 Democratic Transhumanism 2.0
James Hughes Ph.D.
Public Policy Studies
71 Vernon St.
Hartford, CT 06106
860-297-2376
james.hughes@trincoll.edu
An earlier, but substantially different, version of this
essay was published in
Transhumanity, April 28, 2002
version française
Abstract
Biopolitics is emerging as an axis of modern politics alongside economic
politics and cultural politics. Transhumanists, people who embrace
technologies that extend and enhance regardless of their effect on “natural”
life spans, limitations or social institutions, are the progressive end of
the new biopolitical continuum. BioLuddites, who call for bans on
technologies that threaten the “natural,” are conservative end of the new
biopolitics.
But biopolitics only complicates the preexisting political landscape,
they doesn’t supplant it. There are Christian fundamentalists, centrists and
socialist-feminists forming alliances to to oppose human genetic engineering
and nanotechnology. But the transhumanists are, so far, much less diverse,
mostly adhering to one or another flavor of libertarianism. Democratic
transhumanists, pro-scitech social democrats or Left technoutopians are
conspicuously absent from their theoretical niche in this new political
landscape. This essay is an attempt to identify democratic transhumanists
and urge their coalescence.
Democratic transhumanism stems from the assertion that human beings will
generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and
social forces that control their lives. Faith in science and democracy was
more closely linked in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and technoutopian radicals dominated its shadow, the romantic Left Luddites.
Since World War Two however Luddism has superceded technooptimism on the
Left, while libertarians have become the leading champions of technology.
Luddism has also risen to ascendence in Western bioethics, which has a
professional interest in fear-mongering about new technologies. President
Bush’s new Bioethics Commission and the struggle over embryo use in research
makes clear the increasingly important role that bioethicists will play in
the emerging biopolitics.
I argue why democrats should embrace science, technology and
transhumanism: (1) left Luddism inappropriately equates technologies with
the power relations around those technologies; democratic technology policy
requires an acknowledgement of the potential benefits of technology, not
simply a futile effort to slow all technological innovation. (2) Technology
can help us transcend some of the fundamental causes of inequalities of
power. (3) Left Luddism is boring and depressing; it has no energy to
inspire movements to create a new and better society.
Then I argue that the libertarian transhumanists need to engage with
democracy since (1) state action is required to address catastrophic threats
from transhumanist technologies; (2) only believable and effective
state-based policies to prevent catastrophic consequences from new
technologies will reassure skittish publics that they do not have to be
banned; (3) social policies must explicitly address public concerns that
biotechnology will exacerbate social inequality; (4) monopolistic practices
and overly restrictive intellectual property law can seriously delay the
development of transhuman technologies, and restrict their access; (5) only
alliances with other cultural and biological minorities, and a strong
liberal democratic society and state can ensure that posthumans are not
persecuted; and (6) libertarian transhumanists are inconsistent in arguing
for the free market on the grounds of its evolved “naturalness” when
transhumanists are champions of the artificial.
Finally, I present a eleven-point program for democratic transhumanists:
(1) Build the transhumanist movement, (2) Guarantee morphological freedom
and bodily autonomy, (3) Defend scientific research from Luddite bans, while
embracing legitimate safety and efficacy regulations, (4) Protect scientific
access to knowledge from overly aggressive intellectual property law, (5)
Expand federal funding for research into transhuman technologies, (6) Create
national health plans which include transhuman tech, (7) Expand federal
support to education, (8) Provide job retraining and an income to the
structurally unemployed, (9) Solidarize with sexual, cultural, and racial
minorities, especially with morphological minorities such as the disabled
and transgendered, (10) Support rights for Great Apes, dolphins and whales,
(11) Strengthen democratic world government.
Politics of the 21st Century
Political movements in the industrialized world in the 20th century have
been defined by two broad axes, economic politics and cultural politics.
Economic conservatives are generally opposed to the social welfare state,
trade unions, taxation, business regulation and economic redistribution.
Economic progressives generally favor all these measures. Cultural
conservatives are generally nationalists, ethnic chauvinists or racists,
religious conservatives, and opponents of women’s equality, sexual freedom
and civil liberties. Cultural progressives are secular, educated,
cosmopolitan, and supporters of civil liberties and minority rights. Being
situated along one of these dimensions has predicted well one’s position on
a variety of other issues on that dimension, but has not predicted well
one’s position on the other axis. The issues within each axis have developed
an ideological consistency that held them together.
In Table One below, movements and parties can be parsed into one corner
or another of the terrain, or the many points in between.
The emergence of biotechnological controversies, however, is giving rise
to a new axis, not entirely orthogonal to the previous dimensions but
certainly distinct and independent of them. I call this new axis
biopolitics, and the ends of its spectrum are transhumanists (the
progressives) and, at the other end, the bio-Luddites or
bio-fundamentalists. Transhumanists welcome the new biotechnologies, and the
choices and challenges they offer, believing the benefits can outweigh the
costs. In particular, they believe that human beings can and should take
control of their own biological destiny, individually and collectively
enhancing our abilities and expanding the diversity of intelligent life.
Bio-fundamentalists, however, reject genetic choice technologies and
“designer babies,” “unnatural” extensions of the life span, genetically
modified animals and food, and other forms of hubristic violations of the
natural order. While transhumanists assert that all intelligent “persons”
are deserving of rights, whether they are human or not, the
biofundamentalists insist that only “humanness,” the possession of human DNA
and a beating heart, is a marker of citizenship and rights.
The biopolitical spectrum is still emerging, starting first among
intellectuals and activists. Self-described “transhumanists” and “Luddites”
are the most advanced and self-conscious of an emerging wave of the public’s
ideological crystallization. We are at the same place in the crystallization
of biopolitics as left-right economic politics was when Marx helped found
the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, or when the Fabian
Society was founded in England in 1884: intellectuals and activists
struggling to make explicit the battle lines that are already emerging,
before popular parties have been organized and masses rallied to their
banners.
The new biopolitics will not supplant the older political axes, but
rather will another dimension of complexity to contemporary politics. As in
Figure 2 below, we will find biopolitical alliances that crosscut all of our
previous alliances, and various amalgams of biopolitics with economic and
cultural conservatism.
A peculiarity of current biopolitics however is that while
bio-conservatives have formed alliances from right to left to oppose
cloning, stem cell research, genemod food, and other biotech innovations,
until very recently the majority of transhumanists have been libertarians.
As a consequence, issues of equality and solidarity get scant attention from
defenders of biotechnological choice and progress. This essay is an attempt
to address that gap, and to argue for a “democratic transhumanism.”
