A response to Massimo Pigliucci: “the problems with transhumanism”

Massimo Pigliucci responded (and was reprinted) to an article on IEET by Kyle Munkittrick called “Transhumanism F.A.Q. : Is Aging A Moral Good?”.

Munkittrick makes some good arguments, and some bad arguments. Pigliucci points out a bad one here:

Munkittrick begins his own response to critics of transhumanism by stating that if anyone has a problem with technology addressing the issues of disease, aging and death then “by this logic no medical intervention or care should be allowed after the age of 30.” This, of course, is a classic logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. Munkittrick would like his readers to take one of two stands: either no technological improvement of our lives at all, or accept whatever technology can do for you. But this is rather silly, as there are plenty of other, more reasonable, intermediate positions

but Munkittrick is not presenting the transhumanist argument in its strongest form; we can restate the argument in favour of life extension like this: Do you think that the current 50-60-year healthspan followed a 15-30 year senescence and death – a happenstance of historical accident and a limited degree of technological innovation is optimal? If not, then presumably one is faced by the following genuine dilemma: either you think that the ideal healthspan is longer than 50 years, or shorter. If you think the ideal is shorter, then presumably you are planning to commit suicide at some point? Most people, Massimo included, would probably take the other option and argue that a healthspan of longer than 50 years is best for them, technology permitting, in which case they are pro-life extension. [perhaps not pro-immortality for themselves, though]

This form of argument has been generalized by Nick Bostrom as the reversal test.

Moving on, Pigliucci complains about the issue of life extension and population growth. This has been addressed at length elsewhere, but the strongest argument I can think of in favour of life extension is that people who live for a very long time may not keep having children every 30 years; they might decide to have children once and then go and do other things. In this case, population growth is only linear rather than exponential. This kind of population growth is something that we can cope with – by colonizing space and other planets, or by advancing technology to increase the population density on earth – as has happened many, many, many times before.

In the long run, the theoretical limit on human population is given by the available matter and energy in the universe, which we can colonize at a rate which is asymptotically cubic in time – a constantly expanding sphere around earth. If most people have one set of children in their lives, and people who do have more than one set of children do so with longer and longer gaps in between, it would be easy to stay within that cubic bound even out into the far future – say, 1 million or even 1 billion years from now, even if most people lived forever.

Arguments like this show that the population increase/resource limitation problem requires a rate-balancing solution; a careful plan for ensuring that everyone’s right to life is respected whilst at the same time maximizing peoples’ right to reproduce subject to the constraint of resources. It does not warrant a barbaric, premature and absolute slaughter of everyone over a certain age.

True immortality – actually living forever – is probably not worth talking about at the moment, because we are too young and inexperienced as a species to work out what the best choices are. It is better to aim to keep everyone alive for the next thousand years and reconsider our options then.

Transhumanism isn’t just about life extension. H+ is about improving all aspects of our existence, including mitigating the risks of advanced technology and improving the quality of people’s lives. Any transhumanist who claims to ignore risks and blindly support all technology irrespective of its projected effect on our overall quality of life is not in fact a transhumanist – they are a techno-optimist, which is a distinct notion from h+. The work of David Pearce and Nick Bostrom includes much about quality of life, elimination of suffering and living the best possible existence. The singularitarian community is thinking about the creation of a human-benevolent superintelligence which would probably be better at optimizing our experience than we can even imagine. Yudkowsky’s articles on fun theory come to mind here.

And lastly and by far most importantly, the transhumanist movement is closely associated with the more recent rationalist movement which centres around the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson. At LessWrong.com, the rationalist movement considers in extreme detail and rigor the ways that humans fail to achieve their goals and the ways that they fail to have accurate beliefs. Someone like Pigliucci, whose blog is called “Rationally Speaking” would seem to be pursuing the same goals as the rationalist community at LessWrong, and I hope that in the future the transhumanist community will follow the principles of rationality (such as recognizing the importance of the human cognitive biases literature) better than it does at the moment.