"Mind Children": Transhumanism & the Search For Genetic Perfection

At the recent annual 2007 World Transhumanist Association's meeting, Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence guru who heads up MIT's Media Lab, half-jokingly suggested the world could solve any population problem by uploading the minds of 10 billion people and running them on a computer that occupies a few cubic meters and costs only a few hundred dollars to run.

The thing is, Minsky is not really joking. He firmly believes that once researchers understand how brains work, "we will discover ways to upload our minds into machines." He predicts that our AI descendants (what AI researcher Hans Moravec called our mind children) will eventually leave the planet and spread throughout the universe. "If we are the only intelligence in the universe, then we are obligated to ensure that the universe remains meaningful," said Minsky.

Speaking of space travel, Star Trek's Captain Kirk (now days better known as crazy Denny Crane on ABC’s Boston Legal), William Shatner gave a crowd-pleasing speech at the event.

"Maybe the time has come for we human beings to practice intelligent design," he said, endorsing the World Transhumanist Association's goal of using technology to create "better minds, better bodies and better lives."

Ray Kurzweil himself ended the conference by reaffirming his view that we as human beings must reject the fundamentalist desire to define humanity by its limitations. "We are the species that goes beyond our limitations," he declared.

It seems the new trend in transhumanism is to focus more on the possibility of downloading our minds as a computer program of sorts. In effect we could enjoy limitless realities and live forever. However, that kind of technology will be far into the future, if ever. On the other hand, genetically improving humans is within current scientific means, but it’s easy to see why the movement is more hush about the taboo issue of bio-enhancement.

In 2001 Scientists confirmed that at least 30 genetically altered children had already been born using a technique where a fertile women’s genes were combined with an infertile women’s egg and male sperm. The result was healthy children, some of which were indeed found to have genes from three parents, rather than the standard two! This announcement was met with strong opposition and much successful lobbying to ban genetic engineering in humans.

In some minds, human genetic engineering—especially with the transhumanism goal of enhancing body and mind—will inevitably lead to perversions of nature and inequality. But those who support the movement point out that nature is already perverse and unequal, in the form of endowing some with fabulous health, and others with disabilities and disease.

Transhumanism not only supports using new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, but also promotes erasing what is considered undesirable aspects of the human condition, such as, disease, aging and involuntary death. The general idea is that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather an early and limited phase of human evolution.

Whether we are someday uploaded into an advanced computer system, bio-engineered to be immortal superhumans, or just remain our boring old mortal selves…only time will tell.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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