Democratic transhumanism is more than a missing permutation of political
ideas, but also the natural extension of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and
the rationalist and radical democratic tradition it birthed.
Democratic Transhumanism
Democratic transhumanism stems from the assertion that human beings will
generally be happier when they take rational control of the natural and
social forces that control their lives. This fundamental humanistic
assertion has led to two intertwined sets of Enlightenment values: the
democratic tradition with its values of liberty, equality, solidarity and
collective self-governance, and to the belief in reason and scientific
progress, that human beings can use reason and technology to improve the
conditions of life.
Within the democratic tradition there are many variants emphasizing
various combinations and interpretations of liberty, equality and
solidarity. The new Right represents the most minimal interpretation of the
democratic mandate, rejecting any extension of liberty, equality or
solidaristic social policies. The libertarian tradition seeks to expand
personal and economic liberty, but to the exclusion of social policies to
ameliorate inequality or democratize economic power.
The fullest interpretation of the democratic ideals of liberty, equality
and solidarity is found in the social democratic tradition. As Amartya Sen
has ably argued, true freedom for real people (as opposed to abstract
Lockeian free men) requires access to health care, universal education, and
the amelioration of social inequality. Social democracy pursues economic
equality, the democratic control of economic forces, and solidaristic social
policies, as well as personal and civil liberties and minority rights. The
struggle for the most radical interpretation of democracy, of a deepening of
liberty, equality and solidarity, is expressed in modern social democracy.
Technoutopianism and the Left
The other strain of the Enlightenment, the belief in science, reason and
human progress, has been a natural complement at the philosophical level to
the democratic tradition. Science and democracy are the right and left hands
of what Marx called the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of
freedom. The advances in science helped delegitimate the rule of kings and
the power of the church.
Nineteenth century socialists, feminists and democrats were therefore
also generally champions of reason and science. Technoutopianism, atheism,
and scientific rationalism have been associated with the democratic,
revolutionary and utopian left for most of the last two hundred years.
Radicals like Joseph Priestley pursued scientific investigation while
championing democracy and freedom from religious tyranny. Robert Owens,
Fourier and Saint-Simon in the early nineteenth century inspired
communalists with their visions of a future scientific and technological
evolution of humanity using reason as its religion. The Oneida community,
America’s longest-lived nineteenth century “communist” group, practiced
extensive eugenic engineering through arranged breeding. Radicals seized on
Darwinian evolution to validate the idea of social progress. Bellamy’s
socialist utopia in Looking Backward, which inspired hundreds of socialist
clubs in the late nineteenth century U.S. and a national political party,
was as highly technological as Bellamy’s imagination. For Bellamy and the
Fabian Socialists, socialism was to be brought about as a painless corollary
of industrial development.
Marx and Engels saw more pain and conflict involved, but agreed about the
inevitable end. Marxists argued that the advance of technology laid the
groundwork not only for the creation of a new society, with different
property relations, but also for the emergence of new human beings
reconnected to nature and themselves. At the top of the agenda for empowered
proletarians was “to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as
possible.” The nineteenth and twentieth century Left, from social democrats
to Communists, were focused on industrialization, economic development and
the promotion of science, reason and the idea of progress.
The Estrangement of Technology and the Left
So why did these two strains of thought become estranged in the late 20th
century? Why are so many contemporary social democrats, feminists, and
Greens suspicious and hostile to biotechnologies, computers and science in
general? The answer probably starts with the left-romantic traditions that
grew up in reaction to modern technology. William Morris’ pastoralist
visions of a deindustrialized socialism, Luddite machine-wrecking by the
proto-worker’s movement, and absorption into pseudo-science, spiritualism
and back-to-land communalism by bohemian radicals were all reactions to
capitalism. The romantics and Luddites associated technology with
capitalism, and thought that they could create a healthier, more egalitarian
society only by fighting the new technologies. In fact, in the Communist
Manifesto Marx and Engels specifically warns against clerical, aristocratic
and petit-bourgeois socialists who advance pastoralism and pre-industrial
production as the cure to social ills.
But it wasn’t until World War Two that the generally tight association of
the Left with science, technology and reason began to be superceded by the
romantic tradition. Left interest in re-engineering the nature of Man was
silenced by Nazi eugenics. The gas chambers revealed that modern technology
could be used by a modern state for horrific uses, and the atomic bomb posed
a permanent technological threat to humanity’s existence. The ecological
movement suggested that industrial activity was threatening all life on the
planet, while the anti-nuclear power movement inspired calls for
renunciation of specific types of technology altogether. The counter-culture
attacked positivism, and lauded pre-industrial ways of life. While the
progressives and New Dealers had built the welfare state to be a tool of
reason and social justice, the New Left joined cultural conservatives and
free-market libertarians in attacking it as a stultifying tool of
oppression, contributing to the general decline in faith in democratic
governments.
Intellectual trends such as deconstruction began to cast doubt on the
“master narratives” of political and scientific progress, while cultural
relativism eroded progressives’ faith that industrialized secular liberal
democracies were in fact superior to pre-industrial and Third World
societies. As the Left gave up on the idea of a sexy, high-tech vision of a
radically democratic future, libertarians became associated with
technological progress. Techno-enthusiasm on the Left was supplanted by
pervasive Luddite suspicion about the products of the corporate consumerist
machine. Celebrating technology was something GE and IBM did in TV ads to
cover up their complicity in napalming babies. Activists fight the machine.
Bioethics, Technology and Democratic Values
During this period, philosophers and theologians began to address
themselves to emerging ethical issues in medicine and biological research,
giving birth to the field of bioethics. Although many of the early
participants in the field were motivated by theology, the field quickly
adopted a set of secular, liberal democratic values and principles as their
basic consensual starting place. Most notably, Beauchamp and Childress have
argued for the now broadly popular core bioethical principles of autonomy,
justice and beneficence, which are direct corollaries of liberty, equality
and solidarity.
In the seventies, countering the pervasive hysteria about in vitro
fertilization and genetic engineering, and the theological warnings about
playing God, there were occasional secular humanist voices such as John
Fletcher who argued that humans have a right to control their own genetics.
But the focus of most bioethicists’ attention was on protecting patients
from unethical scientific research and overly aggressive applications of
end-of-life care, protecting the public from science and technology rather
than securing their rights to it. As bioethics matured it became clear that
professional bioethicists gained far more traction by exacerbating the
public’s Luddite anxieties than by assuaging them. If cloning is really just
the creation of delayed twins, and not a profound threat to everything we
hold dear, who is going to fund bioethics conferences to address it, and
empower bioethicists to forbid scientific research into cloning?
