Jim Baen's Universe

Nonfiction articles

Transhumanism's Universal Success is Unavoidable

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Every goal of transhumanism will be achieved. This is not a possibility, but an inevitability. This achievement will be accomplished with or without the encouragement of transhumanists. Even if tomorrow at noon every person on earth who claims to be, or secretly believes themself to be, a transhumanist were to fall over dead success would still be guaranteed. There is nothing short of the fall of civilization or the wholesale abandonment of the scientific method that can prevent this.

The reason is a simple as it is non-obvious.

Every human alive today, as well as every human who has ever lived, is or was a transhuman. The philosophy we call transhumnaism is so deeply integrated into the thoughts and desires and behaviors of our species that we are inseparable from it. For a human to abandon the transhuman philosophy would be to abandon their humanness. We are not just devout in our adherence to it; it is part of what makes us human. We are it, and it is us; and the two can never be separated.

To be as clear as possible it might be wise at this point to offer a definition as to just what this mysterious, and supposedly new, philosophy is all about. One good place to look for this is the World Transhumanist Association. The WTA describes itself on it's webpage as An international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well.

While there are many flavors and nuances of transhumanism, the phrase "Better Than Well" summarizes them all. Your doctor's goal is for you to be well; a transhumanist's goal is for you to be even better than that.

The principal method of becoming Better Than Well is expected to be through technological augmentation. And so "Augmentation" has become another central concept. Transhumanists believe that it is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly desirable for people to augment themselves. These augmentations are generally envisioned in the near future as being worn mostly on the outside of the body, just as we wear hats and clothing today; but in the far future as being worn to an increasing degree inside the body, as we wear pacemakers and artificial heart valves today.

The ultimate expectation of augmentation is to provide people with abilities that humans have never before had, such as the ability to see in X-rays, or infrared, or ultraviolet, or even sound waves like bats and dolphins; the ability to feel magnetic fields like migrating birds, and to hear ultrasonic sounds like dogs and cats. Some transhumanists (including myself) want to read WebPages and the entire internet inside their mind's eye without using a computer at all. If this is achieved then exchanging email and cell phone calls will also be possible from within the mind without using any outside device, and without any nearby person being able to detect that these things are being done. (One more thing for teachers to lament, since half the students will be chatting on the phone or playing video games while pretending to listen to the lecture.)

Like all beliefs that are universally entwined in our nature and fundamental to what makes us human, this philosophy of augmentation operates below our level of consciousness and so is difficult to observe, identify and examine. Yet history is filled with countless examples of its long-running domination of our behavior. Some of the most glaring examples are from recent times, but many have played themselves out over hundreds or even thousands of years.

For brevity this article will follow the historical path of only one: the magnifying glass.

As children we all toyed with them as a means of making little things appear bigger, but there are indications that this was not the invention’s original function. Instead it was the other thing we did with them. What's more the invention of the magnifying lens or magnifying glass is buried so far back in human history that its beginning is unknown. (see Wikipedia article about lenses)

A play by Aristophanes which was first performed in 423 BCE called The Clouds mentioned a burning glass. In it, a character named Strepsiades says, "Have you ever seen this stone in the chemist's shops, the beautiful and transparent one, from which they kindle fire?" The character playing Socrates then responds, "Do you mean the burning-glass?" (see Wikipedia article about the history of telescopes)

But that was only 24 centuries ago. Thousands of years earlier lenses were sufficiently understood that in 2600 BCE Egyptian sculptors used "double refracting rock crystal lens elements" to produce the optical illusion that the eyes of the statues of Rahotep and his wife Nofret were following all those who looked at the statues regardless of where the observers stood or moved. Constructed 46 centuries ago, these statues are currently located in the Louvre in Paris. (Here is a technical report on these eyes-that-follow)

Assyrians were also using lenses such as the Layard/Nimrud lens as early as 700 BCE.

Other ancient references include the encyclopedia of natural history by Pliny the Elder, first printed in 77 AD, which describes that burning-glasses were commonly known during the height of the Roman Empire. It also mentions what is possibly the first use of a corrective lens: Nero was known to watch the gladiatorial games through a concave-shaped emerald. The possibility that this was to correct for myopia was discussed in detail for The British Journal of Ophthalmology in their technical article Nero’s Emerald.

Seneca the Younger (3 BC—65 AD) described the magnifying effect of a glass globe filled with water. The Arabian mathematician Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn Al-Haitham), (965—1038 AD) wrote the first major explanation of how the lens of the human eye formed an image on the retina.

