I’ll be up front about this: I’m not one for looking into the future all that much. You’re likely to trip over stuff that’s right in front of you when you do that. But last week’s chat with Don Noble has me thinking (as usual) and that brings us to this rather timely topic.
Transhumanism: What is it, can you get it and—big one here—do you really WANT it?
Don is very much into the concept, and that made the conversation all that much more fascinating. Me, I see the way our bodies often reject even “simple” artificial devices and I think, whoa, I don’t like those odds. But of course this is only considering the hybridization concept. As was mentioned, what about transplanting your “whatever you are” completely into a much longer-lived vessel? If none of our flesh has to go along for the ride, well…that eliminates the rather serious “mating” issues between human and technology, and there we are: The Brain of Col. Barham (Outer Limits episode).
No, that installment in the legendary original series didn’t end well, because his essence freaked out about NOT being what it once was and, living in a solitary paradigm, rebelled against what effectively became its captors—the people who’d put his mind into a machine. But Col. Barham’s problem may have simply been that he missed what he could do in his physical flesh and blood body. Mobility, physical interaction, sensation…the plot doesn’t go into it all that much, aiming more for the megalomaniacal angle, but you’d have to think that being stuck inside an immobile machine would feel like going from being a human to being a tree, and voice or not that would be a major paradigm shift. Would YOU do it?
So let’s say we get robot bodies head to toe. The researchers figure out what our minds really are and move them into these “upgrade” forms. (Hey, Zenu does it, right Mr. Cruise?) Now we’re all out there walking around, buying groceries from the auto shop, and society still looks a lot like this. Does this work?
Maybe we should envision how humans would handle robotic forms. A good analogy is probably the automotive industry, to which many of us are still addicted/bonded. Or travel in general. If we can have robotic forms, why not make them all-terrain vehicles? Think Iron Man. Repulsers would be a great way to avoid rush hour traffic—that is, if cars still exist when we can all function as the vehicles on which we once depended. And if we still need to go someplace to work. And hey, how about an outboard feature on that robotic gluteus maximus for those lazy summer days when you feel like a little boating at the lake?
Some of this, of course, sounds cool. Jet powered speedboat bodies. But if you’re going to daydream into the future, assume we somehow survive our species’ incredible shortsightedness and pervasive existential angst and decide to do this robotic conversion en masse, you should probably try to get as clear a picture as possible.
For one thing, too many of us are already too reckless. I’ve witnessed people leaping off fifty foot bluffs into five feet of water. We all know what crazy stuff gets big action on YouTube. We’re not sure whether Jackass was the chicken or the egg but “hold my beer” is hardly a new thing. Picture that mentality and marry it to the concept of “replacement parts” and it gets scary pretty fast.
Who’s gonna be a robot first?
That’s a good question. Odds-heavily-on answer: the wealthy.
So they’ll become these things, assuming it becomes viable, and naturally they’ll want the less fortunate masses to join them, right? Pardon the blunt sarcasm, making a point about the corruption inherent in privilege. Moving on.
Another thing Don and I talked about was something I brought up: IF you can engineer your own body through DNA manipulation (subject for another blog, not this one), as Don said renegade experimenters are already doing, you could theoretically make your body immune to the widespread petroleum vapor and fission pollution currently afflicting our only living space from top to bottom (or edge to edge, depending on your beliefs). That sounds cool, but if you don’t do it for every other living thing in your biosphere as well, the end result is that you still destroy your living space eventually. Only so many species can come and go at once without the imbalance wrecking everything. And if you think that’s just a scientific liberal point of view, try it with a terrarium. Because that’s what we live in, a terrarium.
So yeah, consider me fascinated by the subject of transhumanism, and thanks as they often do go to Mr. Noble for yet another topic I keep pondering. But if you put me in charge and say, “Hey, if we put our resources toward transhumanism we might be able to outrace our destruction of the biosphere”, well…“You’re fired.”
I won’t end on that sour note phrase for several obvious reasons. Instead I’ll just say this subject needs a lot more debate. Now that we’re talking about both putting our essences inside machines entirely and the concept of physically manipulating our own DNA in real time, there’s too much there to go on about either here. Consider this an intro into the topic(s) and we’ll go into both separately in future blogs.
Hope that’s all logical, Captain.
[bctt tweet=”‘CARPENTER’S SHADES – Do Robots Sing Around Campfires?’ Kevin Candela ‘I’ve witnessed people leaping off fifty foot bluffs into five feet of water. We all know what crazy stuff gets big action on YouTube. We’re not sure whether Jackass was the chicken or the egg but “hold my beer” is hardly a new thing.'” username=”theboldmom”]
