NYT: The first church of robotics

Computer scientist and technology critic Jaron Lanier offers his two cents on the silicon valley mindset in his op-ed, "The first church of robotics." Excerpt:

The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.

It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.

What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

Link.

J. Hughes: Radical Life Extension, Transhumanism and Catholicism

IEET director James Hughes has written an epistle on transhumanism to Italian Catholics. Hughes offers four suggestions to the Italians as they assemble to discuss radical life extension and human enhancement:

1. Although transhumanism is part of the family of secular Enlightenment philosophies, many of its elements are compatible with Christianity.
2. Although some aspects of the transhumanist movement may resemble classical heresies, these are marginal similarities. Transhumanism is not trying to be a life philosophy or religion.
3. Transhumanists are not really interested in “immortality,” but only in reducing unnecessary death.
4. Human enhancement technologies, especially neurotechnologies, can support moral behavior and spiritual self-understanding.

Go here for expanded clarification.

These issues are explored more fully in Hughes's essay “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future”

Also see Max More’s contribution to the Italian conference, “Why Catholics Should Support the Transhumanist Goal of Extended Life.”

Summer Johnson: Who Cares if the Vatican Weighs in on Bioethics?

Great OpEd at the Bioethics Blog by Summer Johnson about the recent admonition from the Roman Catholic Church: "Who Cares if the Vatican Weights in on Bioethics?":

No one. At least that's my view. Certainly not American Catholics who use birth control, IVF, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and a wide range of other reproductive technologies previously and even more so now get a Holy finger wagging from Rome.

Moreover, I don't know any American Catholics who oppose the commonplace forms of human enhancement we use today and even the borderline ones such as taking brain-boosting drugs or drugs to help us sleep at night.

And this concept that the conservative movement more generally keeps leveraging--human dignity--the centerpiece of Catholic bioethics? Perhaps it could be useful, if anyone knew what it meant.

Entire article.

James Hughes: Transhumanism and Religion

Earlier this year, James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), spoke in Tempe Arizona at a seminar on “Transhumanism and the Concept of Human Nature,” which is part of a four year exploration of Transhumanism and Religion that is being funded by the Templeton Foundation.

Hughes has significantly expanded the paper and it's now available in booklet form: “The Compatibility of Religious and Transhumanist Views of Metaphysics, Suffering, Virtue and Transcendence in an Enhanced Future” (PDF). It is being published by the Global Spiral, the Metanexus Institute journal.

Here's the abstract:

Transhumanism – the proposition that human beings should use technology to transcend the limitations of the body and brain – is a product of the Enlightenment humanist tradition. As a consequence most avowed transhumanists are secular, and many religious are skeptical or hostile towards the transhumanist project. However there are also many religious transhumanists who find the project of human enhancement at least consistent with, and sometimes a fulfillment of, their metaphysics, soteriologies and eschatologies. Transhumanism appears to be especially compatible with religious traditions that emphasize human agency and evolution to a transcendent state, such as Buddhism, or that have incorporated Enlightenment values, such as liberal Christianity. But elements of the transhumanist worldview and enhancement technologies are compatible with one element or another of most world faiths, even the most fundamentalist. We can thus expect that human enhancement technologies will be adopted creatively into the theologies of groups within all the world’s faiths, producing many flavors of “trans-spirituality.”

Download the PDF Slides Talk