In the summer of 1990, I was running a pretty weird nightclub in the Roppongi neighborhood of Tokyo. I was deeply immersed in the global cyberpunk scene and working to bring the Tokyo node of this fast-expanding, posthuman, science-fiction-and-psychedelic-drug-fueled movement online. The Japanese scene was more centered around videogames and multimedia than around acid and other psychedelics, and Timothy Leary, a dean of 60s counterculture and proponent of psychedelia who was always fascinated with anything mind-expanding, was interested in learning more about it. Tim anointed the Japanese youth, including the 24-year-old me, The New Breed. He adopted me as a godson, and we started writing a book about The New Breed together, starting with tune in, turn on, take over, as a riff off Tims original and very famous turn on, tune in, drop out. We never finished the book, but we did end up spending a lot of time together. (I should dig out my old notes and finish the book.)

Tim introduced me to his friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were a living menagerie of the counterculture in the United States since the 60s. There were the traditional New Age types: hippies, cyberpunks, and transhumanists, too. In my early twenties, I was an eager and budding techno-utopian, dreaming of the day when I would become immortal and ascend to the stars into cryogenic slumber to awake on a distant planet. Or perhaps I would have my brain uploaded into a computer network, to become part of some intergalactic superbrain.

Good times. Those were the days and, for some, still are.

Weve been yearning for immortality at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Greek mythology, Zeus grants Eoss mortal lover Tithonus immortalitybut the goddess forgets to ask for eternal youth as well. Tithonus grows old and decrepit, begging for death. When I hear about life extension today, I am often perplexed, even frustrated. Are we are talking about eternal youth, eternal old age, or having our cryogenically frozen brains thawed out 2,000 years from now to perform tricks in a future alien zoo?

The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal. Todays transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief, but the notion of immortalityor, more correctly, amortalityis the central tenet. Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary physical intervention.

As science marches forward, and age reversal and the elimination of diseases becomes a real possibility, what once seemed like a science fiction dream is becoming more real, transforming the transhumanist movement and its role in society from a crazy subculture to a Silicon Valley money- and technology-fueled shot on goal and more of a practical hedge than the sci-fi dream of its progenitors.

Transhumanism can be traced back to futurists in the 60s, most notably FM-2030. As the development of new, computer-based technologies began to turn into a revolution to rival the Industrial Revolution, Max More defined transhumanism as the effort to become posthuman through scientific advances like mind uploading. He developed his own variant of Transhumanism and named it Extropy, and together with Tom Morrow, founded the Extropy Institute, whose email list created a community of Extopians in the internets cyberpunk era. Its members discussed AI, cryonics, nanotech and crypotoanarchy, among other things, and some reverted to transhumanism, creating an organization now known as Humanity+. As the Tech Revolution continued, Extropians and transhumanists began actively experimenting with technologys ability to deliver amortality.

In fact, Timothy Leary planned to have his head frozen by Alcor, preserving his brain and, presumably, his sense of humor and unique intelligence. But as he approached his deathI happened to visit him the night before he died in 1996the vibe of the Alcor team moving weird cryo-gear into his house creeped Tim out, and he ended up opting for the shoot my ashes into space path, which seemed more appropriate to me as well. All of his friends got a bit of his ashes, too, and having Timothy Leary ashes became a thing for a while. It left me wondering, every time I spoke to groups of transhumanists shaking their fists in the air and rattling their Alcor freeze me when I die bracelets: How many would actually go through with the freezing?

That was 20 years ago. The transhumanist and Extropian movements (and even the Media Lab) have gotten more sober since those techno-utopian days, when even I was giddy with optimism. Nonetheless, as science fiction gives way to real science, many of the ZOMG if only conversations are becoming arguments about when and how, and the shift from Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley has stripped the movement of its tie-dye and beads and replaced them with Pied Piper shirts. Just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road that brought us Cambridge Analytica and the Pizzagate conspiracy was paved with optimism and oaths to not be evil.