Between the 11th and 13th century, monks began using "reading stones" to assist them as they drew the complicated illuminations for manuscripts. Some of these were made by cutting a glass sphere in half to produce a primitive plano-convex lens. With experimentation it was slowly understood that shallower lenses magnified with less distortion.

This simple augmentation of the human eye was for some a tool for dull and repetitive cloistered work, but for some it allowed their curiosity to expand so that they could learn more about nature's smaller things such as insects and plants. These simple lenses were sometimes mounted in a circular frame and sometimes given a short handle, so that the magnifying glass as we know it today came into being.

It is believed that the Italians came up with the next big innovation. Around 1280 AD someone mounted two lenses side by side in a single frame so that a person could see through one lens with each eye, and they formed the frame such that it could be hung on the ears and nose and left there for hours at a time. This augmentation became extremely popular, sweeping across Europe and then around the world. Seven hundred and twenty years later spectacles are still in use.

But the innovations didn't stop there. Humans never stop. We augmented further. The next innovation was incorporating two different magnification strengths into each of the two lenses. This is generally credited to Benjamin Franklin sometime in the early 1760s, and came to be called bifocals.

Eventually we invented machines for accurately measuring the amount of magnification each individual human, and indeed each eye of an individual human, needed to correct their vision. This produced spectacles and bifocals customized for that particular individual.

But again, we continued improving the augmentation.

Based on theoretical ideas from many thinkers including Leonardo de Vinci, René Descartes and William Herschel, a German glassblower, F.E. Muller, in 1887 developed an eye covering which could be seen through without exessive discomfort. The next year a German physiologist Adolf Eugen Fick constructed and fitted the first successful contact lens. Made from heavy brown glass he first put them on rabbits, then on himself, and then on a few volunteers. Today aproximately 125 million people around the world wear contact lenses: over 30 million in the United States and about 13 million in Japan.

But while these lenses were in very intimate contact with very sensitive areas of the body, they were still just worn on our exterior. The next augmentation was a little more radical since it involved the surgical reshaping of the living tissue of the eye iteslf.

The first practical attempt to perform such a surgery was done on military pilots in 1930 by the Japanese ophthalmologist Sato. He made radial cuts of the cornea to correct effects by as much as 6 diopters. Unfortunately, his procedure had to be curtailed due to the high rate of corneal degeneration.

Later methods used freezing of the tissues; peeling; and even removal, sculpting and then reimplantation. But the greatest success in reshaping the lens of the eye came after the invention of the laser, specifically lasers of industrial strength. On June 20, 1989 US Patent number 4,840,175 was granted to Gholam A. Peyman, MD for his Method for Modifying Coneal Curvature, in which the corneal bed is ablated to the desired shape using a powerful laser. The name LASIK was coined in 1991.

But even this augmentation is on the outside of the body. The first to successfully implant a lens inside the eye was Sir Harold Ridley on November 29, 1949. He used plastic lenses because when he was treating pilots in World War II who had pieces of shattered windshields in their eyes he had noticed the plastic was not rejected by the immune system. Today, over a million intraocular lenses are implanted each year in the United States.

As you read this, researchers are working on ways to restore sight to those whose eyes can never be made to work again. A few pioneering patients are already wearing devises which bypass the cornea and deliver electrical signals from a camera to the nerves located in the retina at the back of the eye. In some patients these signals are made to bypass the eyes all together and are delivered directly onto the surface of the brain. Work is just begun in this area, but the results offer a great deal of promise, and the expectations within the medical community are that within two or three decades the blind will be able to see. Not see a little, but see everything that you and I see.

It should be emphasized that this article has described one little meandering path of innovation through history. Just one of hundreds, maybe thousands; all proceeding simultaneously. Countless paths of augmentation, the cumulative effect of which can not be seen at a glance nor comprehended as a single unit. Yet they are changing our lives everyday, and will more and more as time goes on.

And it’s not those who declare themselves transhumanists that are pushing these augmentations. It's everyone. It has always been everyone. Centuries before the concept of transhumanism was thought of, written down or spoken aloud. In the crowd of a Roman gladatorial game, in a play in ancient Greece, in 1280 Italy. The push was on from before the invention of writing. It has always been on. And it will never stop. There will be no end, just as there was no beginning. We have always been transhuman—eagerly, openly, aggressively—all of us. And we always will be.

****

Learn More

You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.

Or learn more about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.