is a conundrum is almost
01:21:51
a state I think of likely technological lock-in where because we are compelled to eke out through incentives ever more economic growth or at least to
01:22:03
try and sustain some growth we don't have enough people to do all the jobs to pay into the tax system to keep that ticking along we need more machines and China is I think per capita
01:22:14
owns the most industrial robots of Any Nation um so yeah what you're talking about sort of like maybe bringing more manufacturing and stuff on Shore that seems likely for the world to then
01:22:27
siloise and localize I think that seems very unlikely um you know there's certainly political Trends in that direction where people are wanting more sovereignty over you know smaller realms
01:22:40
but we are so locked in to a global system that is so interdependent on each other um and yeah those declining fertility rates really to me portend a future in which In Spite of Ourselves Without
01:22:53
Really consciously realizing we're doing it we end up just out of short-term necessity not thinking of anything transhuman just thinking about how we balance a budget this year investing in
01:23:06
the military military is one of the biggest investors of tech r d more and more machines that do more and more advanced things that suddenly we realize we can do use for all sorts of things that human labor was once used for and
01:23:18
then that becomes very socially destabilizing which is a whole other Minefield but I'm Keen to hear what Mary has to say uh I I agree that's possible I mean if you look at Japan it's kind of that's
01:23:30
kind of the picture there already I mean they have you know robots in Care Homes and you know all sorts of deeply dystopian um one might say um attempts to automate out things which
01:23:42
it's not really intuitively which are not really intuitively automatable um as a I suppose I mean one way of one way of looking at popular the population crash in the fertility crash which is
01:23:54
measurable and everywhere um is it's more evolutionary feedback um it's it's a a clear signal that whatever it is that we're doing is just wrong um you know we're we're not we're not
01:24:07
flourishing we're not thriving you know we're not making more of ourselves um and this is this is clear evolutionary feedback and you know perhaps the human population will start growing again once we you know innovate
01:24:18
our way or in in in some way find find our way culturally out of the dead end which increasingly I think we're in you know and and within which it seems like the
01:24:32
only the only possible fix is more more of the same more of the same solution which seems to be bringing up dragging us into this dead end in the first place I mean if I mean from from where I'm sitting I mean and from to an extent
01:24:44
personal experience and personal reflection it seems to me that the reason people are not having kids isn't because it's not because of the housing crisis but it's fundamentally because people they just don't want to um you know people just aren't up for it
01:24:55
because you know we've reached a level of atomization where where it's still I mean it is it's hard you know I talked to I talk to other moms at the school gate and it's just a slog um it's very lonely yeah I went on I went on holiday I took my daughter away
01:25:08
over the summer my husband was busy he was working I took her camping for a few days and we happened to coincide on the campsite with a big group all the time all of all the kids about the same age as Arts who all get together every summer and for a couple of days it was
01:25:20
just so easy because we just created The Village um in around and there was a feral horde of kids that ran around and they all had water fights and it was like I remember in my childhood and it's just not like that anymore ever and that's just it's
01:25:32
Grim on a day-to-day basis everything is effort um and and no wonder nobody's having any kids because it's just it's effort we've been we've been offered a easier augmented lives it makes me think of how
01:25:45
in Japan they have to give kind of government subsidies bonuses to young men to come out of their flats and engage in The Wider world because they literally have a whole kind of passes of people who are effectively locking you
01:25:57
know I mean if we're talking about if we're talking about evolutionary feedback you know a culture and a system which is actively antenatalist is going to you know they if you if you if you extrapolate that out over the long term
01:26:08
you know it's just not a culture which is destined to survive and I think it almost doesn't matter how much technology you employ you know we're either going to accelerate out into releases fugitive um post-human future or the culture is
01:26:20
just going to go put and we'll end up with something different in its place possibly um possibly with some dim memories of the culture that went before and possibly perpetuated by whoever it is who figures out how to escape the
01:26:32
Skinner machine and and buck the trend for for low for antenatalism um or possibly both I don't know maybe we'll end up with a weird little Eli up at the top who's sort of who've who've
01:26:46
fused themselves with cats or Lizards or turned themselves into tentacle kind of like you've got another career in motivational speaking all right let's take a let's take another question
01:26:57
right into the front here thank you thanks Robert I just wondered what Mary and Elisa um have to say about religion I mean you both talked about need for a change in
01:27:12
Consciousness to avert one form of disaster or another whether it's to to accept the limitations of technology or to expand our technological imagination
01:27:24
but it's all a very secular discussion and I'd like to know whether you think um religious uh belief has any part to
01:27:36
play in um making making the world better I mean you couldn't have had this kind of discussion 50 or 100 years ago um in purely secular terms it wouldn't
01:27:48
have been possible now um you avoid it whenever you can I've been I've avoided the the religious Faith thing deliberately so far um because it's it's just kind of worms as you say
01:28:01
um the only thing I will say about it is that pretty much the only people left who are still having kids are people of faith and you know if you want to talk about evolutionary feedback I think there's possibly there's possibly something there over to your Elise yeah