Renowned Harvard geneticist George Church once told me that breakthroughs in biological engineering are coming so fast we cant predict how they will develop going forward. Crispr, a low-cost gene editing technology that is transforming our ability to design and edit the genome, was completely unanticipated; experts thought it was impossible ... until it wasnt. Next-generation gene sequencing is decreasing in price, far faster than Moores Law for processors. In many ways, bioengineering is moving faster than computing. Church believes that amortality and age reversal will seem difficult and fraught with issues ... until they arent. He is currently experimenting with age reversal in dogs using gene therapy that has been successful in mice, a technique he believes is the most promising of nine broad approaches to mortality and aginggenome stability, telomere extension, epigenetics, proteostasis, caloric restriction, mitochondrial research, cell senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and intercellular communication.

Churchs research is but one of the key discoveries giving us hope that we may someday understand aging and possibly reverse it. My bet is that we will significantly lengthen, if not eliminate, the notion of natural lifespan, although its impossible to predict exactly when.

But what does this mean? Making things technically possible doesnt always make them societally possible or even desirable, and just because we can do something doesnt mean we should (as were increasingly realizing, watching the technologies we have developed transform into dark zombies instead of the wonderful utopian tools their designers imagined).

Human beings are tremendously adaptable and resilient, and we seem to quickly adjust to almost any technological change. Unfortunately, not all of our problems are technical and we are really bad at fixing social problems. Even the ones that we like to think weve fixed, like racism, keep morphing and getting stronger, like drug-resistant pathogens.

Dont get me wrongI think its important to be optimistic and passionate and push the boundaries of understanding to improve the human condition. But there is a religious tone in some of the arguments, and even a Way of the Future Church, which believes that the creation of super intelligence is inevitable. As Yuval Harari writes in Homo Deus, new technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. When he was still just Sir Martin Rees, now Lord Martin Rees once told a group of us a story (which has been retold in various forms in various places) about how he was interviewed by what he called the society for the abolition of involuntary death in California. The members offered to put him in cryonic storage when he died, and when he politely told them hed rather be dead than in a deep freeze, they called him a deathist.

Transhumanists correctly argue that every time you take a baby aspirin (or have open heart surgery), youre intervening to make your life better and longer. They contend that there is no categorical difference between many modern medical procedures and the quest to beat death; its just a matter of degree. I tend to agree.

Yet we can clearly imagine the perils of amortality. Would dictators hold onto power endlessly? How would universities work if faculty never retired? Would the population explode? Would endless life be only for the wealthy, or would the poor be forced to toil forever? Clearly many of our social and philosophical systems would break. Back in 2003, Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, warned us of the perils of life extension and explained how biotech was taking us into a posthuman future with catastrophic consequences to civilization even with the best intentions.

I think its unlikely that well be uploading our minds to computers any time soon, but I do believe changes that challenge what it means to be human" are coming. Philosopher Nikola Danaylov in his Transhumanist Manifesto says, We must all respect autonomy and individual rights of all sentience throughout the universe, including humans, non-human animals, and any future AI, modified life forms, or other intelligences. That sounds progressive and good.

Still, in his manifesto Nikola also writes, Transhumanists of the world unitewe have immortality to gain and only biology to lose. That sounds a little scary to me. I poked Nikola about this, and he pointed out that he wrote this manifesto a while ago and his position has become more subtle. But many of his peers are as radical as ever. I think transhumanism, especially its strong, passionate base in exuberant Silicon Valley, could use an overhaul that makes it more attentive to and integrated with our complex societal systems. At the same time, we need to help the left-behind parts of society catch up and participate in, rather than just become subjected to, the technological transformations that are looming. Now that the dog has caught the car, tranhumanism has to transform our fantasy into a responsible reality.

I, for one, still dream of flourishing in the future through advances in science and technology, but hopefully one that addresses societal inequities, retains the richness and diversity of our natural systems and indigenous cultures, rather than the somewhat simple and sterile futures depicted by many science fiction writers and futurists. Timothy Leary liked to remind us to remember our hippie roots, with their celebration of diversity and nature, and I hear him calling us again.

