James Hughes made this prediction in 2004, the year before delivering this sermon at the UU congregation in Manchester, Connecticut:
"The political terrain of the twenty-first century will add a new dimension -- biopolitics. At one end of the biopolitical spectrum are the bioLuddites, defending humanity from enhancement technologies, and at the other the transhumanists, advocating for our right to become more than human. Since biopolitics cuts across existing political lines, it creates very odd coalitions. Either side can win public support, depending on these coalitions and the lines they draw."
He raises this question:
Are transhumanist enhancement technologies a threat to humanity and democracy and therefore should be banned? Or must we defend our rights to use reason and science to improve the human condition, to control our own bodies, and to create a TransHuman democracy safe for an increasing variety of citizens?
Hughes comes down on the side of reason and science. Do you? Where do you stand in the TransHumanist debate? Where should we all stand?
Technology's potential to transform the human is no longer a matter of mere speculation by sci-fi writers. Tech giants and startups alike are developing new technologies to improve humans and make us more capable.
Take, for example, the new science of mind reading -- also known as thought decoding.
Using fMRI scanners, cognitive psychologists now can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts. They also can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. Computers processing brain scans can now edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. Scientists can now accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects.
Princeton, MIT and Stanford have all established thought decoding institutes. Go upstairs at Princeton's Neuroscience Institute and you'll see toddlers wearing tiny hats outfitted with infrared brain scanners. In the basement, scientists have sliced open the skulls of genetically engineered mice so they use lasers to control individual neurons.
So reports James Somers in his recent New Yorker piece.
The technology of scanning hasn't changed much. It's the data analysis that's changed, so transformed by AI that scientists now can locate thoughts in a physical space.
“The space of possible thoughts that people can think is big—but it’s not infinitely big.” Ken Norman, chair of the psychology department at Princeton University, is now actually able with certitude to say this. Scientists may soon be able to produce a detailed map of concepts in our minds, he says.
Imagine your brain as a three-dimensional grid made up cubes, each of which is one cubic millimeter in size. A millimeter is the length of a point on a pencil. Each cube has about one million neurons. All of these neurons consume oxygen. Scientists can monitor the patterns in which this consumption occurs.
By reading these patterns, scientists essentially are able to read our minds. Researchers track patterns playing out across tens of thousands of voxels at a time, "as though each were a key on a piano, and thoughts were chords," writes Somers.
Every word we know fits somewhere in "semantic space" that powerful AI engines are now able to create and model.
Think of the word "good" and how that relates in the word "nice" in this space. Quite close and overlapping.
Now think "nasty." In our semantic space, that's way over here. With fMRI and AI, we can scan it and read it.
Imagine how rapidly this technology can advance and the uses we'll find for it. Prisoner interrogation is only the most obvious.
As Unitarian Universalists, how do we feel about such advances? Are we for them or against them? Or are we merely cautious, waiting and seeing?