Today most bioethicists, informed by and contributing to the growing
Luddite orientation in left-leaning arts and humanities faculties, start
from the assumption that new biotechnologies are being developed in
unethical ways by a rapacious medical-industrial complex, and will have
myriad unpleasant consequences for society, especially for women and the
powerless. Rather than emphasizing the liberty and autonomy of individuals
who may want to adopt new technologies, or arguing for increased equitable
access to new biotechnologies, balancing attention to the “right from”
technology with attention to the “right to” technology, most bioethicists
see it as their responsibility to slow the adoption of biotechnology
altogether.
Bioethics is proto-biopolitics. As public debate and biopolitical
ideologies crystallize and polarize, bioethicists will increasingly be
revealed as partisan activists rather than experts applying universally
accepted ethical principles. In fact, the mask has already seriously
slipped. While President Clinton’s Presidential Bioethics Commissison was
broadly representative of academic bioethics, the political design of
President Bush’s Bioethics Commission is quite naked. Bush chose Leon Kass
as Grand Vizier of his committee, a man who is opposed to every intervention
into human reproduction from in vitro fertilization to reproductive cloning,
capping the ascendance of Luddism in bioethics. Kass in turn stacked the
committee with both conservative bioethicists, such as Mary Ann Glendon and
Gilbert Meilander, and conservatives with little or no connection to
academic bioethics, such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer. The
current campaign of the Bush administration and Kass’ committee is to
criminalize the use of embryos and embryo cloning in research.
Although the backbone of opposition to stem cell research using embryos
research comes from the right-to-life movement, the Christian Right has been
joined by the Left bio-Luddites. Jeremy Rifkin, long a gadfly organizing
left-right coalitions to oppose gene patenting, cloning and surrogate
motherhood, distributed a petition in March which was signed by more than a
hundred prominent bioethicists and progressive activists implicitly
endorsing the Republican-backed Brownback legislation in Congress to
criminalize medical research using embryos. Fortunately, the coalition in
support of embryo cloning research quickly contacted many of the signers and
discovered they had no idea that they had endorsed the criminalization of
medical research. Now pro- and anti-embryo cloning petitions for
progressives and conservatives have proliferated, making clear both that
biopolitics is orthogonal to the pre-existing political landscape, and that
bioethics is increasingly a political, not merely academic, exercise.
Why Democrats Should Embrace Transhumanism
Luddism is a political dead-end for progressive politics. Progressives
must revive the techno-optimist tradition if they want to achieve the goals
of furthering liberty, equality and solidarity.
First, left Luddism inappropriately equates technologies with the power
relations around those technologies. Technologies do not determine power
relations, they merely create new terrains for organizing and struggle. Most
new technologies open up new possibilities for both expanded liberty and
equality, just as they open new opportunities for oppression and
exploitation. Since the technologies will most likely not be stopped,
democrats need to engage with them, articulate policies that maximize social
benefits from the technologies, and find liberatory uses for the
technologies. If biotechnology is to be rejected simply because it is a
product of capitalism, adopted in class society, then every technology must
be rejected. The mission of the Left is to assert democratic control and
priorities over the development and implementation of technology. But
establishing democratic control over technological innovation is not the
same as Luddism. In fact, to the extent that advocates for the democratic
control of technology do not guarantee benefits from technology, and attempt
to suppress technology altogether, they will lose public support.
Second, technology can help us transcend some of the fundamental causes
of inequalities of power. Although we will never eliminate inequalities of
intelligence and knowledge, the day is not far off when all humans can be
guaranteed sufficient intelligence to function as active citizens. One of
the most important progressive demands will be to ensure universal access to
genetic choice technologies which permit parents to guarantee their children
biological capacities equal to those of other children. Technologically
assisted birth, eventually involving artificial wombs, will free women from
being necessary, vulnerable vessels for the next generation. Morphological
freedom, the ability to change one’s body, including one’s abilities,
weight, gender and racial characteristics, will reduce body-based
oppressions (disability, fat, gender and race) to aesthetic prejudices.
Third, Left Luddism is boring and depressing; it has no energy to inspire
movements to create a new and better society. The Left was built by people
inspired by millenial visions, not by people who saw a hopeless future of
futile existential protest. Most people do not want to live in a future
without telecommunications, labor-saving devices, air travel and medicine.
The Next Left needs to rediscover its utopian imagination if it is to renew
itself, reconnect with the popular imagination, and remain relevant. The
Next Left needs visionary projects worthy of a united transhuman world, such
as guaranteeing health and longevity for all, eliminating work, and
colonizing the Solar System.
Why Transhumanists Should Embrace Democratic Values
What reasons can we mobilize to convince generally libertarian
transhumanists to embrace egalitarianism, majority rule and the social
welfare state? The best argument would be a proof that social democracy
maximizes social welfare better than the chimerical unfettered free-market.
But this is also the most difficult argument, since it weighs actual
existing states against as yet unobserved perfect markets. Of course, the
democratic Left is not immune to this style of argument either, pitting
actual existing capitalisms against idealized democratic socialisms.
Unfortunately, when both sides restrict themselves to empirical comparisons
of states and social policies there are too many mitigating circumstances to
come to many conclusions other than that the complete elimination of markets
or of states do not generally work very well. Political convictions are
largely a matter of faith.
What then of arguments from within the transhumanist worldview?
First, state action is required to address catastrophic threats from
transhumanist technologies. Most transhumanists acknowledge that
nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence could cause
catastrophes if used for terrorist or military purposes, or accidentally
allowed to reproduce in the wild. Contemplation of these catastrophic
scenarios has led prominent transhumanists, such as Max More the founder and
president of the Extropy Institute, to move away from libertarianism and to
endorse prophylactic government policies. Requiring nanotechnology firms to
take out insurance against the accidental destruction of the biosphere just
isn’t very practical. What insurance policy covers accidental destruction of
the biosphere? How could the externalities of bioterrorism be internalized
into a cost accounting of a gene therapy firm? Only governments are in a
position to create the necessary levels of prophylaxis, and most
transhumanists can agree on this point.
Second, 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. Because of the weakness of social
democracy in the U.S., current technology policy is dominated by ignorant
hysteria on one side and greed on the other, politicians feeding off of
populist Luddite hysteria and corporate anti-regulatory lobbyists. Publics
must be offered a choice other than that of unfettered free-market
technology versus bans. If transhumanists do not acknowledge the legitimacy
of regulation, and attempt to craft and support responsible legislation,
they cede the field to the Luddites. These choices require strong social
democratic governments, such as those of Europe, that can act independent of
corporate interests and vocal extremists. We need a strong social democratic
regulatory apparatus that does not block transhuman technologies for Luddite
reasons, but that also will ensure that transhuman 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.