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In this, the first of three episodes, the BBC4 mini-series Visions of The Future examines how some of the scientific advances of the 20th and early-21st century may shape our future. Specifically, presenter Michio Kaku Professor of physics and co-creator of string field theory posits that we are on the brink of an historic transition from the the age of scientific discovery to the age of scientific mastery (00:01:20). He suggests that having created artificial intelligence, unravelled the molecule of life and unlocked the secrets of matter (all 00:01:03), science of the future will be concerned with more than mere observation of nature. It will be concerned with its mastery.

Thus, while the individual programmes each explore human mastery of one of three key areas (intelligence, DNA and matter), the series as a whole maintains a consistent theme: that though this mastery offers us unparalleled freedom and opportunities (00:57:47) it also presents us with profound challenges and choices (00:01:46). Kaku refers to key social issues that will be raised by future science and technology as topics we must start to address today (00:57:59). In the first episode Kaku introduces a number of developments stemming from ubiquitous computing (00:06:19), many of which intersect with relatively new areas of debate in bioethics. Ubiquitous computing or ubiquitous technology is the view that powerful computer microchips will soon be everywhere. They will be such a taken-for-granted feature of every product we use or buy, that they will become largely unnoticed and invisible. While obvious applications of this include intelligent cars and roads, health care monitoring technologies might also become commonplace. For example, Kaku suggests that wearable computers (00:07:40) in our clothes will monitor our health from the outside, and that by swallowing an aspirin-sized pill with the power of a PC and a video camera (00:08:45) the health of our internal organs might also be continuously assessed.

However, as interviewee Susan Greenfield notes, the biggest changes may come when ubiquitous technology converges with the internet (00:09:11); changes which raise some rather disturbing questions (00:18:00). These focus on issues of identity (loss of identity, multiple identities), the preference of virtual social networks over real social networks, and the impact upon family life. As Greenfield further comments, current experience with virtual reality worlds like Second Life and online gaming, suggests changes are already taking place in these areas.

For Kaku, however, it is in AI (artificial intelligence) that an evolutionary leap that will profoundly challenge the human condition (00:22:08) is now taking place. While he does describe the types of monitoring technologies noted above as machine intelligences, it is in the move towards intelligent machines that the future lies. It is these machines that raise a number of important questions with respect to the relatively new bioethical area of robot ethics, including:

These questions also intersect with long-standing debates in philosophy and other areas of ethics, and have also been explored in popular science books and TV fiction (see the BioethicsBytes posts on Kevin Warwicks I, Cyborg and the Cybermen episodes of BBCs Doctor Who). For example, phenomenologists, epistemologists and AI experts have long debated whether machines will ever display human level intelligence (00:29:18) including such social skills as getting the joke (00:37:52) or whether they will be limited to merely mimicking some aspects of it. Kaku explores this question with commentators and AI researchers like Ray Kurzweil and Rosalind Picard, and focuses on emotion, which he suggests is critical for higher intelligence (00:36:58). Current work in affective computing is directed towards developing robots with some such capacities, though as technology forecaster Paul Saffo notes, youll know its not really intelligent (00:35:51).

Similarly, questions around how we might relate to intelligent machines resonate with debates in animal ethics. Kaku notes the tendency to anthropomorphise robots that appear intelligent. He refers to his own Roomba robot, and says of the Japanese robot Asimo I know Asimo is a machine, but I find myself relating to it as if it were a real person (00:32:33). This introduces one of the key issues in the new area of robot ethics: at what point might machines come to be seen as persons rather than mere things, and if this does occur should they be granted robot rights? (see for example Sawyer. 2007. Robot Ethics. Science Magazine, Vol. 318, pp. 1037). Extending this further, Visions of the Future considers what relationship we humans might have with machines whose intelligence greatly exceeded our own. This discussion is predicated on the possibility that intelligent machines might outgrow human control (00:40:15), and examines whether this would be based on harmony or conflict. Here the focus is not on how we will treat the machines of the future, but on how they might treat us.

