Transhumanism: A Selection from Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human (2019)
“The transhumanist movement is less a theory about the advancement of humanity than a simple evacuation plan. Techno-utopians like to think of themselves as orchestrating a complete break from civilization—a leap into outer space, cyberspace, machine consciousness, or artificial life. But their ideas just extend our same blind addiction to consumption, destruction, progress, and colonization. . . .
European colonialists ignored the peoples and places they overran in their conquest of the planet in the belief that they were working toward some greater endpoint, some ordained destiny. If some people were exploited, or their ecosystems annihilated, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Likewise, you can’t grow consciousness on a computer chip without leaving a few people behind—or enslaving some laborers to procure the rare earth metals required.
The singularitans don’t mind harming humans when necessary, because humanity as we know it will not really be participating in the brave new future. These bodies in which we live may as well be forests, oil fields, or any other natural resource that can be clear-cut, burned for fuel, or otherwise trashed in the name of our own immortality. One Bay Area startup harvests the blood of young people so that wealthy executives can transfuse new life into their aging bodies—at least, until they figure out how to upload their ever-so-valuable minds to the cloud.
Once computers and robots can do the thinking, humans won’t even be necessary. It won’t matter so much that we will have destroyed the natural environment, since neither robots nor uploaded humans will require it for sustenance. We will have evolved or engineered beyond the body—or developed an artificial intelligence that makes us humans irrelevant anyway. At that point, we will really only be required to service the machines—at least, until machines get better at doing that for themselves.
Then, say the chief scientists at the world’s biggest internet companies, humanity may as well pass the torch to our evolutionary successors and get off the stage. Proponents of the singularity discount human objections as hubris, ego, or nostalgia. Humans are the problem; they are part of that same evil, ambiguous natural world as women, forests, and uncivilized natives. Heck, humans are the natives, subject to unpredictable ebbs and flows of emotions and hormones and irrational needs.
Singularitans consider technology more trustworthy than humans. Surveillance is not just a profit center for social media, but a way of safeguarding digital society from human resistance. Code enforces rules without bias (unless, of course, you happen to be the coder). It’s a blockchain reality, where machines execute the letter of the law without any sense of the spirit. So much the better to accelerate development and reach the singularity before the clock runs out on the habitable biosphere.
Computers and artificial intelligences are pure intention, not clouded or tempered by human social priorities or moral misgivings. They are a direct, utilitarian extension of our apocalyptic urge to colonize the natural world.”—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)