Third, social policies must explicitly address public concerns that
biotechnology will exacerbate social inequality. Libertarian transhumanists
have a forceful answer to the challenge that biotechnology will be used for
totalitarian applications: in a liberal society, each individual will choose
for themselves whether to adopt the technologies. But what is their answer
to the threat of growing class polarization? Biotechnologies will make it
possible for the wealthy to have healthier, stronger, more intelligent and
longer-lived children. Overcoming popular resistance to technology will
require not only assuring publics that they are safe and will not be forced
on anyone, but also that there will be universal, equitable access to their
benefits through public financing. In other words, genetic choice and
enhancement technologies must be included in a national health insurance
program.
Nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will also exacerbate
inequality by contributing to structural unemployment through automation.
Work will be increasingly unnecessary in the 21st century. If
techno-optimists do not work to ameliorate structural unemployment through
expansions in the welfare state, job retraining, establishing a shorter
work-week and work-life, and a guaranteed social income, then we are likely
to see the return of old-school Luddism, machine-smashing by the unemployed.
Fourth, monopolistic practices and overly restrictive intellectual
property law can seriously delay the development of transhuman technologies,
and restrict their access. Applications of intellectual property law that
are over-generous to corporations may restrict access to information and
tools in ways that slow innovation. By engaging with law and public policy,
transhumanists can protect the public commons in biomedical information
essential to the advance of science.
Fifth, only a strong liberal democratic state can ensure that posthumans
are not persecuted. The posthuman future will be as threatening to
unenhanced humans as gay rights or women’s liberation have been to
patriarchs and homophobes, or immigrant rights are to nativists. While
libertarian transhumanists may imagine that they will be able to protect
themselves if they are well-armed and have superior reflexes, they will be
severely outnumbered. Nor is civil war an attractive outcome. Rather
transhumanists must understand their continuity with the civil rights
movements of the past and work to build coalitions with sexual, cultural,
racial and religious minorities to protect liberal democracy. We need a
strong democratic state that protects the right of avantgarde minorities to
innovate and experiment with their own bodies and minds.
Transhumanists must also come to some terms with congenial wing of the
animal rights movement since, like animal rights, transhumanism is opposed
to anthropocentrism. But rather than rights for all life, transhumanist
ethics seeks to establish the solidarity of and citizenship for all
intelligent life. Transhumanists look forward to a society in which humans,
post-humans and intelligent non-humans are all citizens of the polity.
Consistent with this would be the demands of the Great Ape Project for an
extension of human level protections to the great apes.
Sixth, libertarian transhumanists are inconsistent in arguing for the
free market. The dominant argument for the free market on the part of
libertarian transhumanists comes from Hayek: that the market is a naturally
evolved, emergent phenomenon without conscious guidance, which allocates
resources better than planning. But the goal of transhumanism is precisely
to supplant the natural with the planned, replacing chance with design. The
key to transhumanism is faith in reason, not in nature.
In any case, the assertion that the market s naturally evolved while
governance structures and polities are artificial impositions on nature is
bad sociology. All functioning markets require norms, rules, laws,
legislatures, police, courts and planning. All democratic polities require
the action of millions of autonomous agents aggregating their interests,
expressing themselves in voluntary behavior, and creating an emergent
political system. The market is not any more natural than democracy, even if
being “natural” was a transhumanist virtue.
Weaving a New Democratic Transhumanism
Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transhumanists
At the 2003 Transvision conference Vanessa Foster, the chair of the
National Transgender Acton Coalition, took the podium in the “The Future of
Sex and Gender” workshop and announced that she was a pre-operative
transsexual. Her presentation was built around the theme of the village
mob’s attack on a misunderstood Frankenstein’s monster. Between images of
beautiful transsexuals and stills from Frankenstein movies, Ms. Foster
declared that transsexuals were the first transhumanists. As history we can
debate the point, but as politics it was an historical moment. Transhumanism
as a vanguard civil rights movement had arrived, and the stunned but open
expressions on the faces of the largely straight male audience showed the
work that transhumanists still needed to do to reach out to the disparate
constituencies that will build democratic transhumanism.
There are many constituencies and ideological threads that need to woven
into democratic transhumanism. First among them there are the disparate
movements working to deepen our understanding of human rights to include the
rights to control the body, such as transsexuals, the shock troops of
transhumanism. Reproductive rights activists, who insist that women have
subsidized access to reproductive and contraceptive technology, are natural
allies of a democratic transhumanism. Although many feminists have been
influenced by ecofeminist bioLuddism and left Luddite arguments about the
danger of corporate technology, there is a broader feminist constituency
that sees no contradiction between women’s empowerment and using technology
to expand their control over their lives. Only a democratic transhumanism,
which embraces the need for safety regulation, can respond adequately to the
legitimate concerns about the dangers flags about medical technology raised
for feminists by spectacular disasters like hormone replacement therapy.
An ideological thread that has grown in academia for the last twenty
years, inspired by left feminists’ rejection of ecofeminist bioLuddism, is
found in the cyborgology of Donna Haraway. In 1984 Donna Haraway wrote “A
Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the
1980s,” as a critique of ecofeminism, and it landed with the reverberating
bang of a hand grenade. Haraway argued it was precisely in the eroding
boundary between human beings and machines, in the integration of women and
machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal
dualisms. Haraway concludes “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” and
proposes that the cyborg is the liberatory mythos for women. Haraway’s essay
and subsequent writings have inspired the new sub-discipline of
“cyborgology” or “cyberfeminism,” made up of culture critics who use the
cyborg metaphor and the postmodernist questions Haraway poses to explore the
woman-machine interface. As yet there has been little cross-pollination
between the left-wing academic cyborgologists and the transhumanists, but
the mutual recognition and ties are growing.
Gays, lesbians and bisexuals are also natural allies of democratic
transhumanism since the right to control one’s own body means being able to
share it with other consenting adults. The alleged natural law philosophers
attacking gay rights and gay marriage are deploying the same arguments
against human enhancement, and when they attack gays and lesbians’ use of
reproductive technology they provide a natural link issue. While in-vitro
fertilization allows lesbians to have children without having sex with a
man, cloning would allow them to have a child related to only one parent.
Work on fertilizing eggs with the DNA from another egg, or replacing egg DNA
with sperm DNA, would allow gay parents to both have a genetic link to their
children.