However, as the final sections of this episode of Visions of the Future highlight, the distinction and opposition of the categories human and machine implied above may have limited relevance in the future. Alongside the drive to create intelligent machines, Kaku notes growing interest in the mechanical enhancement of human intelligence: as machines become more like humans, humans may become more like machines (00:43:36). Further, we are asked precisely how many of our natural body parts could we replace with artificial ones before we begin to loose our sense of being human? (00:55:27).

These concerns echo several of the dominant themes in posthumanism: the philosophical trend and cultural movement that both observes and advocates moving beyond a traditional or classical modern conception of the nature of humanity. In the form of transhumanism, this approach embraces the notion of upgraded human, the cyborg, as the next inevitable evolutionary step. In may ways, Visions of the Future functions to outline, both the steps in the posthumanist argument, and it ultimate endpoint. It highlights how technologies currently used for therapeutic purposes could be used to enhance various human capacities (the examples used here are mood, memory and intelligence), however, that those who choose not to take part in this revolution will find themselves severely disadvantaged. Paul Saffo notes all revolutions have winners and losers, this revolution is no exception the big losers are the people who say they dont want to get involved. They are the ones who are going to discover that being a little bit out of touch will have some unpleasant consequences (00:56:39).

Overall this futuristic first episode of the Visions of the Future series sets a tone of expectation both of the future and the next two episodes. It is engaging and useful, both in its presentation of the science, and the questions it raises regarding the social and ethical implications of the intelligence revolution.

The first of three episodes of Visions of the Future was first broadcast on BBC4 on November 5th 2007 at 21:00 (TRILT identifier: 00741D95).

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Ive always been a fan of H+ (though I often disregard a lot of the humanist ethics proposed by some of its adherents). Ultimately, its more of an interest than a worldview for me but to see a world where humanity sheds the meat of its limitations or sheds it all together would be interesting if nothing else. An ushering in of a generation overmen (either through gene/body mods or other enhancements though it is sort of a chicken or the egg scenario as to which event will serve as the catalyst to the other) who radically reject the institutionalized morality in both politics and science would obviously be the best way to go about this. I also think that a fully decentralized and more egalitarian market economy (lending itself to agorism which we are seeing more of today in everything from crypto-currency to start up societies https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/martin20160225) will help reach this goal faster. The following are some older writings of mine detailing the potential implications of transhumanism on culture;

The Hegelian Dialectical Process Applied to Evolutionary BiologyHegels philosophy however, left little creativity to humans, making them instruments of a cosmic agency (Time-Spirit or Zeitgeist) which worked out is experiments leading towards the emergence of Philosophic Man (http://www.uprs.edu/upr-blog/transhumanism-posthumanism-superhumanism/#sthash.uUyw5obK.dpuf -2016)

The progression of history and by extension culture is largely founded on conflicts ensuing between opposing ideological stances (left vs right, centralization vs decentralization). Whether through Marxs Dialectical Materialism or opposition to establishment via social movements (ranging from reformist measures such as the post-Civil Rights social justice causes of neo-liberalism to a Maoist style insurrectionary movement). Hegel (first) recognized this, transferring it into what he is best known for, the Dialectical Process (the formation of a thesis, antithesis and a synthesis of the two opposing forces). Hegel predicted that we would one day reach the end of history as this cycle was repeated ad infinitum. A new world in which the mind of God is glimpsed by all would be ours along with a superior culture reflecting the new paradigm shift.

Nietzsche (who was as most German philosophers of his age were, influenced by Hegel) also had much to say about culture, especially in regard to the forceful removing its limitations (i.e slave morality). His work posits that a culture which fosters the cultivation of genius and celebrates the greatness of the individual, is achieved through the exertion of our will on a world devoid of inherent meaning. The end result of the violent rejection of the status quo in pursuit of art and war and vigor, is the over-man. A being no longer shackled by the constraints of human morality and institutions.

Both the over-man and the end of history could be brought about much more rapidly through the development of the post-human. This can (in many cases justifiably) be a slippery slope and in my opinion will first require the radical decentralization of the means of production, the liberation of the workforce and the fostering of a culture of greater minds, ends which can all be met through various means of secession to weaken the global hegemony.

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