Justice De Thezier’s critical analysis of his experience with the Montreal Mirror

Due to the reporter’s deadline-fuelled haste, Cyborgs in the City is a well-meaning but botched article filled with mistakes and misrepresentations. The following are the necessary corrections.

On a side note, despite being a great fan of Rachel Granofsky’s work, her picture had too much of a “retro-futurist guru” look rather than the “geek and chic” she was aiming for. Oh well...

CYBORGS IN THE CITY

Though bioethicists have their doubts, Justice de Thézier and his fellow transhumanists want to build a supertechnological you

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Actually, there is a growing number of bioethicists who are in favor of human enhancement. Dr. James Hughes, the founder of the democratic transhumanist movement and director of the World Transhumanist Association, is a bioethicist and sociologist teaching health policy and working at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut.

At a public square on the Lower Main a belligerent drunk in an electric wheelchair shouts obscenities at a police officer whose attempts to grab him are befuddled by the man’s oversized vehicle. The cop, befuddled by the prospects of getting the drunk into the paddy wagon, awkwardly tries to grab the man again. Eventually the cop gives up and drives off.

The disabled man in the big wheeled machine has transformed disability into his advantage - the technology has turned him from a cripple to a space pod commander invulnerable to arrest. Body technology had kept the well-oiled man-machine from the backseat of the cop van.

It’s a suitable image just prior to a meeting with Justice de Thezier, the local leader of Montreal’s transhumanist movement, a recently formed gang of about 15 hardcore techno-utopians who seek to lobby and curry public enthusiasm for the improvements that technology can have for the human condition.

The Montreal Transhumanist Association is a non-profit organization devoted to encouraging the ethical and responsible use of technology to overcome limitations of the human body.

Although some transhumanists are “hardcore techno-utopians,” the MTA is only comprised of techno-realists who assess all possible implications of new technologies so that people might all have more control over the shape of their future. This approach involves a continuous critical examination of how these technologies might help or hinder people in the struggle to improve the quality of their lives and their communities.

I was keeping a contacted-lensed eye out for a futuristic ubermensch clad in exoskeletal scaffolding with a wearable computer and an integrated Webcam. But the chief local enthusiast of cyborgs and the gatekeeper of the cryptadia of the full-throttle human tech agenda comes equipped only with a cool name - Justice de Thezier, apparently his real moniker, and his physical form looked more metrosexual than technofutural.

Although transhumanists want to accelerate change, they are concerned with the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Life extension, human gills

Sitting over a frosty ice drink, the UQAM student articulately recounts how he discovered and embraced transhumanism while researching a script for an experimental movie, and has since embraced the possibilities of repairing and improving the human condition through cutting-edge scientific innovation.

“Right now the public discourse on these issues is dominated by neo-Luddites and technophobes who are so afraid that they’re even pushing for laws banning technologies that don’t even exist yet,” he says.

Thézier’s mission is to get the world ready and receptive for massive scientific inroads which will give us unprecedented choices in altering our human form. Some stuff he foresees: germline engineering to remove diseases, giving ourselves gills to breathe underwater or animal feathers, or changing the colour of one’s skin. “It’ll take 20 to 50 years for most of this stuff to be safe,” he says. Plus there is, of course, cryogenic revival and life extension on their agenda.

(Laughter) Mr. Gravenor seems to have confused an offhand remark about the possible future of body modification with serious projections by futurologists within the transhumanist community. I did not say that I foresee people using germline engineering to give themselves “animal feathers” or “changing the colour of one’s skin”! I was only musing about the possibility that advanced body modification through gene therapy could lead some people to want to remove predispositions to some but not all diseases or even upgrade themselves with animal-like features such as an increased lung capacity to stay underwater without breathing or skin that automatically adapts to weather changes. Although I am not alone in foreseeing people in the near- to far-future using converging technologies to enhance human performance, I don’t expect any of these breakthroughs to happen any time soon!

Transhumanists credit the birth of their movement to F.M. Esfandiary (aka FM-2030), an Iranian-American futurist who first laid the receptive groundwork between a future marriage of man and machine in 1966;

FM-2030, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, was a transhumanist philosopher and futurist who professed “a deep nostalgia for the future.” He was the author of one of the seminal works in the transhumanist canon, Are You a Transhuman?. Many of FM’s predictions about social changes from the 1970’s through the early 21st Century were remarkably prescient. FM argued that the inherent dynamic of the modern globalizing civilization would bring such changes about despite the best efforts of conservative elites to enforce traditional beliefs.

in 1998, the World Transhumanist Association was founded, according to Thezier, ”to defend the right of individuals in free and democratic societies to use new technologies that overcome the limitations of the human body.”

Thezier says that our local gang is a thoughtful bunch whose only true eccentric is a vice-president who wears a voice-activated tape recorder around his neck at all times. “He’s recording everything morning to night so he can be ready for when we download our consciousnesses.”

