[ExI] Is Transhumanism Coercive?

[Anders Sandberg]

Stefano Vaj wrote:
> The very idea that there would be social pressure, and actually a 
> rush, towards the adoption of safe, unexpensive, painless enhancing, 
> eugenic and life-extending technologies, and that laws increasingly 
> difficult to enforce would have to be enacted not to make them 
> "compulsory", but rather to prevent their spreading, is the best 
> counter-argument in fact against the spectre of a overhumanist 
> "totalitarism" with all the usual Hollywood, tear-inducing trappings.
Yes. However, the evidence seems to suggest that while the spread of 
many helpful technologies is pretty fast, the *development* of them 
seems to be a bottleneck. There is no doubt a demand for life extension, 
but I suspect more is spent on life extension pseudoscience (which can 
be bought directly by the consumer) than in funding for real 
biogerontology. This development bottleneck is where political and 
cultural influence has the most importance, IMHO.

> Intelligent anti-transhumanists, such as Jürgen Habermas, fully 
> realise that, and seem ready to renounce values such as freedom, 
> self-determination, involuntary-suffering avoidance and protection of 
> human lives for the sake of humanism. This is of course a major 
> tactical point, because I suppose that most of their constituencies 
> and audiences are not equally ready to do so. 

Much can be achieved with framing, or leaving out aspects. Most 
liberal-minded people will immediately agree that women have a right to 
abortion. Yet they often say no to gender selection. This puts them in 
an uncomfortable situation visavi the right to abortion (they often 
accept an abortion due to the mother wishing to go on a holiday as being 
moral if rather selfish, while arguing that a mother aborting an embryo 
because of some genetic trait to be immoral). It can easily be resolved 
by instead focusing on the means to detect something, which is why they 
then quickly move to argue that ultrasound or genetic tests should not 
reveal such information to parents. This of course manages to both dodge 
the tough moral question, impairs the freedom of people, and is pretty 
unlikely to work in the long run. But to the right-thinking people 
supporting this line of thought, that is not a problem since these 
problems are not seriously considered in their evaluation of the situation.

Of course, we should recognize that we often do the same kind of mistake 
in our own thinking. Not fully exploring the uncomfortable implications 
of one's ideas is pretty standard for humans at this stage.

> That is, except for our friend Charles Stross, who appears on the same 
> line to consider a Vile Offspring that which becomes too detached from 
> its human origins.
Count us FHI people in here too. We are seriously concerned about some 
evolutionary existential risks and AI disasters (the problem is not 
detachment from human origins per se, but the creation of strong systems 
that lack human - or any - value and are inimical to our existence). We 
are however doing our best to find a solution,
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/6265049168/in/photostream

There is a real ethical question here: is coercion acceptable to save 
humanity? (for example, preventing people from building/becoming the 
Vile Offspring and then outcompeting conscious life) Normal harm 
principles seem to OK it. Existential risks just turn the volume up to 
11. This might actually be one area where some transhumanists *do* think 
global coercion is justified.


>
> It is however true that globalised western capitalism might indeed 
> involve a risk a loss of diversity across our species, given its 
> ability to reduce, both socially and inter-culturally, the *plurality* 
> of models of excellence and of value systems to a single normalised 
> "Ken & Barbie" paradigm, where for instance a  disproportionate 
> importance is attributed to one's ability to accumulate exchange 
> units, that is money, or rather empty status symbols, in comparison 
> with other possibly desirable features and optimality views.
>
> But, besides the fact that the process is already in place 
> irrespective of any possible accelerating technology, genetic 
> engineering and other similar tools allow a much greater 
> uniformisation as well as a much greater *diversification* of the 
> humankind than it has traditionally been the case. It is not the 
> technology the problem, but what we choose to do with it.
One of my points in the debate was to ask whether we saw more or less 
diversity in western culture than in other cultures. I did not get an 
answer to that question, but I think it is true. While the 
uniformization exists, it also allows plenty of space for individual 
difference - we can afford to have subcultures, to move between them, to 
experiment with new lifestyles and so on. David Brin pointed out that 
the western world has a unique love for picking up memes from other 
cultures and treasuring the diversity that results, something that is 
much more rare in other cultures. Note that culture != economic system - 
one could have a pro-conformity culture with a capitalist system, which 
would result in a fairly dystopian outcome (China?)

My opponent probably felt culture was secondary to economic system, so 
he put the cart before the horse and argued that the conformism he 
deplored (yet urged us to adopt in regards to morphological change) was 
due to capitalism, and that capitalism is the main force shaping our 
culture.


> There again, Habermas does not miss the point, coming of course to 
> value judgments opposite to mine, when he warns against what he 
> regards as the “nightmare scenario” of a “genetic communitarianism”, 
> in which different cultures could carry forward a “genetic 
> self-optimization of mankind in different directions, thereby ending 
> up jeopardising the unity of human nature as a basis with respect to 
> which all men have until now been able to understand and mutually 
> recognise each other as members of the same moral community” (/The 
> Future of Human Nature/, Polity Press 2003).

A lot of the resistance seems to be based on genetic essentialism. My 
opponent argued that he thought it would be horrible if our capitalist 
inequalities got embedded in our genome, implicitely assuming that the 
genome is somehow much more important than our wallets, brains or memes. 
Habermas assumes that the ability to recognize each other as part of the 
same moral community depends on genetics, while it actually depends on 
empathy with the mental processes of others.

However, modifications that do change our ability to function as general 
moral agents should likely be cause for concern. A sociopathy 
enhancement might not be a good thing.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute 
Oxford Martin School 
Faculty of Philosophy 
Oxford University