One activist who saw that link and ran with it is veteran gay rights
activist Randy Wicker. Wicker was one of the first gay rights campaigners to
go on radio and television in the early 1960s, and he was active in gay
rights in New York City till the 1990s. Then in 1996, when an international
backlash started against the cloning of the sheep Dolly in Scotland, Wicker
had an epiphany. He saw that the right to clone was a fundamental
reproductive rights issue and gay rights issue since “Cloning renders
heterosexuality's historic monopoly on reproduction obsolete.” Wicker
started the Clone Right United Front with other gay rights activists, then
co-founded the Human Cloning Foundation, and has become a national spokesman
on cloning as a reproductive right.
Wicker is fighting an uphill battle trying to fight the hysterical
opposition, especially in light of the many birth defects that still plague
mammal clones. But he is beginning to have some progress convincing gay
activists, such as Chandler Burr, author of A Separate Creation: The Search
for the Biological Origin of Sexual Orientation, who acknowledges that
cloning and reproductive technology would allow gay couples to have children
that were related to only one or both of their parents, and therefore poses
a profound challenge to heterosexism. "It takes us another degree further
from the idea that babies are produced only by two heterosexual people
having heterosexual intercourse.”
Another enormous constituency for democratic transhumanism are the
millions of people that are made criminals by laws against cognitive
liberty, i.e. laws against illicit drugs. Drugs are of course a significant
public health problem, but the Drug War only makes that problem worse, while
it diverts resources from vital social needs. If people’s use of drugs makes
them sick, they should be cared for by the health care system, not by a
prison. But our drugs and other brain control technologies will only become
more complex, and the technologies of surveillance and repression more
powerful. A society that denies us the right to put cannabis in our brain is
a society more likely to deny us a right to the many intelligence and mood
modifiers that will soon be available. Instead of allowing individuals to
use brain technology in self-determining ways, and helping those who have
problems, the Drug War is increasingly threatening to use brain technology
as a weapon of control. For instance, the emerging lines of drug vaccines
are not simply developed as voluntary tools for people trying to kick
addictions, but as preventive measures that businesses can require their
employees to take, allow with regular drug testing. A far better use of
public monies, as transhumanist David Pearce proposes in “The Hedonistic
Imperative,” would be to develop better drugs with fewer health risks.
Ironically, after warning of the anti-democratic consequences of mass
intoxication in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley came to the opposite
conclusion toward the end of his life, after a positive experience with
mescaline. In Doors of Perception he writes “The only reasonable policy is
to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to
exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these
other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others
religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the
need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive
surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which
will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in
the long run than it does good in the short.”
Fighting the Drug War puts democratic transhumanists in solidarity not
only with the millions of political prisoners serving time for nonviolent
drug use and possession, but also with the new cutting edge activists for
cognitive liberty, such as Wrye Sententia and her Center for Cognitive
Liberty and Ethics, who says "We seek to establish, promote, and protect the
right of each individual to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, to
engage in multiple modes of thought, and to experience alternative states of
consciousness."
Disabled Cyborgs and Secular Scientists
Disabled cyborgs, using the latest assistive technology and their eyes
fixed on medical progress, are also natural allies of democratic
transhumanists who would support both their rights to social integration and
their technological liberation. Disabled people in the wealthier
industrialized countries, with their wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, novel
computing interfaces and portable computing, are the most technologically
dependent humans ever known. Some disabled people are consciously embracing
the transgressive image of the cyborg. Paraplegic journalist John
Hockenberry made the point that disabled people are pushing the boundaries
of humanness in an article in Wired:
Humanity's specs are back on the drawing board, thanks to some unlikely
designers, and the disabled have a serious advantage in this conversation.
They've been using technology in collaborative, intimate ways for years - to
move, to communicate, to interact with the world. …People with disabilities
- who for much of human history died or were left to die - are now, due to
medical technology, living full lives. As they do, the definition of
humanness has begun to widen.
Probably the most prominent symbol of disabled transhumanist activism
these days is Christopher Reeve, the former Superman actor who became a
tireless campaigner for biomedical research after a horse-riding accident
left him quadriplegic. Reeve has been especially important defending the use
of cloned embryos in stem cell research.
Extreme disability activists have been alienated from human enhancement
technology by the idea that technologies which reduce the incidence of
disability, such as prenatal screening, genetic engineering and even
assistive technologies like cochlear implants, are genocidal “eugenics.” But
most disabled people are not Luddites. Most disabled think we can allow
parents to choose to have non-disabled children and that technology can be
used to overcome or cure disabilities, while we fight for equality for
people with disabilities. Certainly those rights would include the right of
adults to choose not to be “fixed,” and to choose to live with bodies that
aren’t “normal.” The right not to be coerced by society to adopt a “normal”
body is also a central demand of transhumanists.
There is now also a small, explicitly transhumanist organization for
people with disabilities, the Ascender Alliance. Founded by Briton Alan
Pottinger, the Ascender manifesto acknowledges the disability rights
movements’ critique of “eugenics” and concern that human enhancement may
leave behind the disabled. But instead of embracing Luddism, Pottinger calls
on the disabled to embrace transhumanism in order to remove “political,
cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-realization and
augmentation” since “every human being has the right to ascension.”
Pottinger’s assertion that society has an obligation to assist every
individual’s right to self-improvement suggests another reason that the
disabled are a strong democratic transhumanist constituency, in addition to
their transgression of “humanness”: they are generally strong supporters of
the social welfare state, and one of the strongest arguments for it. The
disability rights activists are already campaigning worldwide for increased
government monies for assistive technology, and they will be key allies in
the democratic transhumanist demand that everyone who has need of a
cyborgological implant or gene therapy to correct a disability should have
one through public subsidy. The costs of the treatments and technologies
will have to drop and their safety and reliability increase, but eventually
the demand that the blind should see, the lame walk and mute speak will
become part of the overall political agenda.
More generally patient advocacy groups and scientific lobbies share a
broad interest with the transhumanist movement in seeing more public
financing of medical research and protecting the freedom to conduct research
from bioLuddite bans. The struggle over NIH funding for, and bills
criminalizing, stem cell research have mobilized an enormous coalition in
defense of scientific research. The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical
Research, principal pro-stem cells lobby, includes dozens of powerful
Washington lobbies, including patient groups like the American Diabetes
Association and the American Infertility Association; physician
organizations like the American Medical Association and the American College
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; individual research universities such as
the University of California System, and education associations such as the
American Council on Education; foundations like the one founded by
Christopher Reeve; and industry groups like the Biotechnology Industry
Association and National Venture Capital Association. The broad alliance of
patient, provider and educational groups against the right-to-life lobby and
the Republican Party is extremely good news for a democratic transhumanism,
and hopefully the trend that will continue as the Bush administration
continues to pursue policies hostile to science.