Although the [now former] MTA vice-president studies the potential of brain-computer interface technology as a precursor to mind uploading, he is very much a down-to-earth fellow who keeps an archive of audio recordings of his life as a memory aid only. Furthermore, since mind uploading may only become a possibility between 2050 and 2100, none of us is seriously expecting being able to upload our consciousnesses into an electronic medium anytime soon.

The local group busies itself with the challenge of making government more receptive to the techno-future, translating documents into French and hoping to ensure that the poor also benefit from future innovations.

The MTA will busy itself with organizing public forums and art exhibits that invite people to think about the possibilities and implications tied to the emergence of human enhancement technologies in order to rationally debate what needs to be done, and a social order in Quebec where responsible decisions can be implemented.

“What people really want to know is whether human enhancement is only going to benefit the Donald Trumps of the world,” says Thezier, who wants to bring superintelligent brain implants and other innovations to the all social strata by “guaranteeing safe, universal and voluntary access to them. Because for me, ultimately, it’s all about the little guy finally having a chance to not only overcome the biological limitations we all have as human beings but also the social limitations imposed on him.”

The future is now

Transhumanists believe that amazing technological advances will hit us quite suddenly, possibly in a magical moment called “singularity,” when an advanced artificial intelligence unit will offer a host of technological advances all at once, at which point “the progress curve becomes nearly vertical,” says Thézier.

From the Transhumanist FAQ: Some thinkers conjecture that there will be a point in the future when the rate of technological development becomes so rapid that the progress-curve becomes nearly vertical. Within a very brief time (months, days, or even just hours), the world might be transformed almost beyond recognition. This hypothetical point is referred to as the singularity. The most likely cause of a singularity would be the creation of some form of rapidly self-enhancing greater-than-human intelligence.

Some improvements have already arrived, such as the improved method of cryogenic freezing called vitrefication, which he enthusiastically reports “turns a body into something like glass, thereby leaving tissues undamaged.”

(Laughter) I was not enthusiatic but quite nonchalant when I reported to Mr. Kravenor that there is an improved method of cryogenic preservation using vitrification, which involves injecting ‘anti-freeze’ substances that make water in the body harden like glass thereby reducing tissue damage significantly.

Perhaps the most heralded upcoming innovation is also the most controversial: germline engineering, which would see a defective or undesirable gene removed from one’s genetic structure, ensuring that the trait would not be passed on. It’s rife with controversy, but these guys are all for it.

Thezier wants people to overcome their apprehensions to what could be an unrecognizable human future. “There’s too much technophobia out there. When the VCR flashes 12:00, what prevents people from adjusting it is the assumption that it’s complicated, but in fact it’s quite simple. So much technology now is ubiquitous and fundamentally integrated, and it’s becoming more so, with the visual phone, the Segway - the list goes on.”

The visual phone and the Segway are not examples of the kind of ubiquitous integrated technology I was referring to. A single mother putting a radio frequency ID chip in her child’s clothing in order to better track him for his safety is. However, this is another example of an offhand remark that was irrelevant to a debate about the fears surrounding human enhancement technologies.

As Dr. Hughes explains, only believable and effective state-based policies to prevent adverse consequences from new technologies will reassure skittish publics that they do not have to be banned. Publics must be offered a choice other than that of unfettered free-market technology versus bans. These choices require a strong social democratic government that can act independent of corporate interests and vocal extremists. We need a strong social democratic regulatory apparatus that does not block enhancement technologies for Luddite reasons, but that also will ensure that enhancement technologies are safe and effective. The case of cryonics shows how spectacular frauds or iatrogenic disasters can set back acceptance of transhuman technology altogether. Human enhancements must be proven safe before being used, but not held hostage to vague Luddite anxieties.

Human 2.0

I later got McGill University bioethicist Margaret Somerville on the blower and it turns out she’s abuzz with caveat emptor vis-a-vis transhumanism. “One of the things I’m interested in researching is the importance of the basic presumption in favour of the natural. It doesn’t mean you can’t change nature, but you must be sure that you are justified when doing it. The transhumanists have the opposite presumption. They think it’s fine to do what you can.

Since there is no evidence supporting a basic presumption in favour of the natural, transhumanists insist that whether something is natural or not is irrelevant to whether it is good or desirable.

I feel that they’ve got an unbalanced optimism about what they can use science for,” she says.

As I said before, transhumanist optimism is tempered with technorealism, which is an attempt to expand the middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism by assessing all possible implications of new technologies so that people might all have more control over the shape of their future. This approach involves a continuous critical examination of how these technologies might help or hinder people in the struggle to improve the quality of their lives and their communities.

Somerville, who had a high-profile debate last year with Toronto transhumanists, says she’s concerned that two tiers of humanity could evolve from techno-tinkering. “They think they will engineer the transition from human to post-human, to make a vastly superior model. In fact it would be so different from what we know as human, that what we consider human would be so inferior that it’d be a subspecies.

