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Transhumanism is part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. As such transhumanism has also inherited the internal tensions and contradictions of the broad Enlightenment tradition. From the beginning thinkers and movements have interpreted core Enlightenment values of reason, secularism, self-determination, progress, universalism and individualism in radically different ways. It is essential that transhumanists understand how our internal divisions and arguments are playing these three hundred year old debates so that we can avoid old mistakes and dead ends."Dr. J." Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and the former Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association. A bioethicist and sociologist, Dr. Hughes teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University.
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J. Hughes
Humanity+ Summit – June 12, 2010 Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006
Natural philosophers
1660 Wishlist1.Life extension, anti-aging therapies, transplants, telemedicine
2.Strength and speed enhancement, body armor
3.Glasses, telescopes, microscopes and electric light
4.Flying, traveling under water, GPS locators
5.Speeding up agricultural production
6.Smart drugs, amphetamines, sleeping pills, analgesics and hallucinogens
7.Synthetic biology and genetic engineering.
“D'Alembert's Dream” 1769
Mind = body/brain
Animals can evolve intelligence
Machine minds are possible
Minds can be stored and re-bodied
Science can bring back the dead
Human-animal hybrids OK
Sexual freedom
Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)
Reason liberates us from church, authoritarianism, nature
Women’s suffrage Opposed to slavery Radical life extension Freedom from work
through technology
Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006
Marquis de Condorcet
"Nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us."
Copyright Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies 2006
Arguments within H+ and between H+ and our pro-Enlightenment friends
A four hundred year-old conversation
Parallel movements and issues
We promote reason, but reason is not self-validating
Acknowledge our pre-rational side
Natural philosophers divided between deists and atheists
If super-intelligence is possible, then god(s) are possible
Why shouldn’t smart people control the things instead of democracy or markets?
How about super-friendly AIs?
Rational planning vs. exchange between rational actors
Democratization of economic power vs. minimizing state power
Faith in the inevitability of progress vs. radical uncertainty
Existential risks Optimism of the
will and pessimism of the intellect
Enforcing ethical universals, while respecting pluralism and the contingent, evolving nature of our values
Evolutionary psychology, Jon Haidt and Sam Harris
Liberal individualism vs. the illusion of autonomous, continuous, discrete selves
If we upload and live for millennia, who survives?
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
ieet.orgdirector@ieet.org
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