Most American scientists are secular, civil libertarian and lean toward
the Democrats. Scientists believe passionately in scientific freedom, are
incredulous at neoLuddite attacks on technological progress, and suspicious
of the religious fundamentalist base in the Republican Party. Scientists
have grown even more restive under the Bush administration as it dismissed
the scientific consensus on stem cells, climate change, Headstart and
abstinence-oriented sex education. When the President’s Council on Bioethics
recommended the banning of therapeutic stem cell cloning, every practicing
scientist voted against the resolution. The Bush has further alienated the
scientific community by promoting scientists to government posts solely on
the basis of their political and religious views. Bush’s post-9/11
restrictions on visas for foreign scientists and students were condemned by
the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and
the Institute of Medicine. Those restrictions recently cost MIT a $400,000
research grant to explore artificial intelligence when it refused to allow
the National Security Agency to vet its foreign graduate students.
The Bush administration’s anti-intellectualism harkens back to Spiro
Agnew’s attack on intellectuals as “effete snobs.” Bush’s political advisor
Karl Rove told the New Yorker that the definition of a Democrat was
“somebody with a doctorate.” Bush has half as many Ph.D.s in his cabinet as
Clinton did, and he moved the Office of Science and Technology Policy
outside the White House and cut its staff. Thanks to these trends a
left-leaning, pro-science politics, i.e. democratic transhumanism, would
have a natural base among scientists.
BioPunks
While libertarians celebrate high tech entrepreneurs and innovators, they
occasionally have qualms about the effects that monopolists like Microsoft
and overly aggressive interpretations of intellectual property law have on
innovation. In reaction to monopolists libertarians have supported voluntary
efforts, such as the open source movement. If we all used Linux, a free
open-source operating system, we could force Microsoft to improve Windows,
or at least that’s how the argument goes. The goal of the open source
movement is challenge the monopolists from below, by building a community
around the constant refining of hopefully more robust and cheaper
information technologies. Most libertarians are far more skittish of
government “trust-busting,” or any “defense of the commons” that declares
the genome and industrial innovation to be public property. Democratic
techno-optimists, on the other hand, are already distinguishing themselves
by their willingness to use anti-trust law, restrictions on intellectual
property, and regulatory standards to protect competition, scientific
innovation and the public good.
For instance science writer Annalee Newitz has pointed to an emerging
“biopunk” ethos in the work of artists and anti-corporate genetics
researchers. Biopunks are committed both to the benefits that can can emerge
from genetic technology, and to opposing the madness of patents on
discovered genomes that allow corporate control of genetic data which should
be in the public domain. Biopunks protest both "bioLuddites and apologists
for the biotech industry." Newitz finds biopunk sensibilities expressed in
groups like the Coalition of Artists and Life Forms (CALF), a loose network
of artists who celebrate biotechnology while remaining critical of its
capitalist exploitation and limitations. Biopunk sensibilities among
scientists, Newitz argues, can be seen in the growing call for the “open
sourcing” of scientific information, from the human genome databases to
scientific journals. Gene sequencers working within the Human Genome
Initative, for instance, deposited their data in the publicly accessible
GenBank, and now researchers outside of corporate labs deposit gene
expression data in the public Gene Expression Omnibus database.
One biopunk effort is the National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Data Center (fMRIDC) established by brain scientist Michael Gazzaniga and
others at Dartmouth College. The fMRIDC aggregates enormous files of brain
scans into a supercomputer to create an atlas of normal and dysfunctional
brains, at work and at play. When cognitive science journals began to
require that the data used in studies they published be submitted for public
use in the fMRIDC scientists balked. Some researchers were involved in
proprietary medical and pharmaceutical research and others simply wanted to
be the sole exploiters of their data. But as Gazzaniga and collaborator
Daniel Rockmore argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education “shared
databases speed the development of the disciplines that use them. Recent
advances in informatics-or data mining-make it possible to use databases as
primary research material. The resulting meta-analyses give researchers
ideas for new experiments, cut down on duplication of effort, and allow
researchers from other disciplines to work in the field.” Most brain
research had received public financing in any case, which obliged
researchers to share their data. In a related effort the International
Cosortium on Brain Mapping has compiled data from the brains of 7000
subjects.
TechnoGaians and Viridians
I like to think (and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
Richard Brautigan "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
A democratic transhumanism also needs to make the case to skeptical and
hostile Greens that the new technologies can be developed safely, and
deployed in ways that prevent and repair the damage we are doing the
ecosystem and human health. This argument connects with the strain of
tech-positive environmentalism, sometimes referred to as TechnoGaianism,
which has grown up with the “appropriate technology” and “alternative
energy” milieu, reflected in journals such as the Whole Earth Review.
Walter Truett Anderson is an example of a technogaian political
philosopher. In To Govern Evolution and Evolution Isn't What It Used to Be
Anderson proposed the only way for humanity to avoid catastrophe in the
ecosphere or in our biomedical interventions is to take democratic
responsibility for managing nature, both in the ecosystem and in our genome.
Today the driving force in evolution is human intelligence. Species
survive or perish because of what people do to them and to their
environments. The land and air and water system are massively altered by
humankind which has become, as one scientist put it, 'a new geological
force…Even our own genetic future is in our hands, guided not by Darwinian
abstractions but by science and medical technology and public policy," he
continued. "This is the project of the coming era: to create a social and
political order -- a global one -- commensurate to human power in nature.
The project requires a shift from evolutionary meddling to evolutionary
governance.
Technogaianism applied to ecosystem management is found in
“reconciliation ecology” writings such as Michael Rosenzweig Win-Win
Ecology. Rosenzweig boils down his approach to the redesign of human habitat
for ecosystem compatibility to several simple steps.
First, drink deeply from the natural history of the species you want to
help. Study their reproductive cycles, their diets, and their behavior.
Abstract the essence of their needs from what you observe. Then apply it
without worrying whether your redesign of the human landscape will resemble
a wilderness. It won't, so feel free to be outrageously creative.
