Become What You Are

Who'd have thought that Nietzsche would have agreed with me?

I promised at the beginning of the year that the blog's focus for 2010 would be the coming revolution in Human-Machine Interface, and as I saw it, the likelihood that the next revolution in technology will be the integration of electronics directly into the human body, or conversely the integration of consciousness into electronics, leaving the body behind.

Nietzsche, who annually wins awards for having the single most irritating name on Earth to try to type correctly, wrote a century ago about the overman, or "Ubermensch", a group of people that would be greater than humans. Just as humans have risen so far from worms, he posited, so too can humans rise that far from the apes we have barely left behind. However Nietzsche was very vague in this explanations of just how we would leave ourselves behind.
The Nazi's especially were known for adopting eugenics as their attempt to adopt the philosophy; clearly this wasn't the intent of Nietzsche. Modern nihilists and Nietzscheans agree: genetic manipulation of humanity was probably not his original intent. In fact he tended to reject biology in his work.

But TAE suggests the following: our method of departure from humanity, or rather our method of achieving the Singularity, of becoming the Overmen of Nietzsche's dreams, is to boost our own faculties via electronic integration. Would war not seem a pathetic and amoral waste of global resources to beings that were all connected together via a wireless, instant network that allowed the sharing of not just data, but also thoughts and feelings? Could we make our brothers suffer if we directly shared in their suffering? Would a post-biology world, filled with living, autotrophic beings all communally sharing the same global consciousness stream not evolve a new, post-Christian value and moral set, exactly as Nietzsche predicted? TAE muses.

Nevertheless, TAE thinks we must begin asking ourselves questions now, rather than later. What will we consider fair sharing of information when we can share anything instantly with anyone? When is it invasion of privacy when a consciousness is stored in cyberspace, and can be accessed or locked out at the whim of authority?
If consciousness leaves biology behind, and at this point I believe it almost certainly will, how will we procreate? And how will a new fledgeling consciousness, born into this world, deal with the ability to access anything, instantly? Will the data input overload its ability to reason, rendering it insane? Will we have to develop restricted flows of information to our electronic children, gradually increasing their ability to surf the global consciousness stream?

These are questions far in the future, however. Nearer term, questions like "once a USB 3.0 - human nervous system port exists and can be implanted, how do we regulate the distribution of such a device? How do we fairly allow fairness and not create a have-have not situation where the "haves" can rapidly and easily amplify their own intellectual power, where the "have nots" become like the epsilons and deltas of Huxley's Brave New World?

And what if it turned out that a device could be implanted in a fetus that would then integrate itself into the nervous system of the baby, so that when it was born it had a "plug" like the characters in the movie "The Matrix"...would you give your fetus that implant?
Which is less ethical: messing with a fetus to give it enhanced cognitive potential, or intentionally denying that same person its own right to thrive when it grows older, surrounded by electronically enhanced friends and enemies? Your poor child has to look things up on a computer, and talk via their vocal chords. Their friends can access the internet instantly directly through their brains, and gossip with one another silently, sending text messages to each other with no one the wiser.

People often complain that science has outpaced ethics. This is doubly true, not only because it has, but also because the pace of scientific discovery has accelerated whilst ethics has ground to a politically-tolerable halt (if not moved backward). And yet, we still haven't cloned Hitler. We still haven't built a black-hole and unleashed it. We still haven't created a supervirus and wiped ourselves out. It almost seems that as science leaves post-modern ethics behind, a true set of morals that humanity cannot escape stays with us, riding Science's slipstream to the finish. Could it be that as science moves us further and further away from biological humanity, the morals and ethics that make it through this revolution will prove just exactly what the hell humanity is?


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