From the Transhumanist FAQ: “Human society is always at risk from some group deciding to view another group of humans as inferior and even fit for slavery or slaughter. To counteract such tendencies, modern societies have created laws and institutions, and endowed them with powers of enforcement, that act to prevent groups of citizens from assaulting one another. The efficacy of these institutions does not depend on all citizens having equal capacities. Modern, peaceful societies have large numbers of people with diminished physical or mental capacities along with many other people who may be exceptionally physically strong or healthy or intellectually talented in various ways. Adding people with technologically enhanced capacities to this already broad distribution of ability would not necessarily rip society apart or trigger genetic cleansing or enslavement.”

“The stated goal is to create humans that have superintelligence, superemotions, that you won’t have to worry about wars and conflict because we’ll be so well-programmed. That has an ultra-humanist base but I think it fails to understand the complexities and values of what we are.”

On the contrary, behaviour geneticists and evolutionary psychologists - two of the strongest proponents of genetic influentialism - demonstrate in their research precisely how environments interact with heredity to shape behaviour and personality. This interactionism starts when genes code for biochemical reactions, which regulate physiological changes, which govern biological systems, which impact neurological actions, which induce psychological states, which cause behaviours; these behaviours, in turn, interact with the environment, which change the behaviours, which influence psychological states, which alter neurological actions, which transform biological systems, which modify physiological changes, which transfigure biochemical reactions. And all of this happens in a complex interactive feedback loop between genes and environment throughout development and into adulthood.

As Dr. Hughes explains, it is because of this greater understanding of human cognition and behaviour that post-Darwinian leftists like Peter Singer can argue that there is a biologically rooted tendency towards selfishness and hierarchy, which has defeated attempts at egalitarian social reform. If the Left program of social reform is to succeed, Singer proposes that we must employ the new bio- and neuro-technologies to identify and modify aspects of human nature that cause conflict and competition. Singer therefore embraces a program of socially subsidized, but voluntary, genetic improvement while rejecting coercive reproductive policies and eugenic pseudo-science.

Somerville also believes that efforts at immortality are also a dodgy goal. “We won’t be wear-outable, they say, because we’ll be made of replaceable computer bits. But once you start talking about immortality you’re getting close to advocating a secular religion because that’s what religions deal with - why we’re here, what we’re doing and how long we’ll be here.”

From the Transhumanist FAQ: “While not a religion, transhumanism might serve a few of the same functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development. Some of the prospects that used to be the exclusive monopoly of the religious institutions, such as very long lifespan, unfading bliss, and godlike intelligence, are being discussed by transhumanists as hypothetical future engineering achievements.”

Somerville also worries about the vaunted germline engineering that would simply deprogram unwanted traits in an embryo. “That’s really designing humans. The basis of democracy is that we are all free and equal and what that would mean is that the designed person is not free because they’ve been designed. It’s not a free thing that happened to them, it’s the ultimate form of slavery - genetic slavery.”

This is absurd. If we follow this fallacy to its logical conclusion, it would mean that people who choose to give birth to, or adopt, and raise children without their prior consent are engaging in parental slavery.

Therefore, parents should be discouraged or forbidden to modify their children in ways that reduce their powers of self-determination (by imposing on them a tendency towards subservience for instance), but they should be encouraged to increase their children’s self-determination powers (by gifting them with a tendency towards higher emotional intelligence).

Enhancement for everyone!

Nor is she persuaded by the idea that once somebody does it, it’s full-speed ahead for the rest. “It’s like using drugs in the Olympics. You’re supposed to work out whether that’s what you really should be doing in the first place.”

Actually, there is a growing number of sports ethicists who argue that there are good reasons to encourage the use of performance-enhancing drugs: It would level the playing field by increasing equality between athletes with varying genetic and environmental advantages but, more importantly, it would stimulate more research to ensure the safety of those drugs.

One scenario Somerville suggests might come involves slowed ageing. “You go into the embryo and alter the ageing gene, so you wouldn’t reach puberty until 25 or 30, you’d hit middle age at 60 and wouldn’t actually get old until you were like 150. Is it acceptable to do that? Who will be the first to make their kid go through that?”

(Laughter) As far as I know, no one since, if possible, it would make more sense to simply modify our children’s genes so that their normal aging process simply stops at 25 or 30. Who wouldn’t thank their parents everyday for having blessed them with such a gift?

When told of this criticism, Thezier seems delighted that such debates are evolving, but he tosses suspicions back.

Actually, I was never told of this criticism. If I had, my reply would have responded to every point she made as I have done now.

“Bioethicists hide a conservative agenda and don’t look at both sides;

Many but not all bioethicists hide or openly promote a conservative agenda.

we’re not a cult or religion. We don’t have a cult hero,” he says. “Nor do we all have shared values. Some transhumanists care about space colonization, for example, others don’t. We have no dogmas.

Transhumanists may have different interests, but we all share the value of rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, democracy and concern for our fellow human beings.

We’re a humanist movement. We want to explain the benefits of funding research and development of enhancement technologies but also guarantee safe, universal and voluntary access to them through modernized health-care plans.

“Rather than banning these technologies for fear that they might increase social inequalities, they should be seen as tools for the poor and disenfranchised to gain not only better health but social mobility.”