Into The Unknowable
by Russell Blackford
The thing about radical enhancement is, it’s radical.
For comparison, Gregory Benford, the award-winning science fiction writer and distinguished astrophysicist, has often emphasized the sheer alienness of intelligent extraterrestrials, if such exist. If we ever encounter them, we must not assume that their thought processes and motivations make intuitive sense in human terms. This idea appears in one of Benford’s early short stories, “In Alien Flesh” (first published 1979), whose protagonist has worked — in terrifying circumstances — studying the alien Drogheda: huge marine creatures, comparable to whales, whose impressive intellects are known only via their mathematics, since they have not built a technological civilization. In an afterword to the story, Benford discusses the frequent representation of aliens in science fiction either as monsters or as analogues for indigenous tribes, but for him what most matters about aliens is that they would be very strange by our standards: “[T]he most compelling aspect of aliens is their fundamental unknowability.”
Benford makes the point succinctly in another story, “Doing Alien”, first published in 1994: “Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.” A variation — “The thing about aliens is, they’re alien” — appears in his 1999 story “A Hunger for the Infinite.” This phrasing, or similar, is now closely associated with Benford.
We might hope that radically transformed human beings, their capacities augmented through technological means such as genetic engineering, brain–machine interfaces, advanced prosthetics, powerful pharmaceuticals, or extraordinary new medical therapies, would not be so deeply unknowable as extraterrestrial aliens. Their psychological nature would, we might assume, be path-dependent, and the path to it would go via the evolved psychology of ordinary human beings. Nonetheless, radical enhancement as it’s understood here would, indeed, be radical in its immediate results and its longer-term consequences. If we greatly extend human capacities, this changes everything. It should not be thought of as merely adding some extras to current Homo sapiens and current human societies. We don’t really know what we’re in for with radical enhancement, and that is, to say the least, a reason to pause and consider the possibilities. Even if we’re not at all technophobic, and even if we’re sympathetic to the general idea of augmenting human capacities, radical enhancement is, at least in part, a step into the unknowable.
The philosopher Nicholas Agar has emphasized this in a valuable body of work that constitutes a thorough critique of radical enhancement and its advocates. As he makes clear, we largely fail when we attempt to imagine what changes would flow from radical enhancement. It’s one thing to be told that new technologies are in the offing that could make us (for example) much stronger, smarter, and longer lived. That sounds attractive, but it’s another thing to imagine in detail what it might be like for us as individuals, and it’s still another to think through how an entire human society — or even our entire species-wide civilization — might function with much smarter, longer-lived, and generally more capable people than any human beings in history. Agar argues that if we really understood what is involved in radical enhancement we’d reject it. We’d prefer ourselves as we are, and we’d try to improve human societies through less drastic means.
As Agar has said, a philosophical interest in human enhancement, in its different degrees, is timely in what has become an age of enhancement. In his 2010 book Humanity’s End, he observes that “aspiring radical enhancers” want extended lifespans, enhanced intelligence, and other extreme augmentation of human capacities almost immediately — if not for themselves, at least for their children. In any event, we are already getting deeper into the game of enhancement. Even if enhancing human capacities is morally okay in principle, which I’ll assume to avoid much-mapped territory, we face important questions about the timing and degree of enhancement to individuals, and about the pace and magnitude of social change. Potentially, we’re at the dawn of a great transition to a different form of civilization and a very different world.
Before going further, we need a few definitions. In Humanity’s End, Agar introduced the concept of radical enhancement as follows: “Radical enhancement involves improving significant human attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings.” He illustrates this by referring to capacities that dramatically exceed, say, the intellect of Albert Einstein, the athletic prowess of the champion sprinter Usain Bolt, or the longevity achieved by the French centenarian Jeanne Calment, who was documented as living for 122 years (from 1875 to 1997). By way of contrast, he distinguishes the idea of moderate enhancement. This might involve, for example, undergoing genetic modification to obtain prowess similar to current Olympic champions.
Agar acknowledges that there could be a grey or vague region between clear cases of radical and clear cases of merely moderate enhancement. That is, we cannot draw a sharp line between capacities that merely exceed current human possibilities and capacities that “dramatically” or “greatly” exceed them. Nonetheless, many imaginary cases undeniably fall into the region of radical enhancement. It is one thing to break the current world record for the 100-metre sprint by a fraction of a second, and a technological innovation assisting this could be regarded as producing a moderate enhancement. It would be another thing — something radical — for one of us to run with the swiftness of a cheetah. Likewise, it is one thing to exceed historically measured levels of human intelligence. It’s another to have intellectual powers that lie on the other side from us of an immense cognitive gulf.
Though Agar is not opposed to all technologies that might enhance human capacities, much of his writing has expressed opposition to radical enhancement as he defines it. On his account, enhancement of human capacities is a good thing, but we could have too much of it.
Interestingly, he does not think genetic enhancement — modifying human DNA to enhance physical and cognitive capacities — is the most troubling issue. In his 2014 book Truly Human Enhancement, he suggests that environmental rather than genetic enhancements should be our focus of moral investigation, since “They’ll be the chief category of changes interfering with autonomous choice or fracturing the human species into haves and have-nots.” In this context, environmental enhancements might include a wide range of non-genetic modifications to human bodies and minds, but especially attempts to integrate our brains and nervous systems with computer technology.
We can usefully bear in mind the variety of forms that enhancement might take, with more than one dimension to classifying them. In a lengthy article published in 2009 in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, the American philosopher Allen Buchanan distinguished usefully between modes of enhancement (such as genetic, cybernetic, and pharmaceutical) and kinds, or types, of enhancement (such as cognitive, motivational, and physical — the latter including resistance to ageing and resistance to disease).
For his part, Agar identifies in Humanity’s End three specific kinds of experience that human beings value, and which he sees as species-relative values. That is, they are values held by Homo sapiens as we are now, and “are unlikely to appeal to posthumans or rational aliens.” They are: first, a general set of humanity-defining experiences and commitments; second, our experiences with our children; and third, elite athleticism. The argument is that radical enhancement would alienate us from each of these things. Furthermore, when we consider undergoing radical enhancement, we need to apply the values that we have now, not some set of new values that we might adopt after being enhanced.
On this occasion, I will not focus mainly on issues as to whether we could ethically “get there” — get to the technology for creating radically enhanced people. I’m mostly concerned with what “there” might be like. However, we will need to give attention to the question of how — and whether — we might navigate a time of transition when people who are enhanced to various degrees (or not at all) must coexist in mixed human/posthuman societies.
Thus, I’m worried about a number of questions. First, would individuals find that radical life extension, or any other form of radical enhancement, is a “poisoned chalice” (to borrow some phrasing from a 2014 article by Aveek Bhattacharya and Robert Mark Simpson)? Would the social uptake of radical enhancement technologies produce intolerable collective outcomes, if not in the judgement of the people living in future societies, at least by our standards now? Irrespective of the eventual outcome, how could we manage a transition without unacceptable conflict, or else intolerable relations of dominance–subordination, in mixed societies of the radically enhanced and the less enhanced or unenhanced?
The stakes are high, since radical enhancement is, after all, radical. Nonetheless, I do not reject the idea of radical enhancement. Rather, I have a different theme: the path to radical enhancement must go via moderate enhancement. At the Dawn of a Great Transition explains why this is, and what it means today.
This is an abridged extract from Russell Blackford’s newly released book, At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement, published by Schwabe Verlag. Dr. Blackford is Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
