Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Preface

xi Preface Only Evolve! Bioethics and the Need for Narrative The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are. —Ray Kurzweil in 1999 Ray Kurzweil is afraid to die. Multimillionaire inventor of the first reading machine for the blind, Kurzweil is best known for his predictions about the future that culminated in his 2009 book, The Singularity Is Near.1 Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 machines will exceed human intelligence and the posthuman era will begin, eventuating in solutions to all of our most pressing problems, including death. In the opening voice-over of the recent documentary Transcendent Man, Kurzweil speaks slowly and deliberately , with haunting strains of the music of Philip Glass in the background : I do have a recurring dream. It has to do with exploring this endless succession of rooms that are empty, and going from one to the next, and feeling hopelessly abandoned and lonely and unable to find anyone else. That’s a pretty good description of death. Death xii Preface is supposed to be a finality, but it’s actually a loss of everyone you care about. I do have fantasies sometimes about dying. About what people must feel like when they’re dying, or of what I would feel like if I were dying. And it’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling . . . that I really can’t bear it. And so I go back to thinking about how I’m not gonna die.2 There is nothing new, of course, about Kurzweil’s fears or hopes. The inevitability of death has always shaped human psychology, philosophy , religion, and the arts. What is relatively new here is the specific content of Kurzweil’s optimism: he believes that his life on Earth will literally not end. In his lifetime, humanity will evolve to overcome death by learning how to repair diseased and aging cells, and eventually how to download minds into computers.3 Kurzweil’s personal desires have become a part of his prophetic narrative: by way of the exponentially increasing power of science applied through technology, humans will return to the garden of Eden, with not only a new Eden but a new Adam and a new Eve to inhabit it. And Kurzweil is far from alone in this ultimate prediction. When Lee Silver, a Princeton biologist, wrote Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family, this is what he meant: that our scientific knowledge and technical skill will ultimately give us complete control over our own evolutionary future. “We, as human beings, have tamed the fire of life,” Silver writes, describing this future world. “And in so doing, we have gained the power to control the destiny of our species.”4 Whether the ability to control the destiny of the human species will turn out to be a good thing remains to be seen. Either way, to define transcendence as the inevitable outcome of technologically driven human evolution represents not only a phenomenon unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries5 but also a rejection of thousands of years of philosophical and theological thinking about what constitutes the highest and best life available to human beings.6 While it is tempting to think of Kurzweil and Silver as outliers, their thinking is merely a logical extension of the increasing confidence that late modern people have placed in finding technological solutions to problems. This belief could be summed up by the mantra “Only evolve!” This kind of evolu- Preface xiii tion, it must be noted, is not Darwinian evolution; it assumes that Mother Nature has been fickle and random, and that we can and should do much, much better.7 Variations of this mantra can be seen in bestselling books by Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Lee Silver, Simon Young, Rodney Brooks, and many others. What they all share is the belief that we inherently know what the good life is (to be free from suffering , disease, death, and other difficulties) and that it is something that we can and must make, not learn.8 Technoscience—scientific knowledge applied through technology—is the way to make that life. As if this change were not profound enough, the “Only evolve!” mandate resists any challenges to its fundamental definition of the good life. But that doesn’t phase Kurzweil or any of these thinkers, for as a mandate built on a...