[extropy-chat] back in the day

[Damien Broderick]

I found this nearly year-old piece:

<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php>http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php

Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights
Cyborg Liberation Front
by Erik Baard

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," was a
governing principle for those attending the World Transhumanist
Association conference at Yale University in late June. International
academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that
would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made
from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic,
genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. A good
many of these 160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience through
uploading human consciousness into ever evolving machines.

The three-day gathering was hosted by an entity no less reputable than the
Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project's Working Research Group on
Technology and Ethics; the World Transhumanist Association chairman and
co-founder is Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom. Dismiss it as a
Star Trek convention by another name, and you could miss out on the
culmination of the Western experiment in rights and reason.

The opening debate, "Should Humans Welcome or Resist Becoming Posthuman?,"
raised a question that seems impossibly far over the horizon in an era
when the idea of reproductive cloning remains controversial. Yet the
back-and-forth felt oddly perfunctory. Boston University bioethicist
George Annas denounced the urge to alter the species, but the response
from the audience revealed a community of people who feel the
inevitability of revolution in their bones.

"It's like arguing in favor of the plough. You know some people are going
to argue against it, but you also know it's going to exist," says James
Hughes, secretary of the Transhumanist Association and a sociologist
teaching at Trinity College in Connecticut. "We used to be a subculture
and now we're becoming a movement."

A movement taken seriously enough that it's already under attack. Hughes
cites the anti-technologist Unabomber as a member of the "bio-Luddite"
camp, though an extremist one. "I think that if, in the future, the
technology of human enhancement is forbidden by bio-Luddites through
government legislation, or if they terrorize people into having no access
to those technologies, that becomes a fundamental civil rights struggle.
Then there might come a time for the legitimate use of violence in
self-defense," he says. "But long before that there will be a black market
and underground network in place."

Should a fully realized form of artificial intelligence become in some
manner enslaved, Hughes adds, "that would call for liberation acts -- not
breaking into labs, but whatever we can do."

But beyond the violent zealots, who are these supposed bio-Luddites? From
the right, Leon Kass, chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, rails
against transhumanism in his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of
Dignity, and Francis Fukuyama weighs in with his fearful exploration, Our
Posthuman Future. From the left, environmentalist Bill McKibben fires
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, a book that reads like a
227-page-long helpless screech of brakes on a train steaming ahead at full
power.

They have a case for being somewhat apocalyptic about the convergence of
genetics, computer science, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. The
outcome is almost guaranteed to strain our ancient sensibilities and
definitions of personhood.

For now, though, the dialogue sounds like a space-age parlor game. Why
should the noodlings of a relative handful of futurists matter? The easy
answer, and that's not to say it isn't a true one: As with science
fiction, the scenarios we imagine reflect and reveal who we are as a
society today. For example, how can we continue to exploit animals when we
fear the same treatment from some imagined superior race in the future?

But the purpose of the Yale conference was direct, with no feinting at
other agendas. The crowd there wanted to shape what they see as a coming
reality. From the first walking stick to bionic eyes, neural chips, and
Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, they would argue we've long been in
the process of becoming cyborgs. A "hybrot," a robot governed by neurons
from a rat brain, is now drawing pictures. Dolly the sheep broke the
barrier on cloning, and new transgenic organisms are routinely created.
The transhumanists gathered because supercomputers are besting human chess
masters, and they expect a new intelligence to pole-vault over humanityin
this century.

"All one has to do is read the science journals to know these issues are
on the table today," says Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby, who
serves as a bioethics adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
and has, along with other dignitaries, discussed the posthuman prospect
with French president Jacques Chirac. "One thing I can say with certainty
from my experience is that the wheels of law, of the legislative process,
grind very slowly within nations and slower still internationally. The
progress of science, on the other hand, is ever accelerating. If anything,
we've been surprised at how quickly technology has progressed. It's worth
taking on these issues intellectually now, rather than in crisis later."

[etc etc etc]