01:28:14
I mean on the note of evolutionary feedback I mean Galaxy brain version of that is that Evolution's found a new replicator so there is you would see this almost if you visualize history this series of s-curves right so these
01:28:28
like exponential spikes of huge growth and then plateau and the plateau is the base of the next transition so you can think of like Paleolithic giving rise to the preconditions for agricultural giving rise to the preconditions for
01:28:41
industrial and human giving rise to the preconditions for post-human for AI future so we know that AIS are incredible replicators right like they don't need 20 years to mature into a
01:28:55
Consciousness after birth they don't need to be gestated you can just make copies of them not saying better or worse only saying that it's not as if I get the signal that evolution is sort of
01:29:08
going ah okay intelligent life is up it's hit its limits okay that's all gonna go collapse now there are the preconditions for other forms of intelligent life to Spring forth from what we are
01:29:21
as to religion it's definite can of worms come true I have I have strategically um yeah I mean I'm a raging atheist I I
01:29:34
don't have any deep conception of what it is like to carry a religious sensibility in a way that informs thinking I do have an understanding of what a spiritual sensibility is like and
01:29:47
I think all humans do and then it's inborn um and that as with embodiment there is a lot of feedback that comes through that that to Annex ourselves from it
01:29:58
often does make us worse thinkers uh but as for any particular organized religion is it essential that we sort of bring a Doctrine into the ways that we
01:30:11
think about uh this present moment I can't see any good argument for that being the case I can certainly see it being a good argument for consolation and for organized religion independent
01:30:24
of the doctrine really being something that that knits people together it gives them common stories uh builds communities I don't see that that needs to be done in a religious rather than a secular way
01:30:37
back on that for a sec you know if Tom Holland were here um he would argue that in fact you can't you can't help um thinking about things to an extent within an inherited set of religious
01:30:49
friars and that in fact pretty much all of the conversation that we've had this evening has been conducted within a broadly Christian Heritage frame I mean the the fact is that we're both talking basically in eschatological terms you
01:31:01
know I mean it's not quite death judgment heaven and hell but you know in a sense both of us are talking about accelerating towards some kind of a a an end point at which we'll transition to something different which is a fun it's
01:31:13
fundamentally an apocalyptic Vision um and that that kind that that Paradigm is directly inherited from from the Christian tradition whether or not you choose to think of yourself in those terms I mean
01:31:26
even even this I mean you know it's that this is such a nerd argument and it's probably not the best for it it's such a can of worms I'm sorry but yeah um but how much of it is coming from the judeo-christian cultural Traditions
01:31:39
which no denying have hugely shaped this country and this culture and how much of it is coming from an inherited sensibility that is biological in the sense that we're storytelling animals we are pattern recognition mammals and that
01:31:52
we fit data from the world we fit phenomena into these patent narratives that across so many religions sort of follows similar arcs probably because it's just a byproduct of how our minds work so we could be
01:32:05
talking about scientific and technological phenomena and we sort of end up in similar places with similar stories because this is how we tell stories with this conflict there's transition there's a beginning there's a
01:32:17
middle there's an end point it's kind of in the nature of story itself but I think but again you know if you're thinking about if we're talking in in apocalyptic terms then you know if if I
01:32:30
were I mean forgive me if there are any people of any Hindus in the audience but the Hindus that I know just straightforwardly don't think in those terms they're like yeah no you get you get a whole load of advance and then you get you get the color Yuga and then it all goes to and then it all comes
01:32:42
around again and that's just how it works it goes around history goes in a circle it doesn't go in a straight line yeah and your S curves that go on and on ADD infiniteum is you know or perhaps not and you know perhaps I don't know
01:32:54
two and apocalypse you know that's that's very much uh that that's one set of religious paradigms and I don't think you can say oh yeah no they all join up at the back I don't think it's as simple as oh yeah and then that's maybe just biology and evolution because it because in fact you know there are if you if you
01:33:06
compare you know sort of the people of the book if you like the Judea Christian tradition and the paradigms which descend out of that even when they're secularized even the idea of secularization is is itself you know fundamentally Christian and derivation
01:33:20
um but then you know and then you compare that to the paradigms which sort of descend out of out of the Hindu faith for example it's just that they just call it they're structurally so different they are but those are the two main structures Eternal recurrence
01:33:31
recurs quite a lot and you kind of get you know history goes round and round or it doesn't um but there are only so many ways that we we tell stories so this is one of the very common modes in which things fit
01:33:44
unfortunately I have to follow the Arc of history as well and say that our time is up but we will be sticking around in this room and downstairs in the bar and cafe to continue the conversation as we
01:33:56
always do thanks so much to our online audience for joining us to everyone in the room and most importantly to Mary and Elise for their fascinating insights can you join me in thanking them
01:34:06
[Applause] do stick around and we'll see you here or downstairs the bar is now open so enjoy
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