Cyborg Liberation Front

[Dave Monroe]

Inside the Movement for Posthuman Rights
Cyborg Liberation Front
by Erik Baard
The Village Voice
July 30 - August 5, 2003


Once out of nature I shall never take 
My bodily form from any natural thing, 
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make 
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling 


Yeats's wish, expressed in his poem "Sailing to
Byzantium," was a governing principle for those
attending the World Transhumanist Association
conference at Yale University in late June.
International academics and activists, they met to lay
the groundwork for a society that would admit as
citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs
made from a free mixing of human and machine parts,
and fully organic, genetically engineered people who
aren't necessarily human at all. A good many of these
160 thinkers aspire to immortality and omniscience
through uploading human consciousness into ever
evolving machines.

[...]

The opening debate, "Should Humans Welcome or Resist
Becoming Posthuman?," raised a question that seems
impossibly far over the horizon in an era when the
idea of reproductive cloning remains controversial.
Yet the back-and-forth felt oddly perfunctory....

"It's like arguing in favor of the plough. You know
some people are going to argue against it, but you
also know it's going to exist," says James Hughes,
secretary of the Transhumanist Association and a
sociologist teaching at Trinity College in
Connecticut. "We used to be a subculture and now we're
becoming a movement." 

A movement taken seriously enough that it's already
under attack. Hughes cites the anti-technologist
Unabomber as a member of the "bio-Luddite" camp,
though an extremist one. "I think that if, in the
future, the technology of human enhancement is
forbidden by bio-Luddites through government
legislation, or if they terrorize people into having
no access to those technologies, that becomes a
fundamental civil rights struggle. Then there might
come a time for the legitimate use of violence in
self-defense," he says. "But long before that there
will be a black market and underground network in
place."

[...]

But beyond the violent zealots, who are these supposed
bio-Luddites? From the right, Leon Kass, chair of the
President's Council on Bioethics, rails against
transhumanism in his book Life, Liberty, and the
Defense of Dignity, and Francis Fukuyama weighs in
with his fearful exploration, Our Posthuman Future.
>From the left, environmentalist Bill McKibben fires
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, a book
that reads like a 227-page-long helpless screech of
brakes on a train steaming ahead at full power.

[...]

But the purpose of the Yale conference was direct,
with no feinting at other agendas. The crowd there
wanted to shape what they see as a coming reality.
>From the first walking stick to bionic eyes, neural
chips, and Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, they
would argue we've long been in the process of becoming
cyborgs. A "hybrot," a robot governed by neurons from
a rat brain, is now drawing pictures. Dolly the sheep
broke the barrier on cloning, and new transgenic
organisms are routinely created. The transhumanists
gathered because supercomputers are besting human
chess masters, and they expect a new intelligence to
pole-vault over humanity—in this century.

[...]

... Such qualms are natural. The transhumanists are
forcing, with microchips and DNA, a debate on ancient
and unanswerable questions, says Bonnie Kaplan, chair
of Yale's Technology and Ethics Working Group,
co-sponsor of the conference. 

"My gut says we'll never have the answer to that
question we first raised thousands of years ago: Who
are we?" 

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0331/baard.php


If our world survives, the next great challenge to
watch out for will come - you heard it here first -
when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and
robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and
unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It
is certainly something for all good Luddites to look
forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

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