One of the most outrageously creative of technogaian thinkers is the
science fiction author and cyberpunk ideologist Bruce Sterling. In January
of 2000 Sterling returned to his polemicist roots and penned a 4300-word
manifesto for a new “Viridian” green political movement. Sterling accepts
the urgency of climate change and species depletion, but his principal
complaint about contemporary Green politics is that they are Luddite and
dour. He calls for a sexy, high-tech, design movement, to make attractive,
practical ecological tools. Although Sterling steadfastly refuses to argue
for political activism or partisan engagement, like FM-2030 he outlines a
third way between capitalism and socialism involving controls on
transnational capital, redirecting of militaries to peacekeeping,
sustainable industries, increasing leisure time, guaranteed social wage,
education reform, expanded global public health, and gender equity. The
Viridian movement has attracted hundreds of people to participate in its
list, and to receive weekly missives from Sterling about ecologically
appropriate, but exciting, technologies.
The new molecular technologies do carry serious environmental risks that
need serious regulatory oversight, a form of oversight most libertarian
techno-enthusiasts are unwilling to embrace. But the technologies also
promise radical new environmental benefits. Crops can be genetically
engineered which require less agricultural land, pesticides and fertilizer,
and provide more essential nutrients. In Our Molecular Future, Doug Mulhall
outlines a vision of a “nanoecology,” using a convergence of nanotechnology,
genetics and artificial intelligence to prevent and repair ecological
destruction. The new technologies will allow us to design new industrial
processes that use fewer resources and create fewer wastes; to repair the
damage we have already done to the ecosystem; and to protect ourselves and
the ecosystem from natural threats such as asteroids and gamma ray bursts.
For Mulhall, it is our responsibility to the ecosystem to develop these
technologies and use them to protect Earth’s ecosystem.
Nanotechnology pioneers Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson also address the
possible ecological applications of nanotechnology in their book Unbounding
the Future. Even Greenpeace appears to be coming around on the utility of
nanotechnology. In its 2003 review of nanotech and AI titled “Future
technologies, Today’s Choices” Greenpeace says there is no need for bans on
nanotech, or even new regulatory structures, and that “new
technologies...are also an integral part of our solutions to environmental
problems, including renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and
wave power, and waste treatment technologies such as mechanical-biological
treatment.”
Although population growth rather than population control should be our
goal, a high-tech society with a thorough guarantee of individual rights and
a strong democratic state – in other words, the goal of a democratic
transhumanism - is the best guarantee of a low birth rate. Science and
technology make possible contraception, and the industrial employment that
encourages smaller families. Liberal democracies provide women with
education, employment opportunities and publicly financed family planning,
contraception and abortion, giving them the means and incentives to control
their fertility. Affluent liberal democracies also require children to be
educated instead of worked in farms and factories. They invest in public
health to reduce the childhood mortality rate. They ensure the well-being of
the elderly through old age pensions. All are measures that reduce parents'
incentives to have children as investments in their future.
And Everybody Else…
In some sense, as machine intelligence becomes more sophisticated and
increasingly automates manual, service and intellectual labor, we may all
become “disabled,” and we may all have to struggle for our right to Social
Security as a basic human right. On March 22, 1964 The Ad Hoc Committee on
the Triple Revolution sent a long letter to U.S. President Lyndon B.
Johnson. The letter was signed by 34 left-wing intellectuals, including
leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden,
leaders of the US Socialist Party Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the
Nobel-prize winning biologist Linus Pauling, the economists Robert
Heilbroner and Gunnar Myrdal, the futurist Robert Theobald, and my cousin
(five times removed) the sociologist Everett C. Hughes.
The three revolutions that the letter described were the revolution in
armaments, which required new international arrangements to avoid
apocalypse; the global human rights revolution, which required a commitment
to democratization of every country, starting with civil rights for Negroes;
and the “cybernation” revolution, automation, which would require the
establishment of a universal basic income since there would soon be
widespread structural unemployment.
The traditional link between jobs and incomes is being broken. The
economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic
security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work.
Wealth produced by machines rather than by men is still wealth. ….(Therefore
society should provide) every individual and every family with an adequate
income as a matter of right.
Responding to the Triple Revolutions piece in the New York Review of
Books in 1965 the sociologist Daniel Bell dismissed the idea that there
would soon be widespread unemployment from automation since it was only
impacting a couple of industries. Evidence of such an effect would require
that there be rising productivity economy-wide at the same time as rising
unemployment.
Flash forward to the “job-loss recovery” of 2003. Since 2001 the U.S. has
lost 2.7 million jobs. As the economy has picked back up none of those jobs
are coming back. They have all either gone to the developing world or been
taken by machines. As a consequence the economic recovery has seen dramatic
gains in productivity. According to the U.S. Labor Department the amount an
employee produces for each hour of work rose almost 2% just between April
and June of 2004.
The job-loss recovery was also predicted by Hans Moravec in his book
Robot. But he goes on to note that society will be unlikely to put up with
growing inequality and concentration of wealth.
It is unlikely that a future majority of service-providing “commoners”
with more free time, communications and democracy than today would tolerate
being lorded over by a dynasty of non-working hereditary capitalists. They
would vote to change the system. The trend in the social democracies has
been to equalize income by raising the standards of the poorest as high as
the economy can bear. In the age of robots, that minimum will be very high.
He then suggests that capitalism will come to an end and that society
will need to provide a universal basic income
Incremental expansion of such a subsidy would let money from robot
industries, collected as corporate taxes, be returned to the general
population as pension payments. By gradually lowering the retirement age,
most of the population would eventually be supported. The money could be
distributed under other names, but calling it a pension is meaningful
symbolism. Social Security pension payments begun at birth would subsidize a
long, comfortable retirement for the entire original-model human race.
Similarly Marshall Brain, the computer scientist and entrepreneur who
founded the successful HowStuffWorks website and book series, is promoting
his “Robot Nation” epiphany, that half of all jobs in the U.S. will be lost
to the developing world or robots by 2055. Brain suggests that all Americans
receive a guaranteed basic income of $25,000 a year, paid from a general
fund supported by progressive taxation, corporate fines and the sale of
public resources. Brain argues that basic income is necessary for the
survival of capitalism: no consumers, no capitalism.
Moravec and Brain join a growing international movement of economists and
activists advocating a “basic income guarantee” (BIG). BIG is the answer to
the next wave of Luddite machine-wrecking by angry displaced workers. The
Luddites have no faith that democracy can allow everyone to benefit from
technological innovation, and the libertopians think we don’t need democracy
since we have the stock market. But Brain, Moravec, and the BIG movement aim
to prove that democracies can provide universal economic benefits while
advancing the technological innovation necessary to pay for them.
