Bailey: Transhumanism and the Limits of Democracy

Reason Online's science correspondant Ronald Bailey has published a paper he presented at the Arizona State University's Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict Workshop on Transhumanism and the Future of Democracy last week.

The workshop addressed such questions like, how does the enhancement of human beings through biotechnology, information technology, and applied cognitive sciences affect our understandings of autonomy, personhood, responsibility and free will? And how much and what type of societal control should be exercised over the use of enhancement technologies?

In his paper, Bailey argues that a number of democratic transhumanists, including James Hughes, have "fetishized" democratic decision-making over the protection of minority rights. Instead, argues Bailey, transhumanism should be accepted as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine that should be tolerated in liberal societies by those who disagree with its goals.

Bailey, who is one of the movement's most vociferous advocates (although I doubt he'd refer to it as a "movement"), is largely arguing on behalf of the libertarian perspective. What he describes as 'democracy' in this context is any kind of collective or institutional interference against what he considers to be our civil liberties. In other words, Bailey feels that morphological, cognitive and reproductive liberties need to be protected against the reactionary masses and bureaucratic interference. "Technologies dealing with birth, death, and the meaning of life need protection from meddling—even democratic meddling—by those who want to control them as a way to force their visions of right and wrong on the rest of us," writes Bailey, "One's fellow citizens shouldn't get to vote on with whom you have sex, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth."

In addition, Bailey illustrates the problems of democratic authoritarianism by detailing some of the history of legal interference with reproductive rights. He also analyzes the various arguments used by opponents of human enhancement which they hope will sway a majority into essentially outlawing the transhumanist enterprise.

Read the entire article.

Libertarian reactions to Marshal Brain's automated economy

Considerable buzz emerged at last year's Singularity Summit after the talk given by IEET Fellow Marshall Brain who spoke on the inevitable structural unemployment that automation and artificial intelligence will create.

IEET Executive Director James Hughes offered this commentary:

The astonishing thing about Marshall’s talk was the amount of outrage from the libertopians in the audience who were all perfectly content to imagine that we would soon have super-robots doing things a gazillion times better than humans, and that that transition might wipe humans out or bring about a utopian society, but they couldn’t accept that such a transition might cause unemployment and require any redistribution of the wealth. History apparently shows that the market solves all structural unemployment, even after an historical discontinuity so radical that we make up a word for it - Singularity - which precisely means that we can’t predict anything after that point. Libertopians would be funny if they hadn’t just ruined the world economy.

Like Dr. J, I was shocked by the largely negative and skeptical response to Brain's suggestion. I had largely assumed -- and now I'm guessing quite wrongly -- that most forward-looking people were in favor of mass-automation and the introduction of permanent human retirement (if I can borrow Hans Moravec's phrase).

But now that I think about it, this response actually makes sense: such an outcome is an affront to libertarian minarchism. They know that you can't have mass unemployment and a weak state apparatus. Unlike us lefty futurists who have been anticipating a work-free future for some time now, libertarians aren't too happy about the idea of having to institute a guaranteed universal income to deal with massive unemployment. But then again, their predecessors weren't very happy with the introduction of the welfare state in the early part of the 20th century, either -- a rather necessary government solution to growing problems that were caused by the maturing nation state and industrial economy.

Anyway, be sure to read Hughes's thoughts on the matter.