Universal health care and basic income systems are essential as we make
the transhuman transition, not only to ensure equal access to benefits
between the rich and poor, but also between the young and old. As the
population rapidly ages, and the population supporting senior benefits
shrinks both demographically and because of structural unemployment,
generational conflict will be inevitable without programs that provide
universal benefits. Either the shrinking population of angry workers will
wage war on the benefits available to the growing senior and unemployed
population, or we will expand the benefits of income security and health
insurance to everyone.
Building a Democratic Transhumanist Majority
Currently all the self-described “social democratic transhumanists” in
the world could hold a convention in an average sized classroom. That’s not
the point. There is a latent majority constituency for social justice, a
caring society, technological progress, and health and longevity for all.
Even though no politician would get elected on a platform of ape rights,
subsidized intelligence enhancements and a universal guaranteed income, the
basic goals of democratic transhumanism are shared by the vast majority of
people. The challenge is to find issues and struggles that demonstrate the
marginality of the libertarians and bioLuddites.
In 1996 the National Opinion Research Center asked a random sample of
Americans whether it was the government’s responsibility to provide health
care for the sick. As has been true since the first time that survey
question was asked in the 1930s, a majority, 85%, said yes. The survey also
asked whether genetic screening was likely to produce more harm or more
good, and two thirds, 68%, thought it would produce more good than harm.
Looking for the left-leaning techno-optimists with those two tests slightly
more than half of Americans, 56%, are democratic transhumanists. That is the
majority waiting to be having its voice heard.
Some people say that genetic screening is a wonderful medical advance.
Others think it may cause trouble. Based on what you know, do you think
genetic screening will do more good than harm, or more harm than good?
Is it the government’s responsibility to provide health care for the
sick? Good Harm
Yes 56% 27%
No 12% 5%
Source: General Social Survey 1996, National Opinion Research Center
(N=311)
A Democratic Transhumanist Agenda
Whether it amounts to a Singularity or not, the coming decades will turn
our world upside down and our expectations inside out. Radical times call
for radical solutions.
Build the transhumanist movement
Build a global, future-oriented, radically liberal, Next Left
Radicalize “human rights”
- Defend the rights of all human beings oppressed because of their bodies
Democratic transhumanists should build solidarity with all those who are
denied the right to control their own bodies and minds, and those oppressed
because of the bodies and minds they possess. A diverse posthumanity can be
best assured by expanding the bounds of tolerance and equality to include
the full diversity of human beings, sexual, cultural, and racial. Racism and
discrimination in all forms must be opposed. The physically disabled should
have access to the social and technological assistance they need to be equal
citizens. Gender must not determine rights, so civil marriage must be open
to gays and lesbians. People should be allowed to define themselves as any
gender they prefer, and be allowed use technology to sculpt their gender to
fit those preferences, whether they fit the binary gender system or not.
- Support rights for great apes, dolphins and whales
Democratic transhumanists should join the campaigns to extend rights to
great apes, dolphins and whales as a wedge to open rights to all intelligent
persons, defeat human-racism, and build a cyborg citizenship.
- Guarantee the right of all persons to control our own bodies and minds
We not only need to radicalize our understanding of citizens, the bearers
of rights, but also of the rights we have to control our bodies and minds,
and the structures we need to make those freedoms real. The right to control
our bodies and minds should include the right of sane adults to change and
enhance their own minds and bodies, to own our own genetic code, to take
recreational drugs, to control our own deaths, and to have ourselves frozen.
Procreative liberty, an extension of the right to control our body and life,
should include the right to use germinal choice technologies to ensure the
best possible life for our children. Strong democratic government is
required not only to protect these rights, but to ensure that the
technologies are tested for safety so that consumers understand their risks
and benefits. We also need strong social democracies to ensure all citizens
have access to these options, not just the affluent.
Democratize technological innovation
- Support science education and federal research into transhuman
technologies
Democratic transhumanists should support expanded public financing of
higher education and especially science education and scientific research.
American secondary school students, in particular, are woefully behind the
rest of the industrialized world in their preparation for further math,
science, engineering or medical education. As a consequence more American
students get degrees in “parks and recreation” than electrical engineering.
The priorities of federal science funding in medicine, artificial
intelligence and nanotechnology should ensure that transhuman technologies
are developed openly in the public sector not just by secret military and
corporate labs.
- Support appropriate regulations of scientific research and
technological innovation
Democratic transhumanists should defend and promote rigorous, independent
safety testing of transhuman technologies, and reject Luddite bans and
regulations based on vague ethical and social anxieties. International
agencies should be empowered to enforce global regulations on the safety of
industrial and medical technologies. The U.S. Congress should re-establish
the Office of Technology Assessment, and the size and mandate of the EPA and
FDA should be expanded to rapidly vet the safety of new industrial
materials, drugs and medical devices.
- Protect genetic self-ownership, and the genetic and intellectual
commons from patent madness
Patents on existing genomes of plants, animals and humans should be
declared void. Patents on novel gene sequences should be protected, unless
they end up a part of the body of a self-aware citizen, in which case that
person becomes co-owner of the genetic property. Individuals must have
control over their own genome, extending to the privacy of their genetic
information.
Defend and extend social rights
- Build and defend universal health systems with choices
All citizens should be guaranteed equitable access to a basic package of
health care services, including enhancement technologies where fiscally
possible. When safe technologies cannot be provided through the public
health system for political or fiscal reasons, they should be available in
the private sector.
- Establish a guaranteed basic income and expand the social wage
All citizens should be guaranteed a basic income. Public financing of
higher education should be expanded.
Create global solutions
- Build democratic global governance
There should be a global, standing constabulary ready to rapidly
intervene to prevent wars and other disasters. The U.S. should join the
International Criminal Court. The United Nations should be empowered to
collect taxes on international trade and reformed to be directly
representative of world opinion through direct election. World trade
agreements should be coupled with effective regulation by global bodies to
ensure compliance with environmental, consumer protection and worker safety
agreements.
- Ensure access to technology for the developing world
Agencies in the developed world should expand research into technologies
appropriate to the needs of the developing world, and support programs of
technology transfer to the developing world. International institutions such
as WHO, FAO, UNCTAD, UNDP, and UNESCO should be expanded to support
technological diffusion in the developing world.
- Reduce global risks ot the future of civilization
Democratic transhumanists should support the creation of international
bodies capable monitoring and effectively enforcing international agreements
preventing the proliferation of, and requiring the destruction of, weapons
and other dangerous technologies. Global programs to monitor the health of
ecosystem and the threat from asteroids should be expanded.
Let the ruling classes and Luddites tremble at a democratic transhumanist
revolution. Would be genemods and cyborgs! you have nothing to lose but your
human bodies, and longer lives and bigger brains to win!
Transhumans of all countries, unite!
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