What makes the human enhancement movement tick?
I’ve been thinking further about what a loose intellectual movement around human enhancement and converging technologies may look like. Did some search and came across the Betterhumans website which seems to be one of the major on-line gathering places for the transhumanist crowd. One of the most prolific contributors to the discussion forum, Anne C., an electrical engineeer in California, expresses a rather common sentiment in one of the threads:
I don’t think that these sorts of things — discussion of life extension, cryonics, human enhancement, biological research, nanotechnology, etc. — are very popular topics in the population at large. Sadly, most people seem enamored with “reality TV” and celebrity gossip much more so than things that actually have the potential to improve their lives and make them a heck of a lot more interesting.
She also addresses the question why there are so many male geeks and so few female nerds involved:
There are probably more men interested in transhumanism simply because the “movement” is so internet-based and I think guys grow up being more encouraged to use computers.
However, she does have
a few internet-friends who are female and intrigued by life extension. I don’t know how significant this is, but I and these other females who have such interests tend very strongly to be diagnosed with “autistic spectrum” conditions. [my link added]
This is anecdotal evidence, and I don’t think one should characterise the converging technologies/human enhancement movement as a bunch of autists. That said, there is much more on Anne C.:s blog Existence is Wonderful: a goldmine for the historian of contemporary ideas.
For whatever it’s worth, the lasting impression of my two-hour search is that the quest for longevity seems to be an important motivational factor behind the human enhancement / transhumanist movement. (This is actually one of the things we could have made much more out of in our new exhibition Oldetopia; also here).
26 Dec 2007 Thomas
Hi. Wow, you found a really old comment of mine I guess! (At least in “Internet years”). I realize you weren’t saying I was saying this, but just to clear up any misconception, I certainly do not see the “human enhancement” movement (or whatever you want to call it) as “a bunch of autists”.
In fact, one of the things that occasionally makes me leery of the whole “enhancement” thing (and I actually prefer the more neutral term “modification”, since “enhancement” can only describe the quality of a change from an individual’s subjective point of view) is the tendency some would-be “enhancers” have to pathologize practically everything in sight.
That is, some people (perhaps working from the mindset encouraged by many insurance companies, which requires that a given condition or state be “proven” a serious hardship for the individual in order to establish access to needed assistance) seem to be trying to define more and more things as “disease”.
I don’t take that approach at all — mine is more about self-determination and choice. Yes, I think people should be able to modify themselves in ways that (to them) comprise “enhancements”, but I really do not agree with the goal of defining more and more existing variations as intrinsically pathological. Society should be flexible enough to accommodate a wider range of people, it should not be looking to narrow that range! I see variant groups (such as autistics who wouldn’t seek a “cure” if one were available, a population in which I count myself) as litmus tests for future tolerance. If the world can’t deal with an autistic person, how the heck are they going to react to a three-armed cyborg?
Whoops, looks like I veered off on a tangent in my last comment (I still made points I wanted to make, though, but I wanted to clarify a few more things). I am quite aware that my evidence for ASD females being open to the idea of life extension is “ancedotal”. I certainly did not intend to present it as scientific research data! Not that you were saying I did intend this, I just wanted to make sure that impression did not come across to anyone else who might happen upon the comment.
I think that the fact that I personally happen to know of at least a few autistic females who are friendly to the idea of longevity has more to do with the tendency of people to self-sort according to common interests (and being a nerd, I tend to seek out other nerds, some of whom are female) than with anything pertaining to particular neurological variations (i.e., autism).
Hi Ann, I think you’re absolutely right in drawing a line between “enhancement” and “curing pathologies”.
For one thing, as you say, because the human population consists of myriads of (both genetic and fenotypic) variations. They are only “pathological” in as far as a medical doctor-patient-system constructs them as such.
But also because the “enhancement movement” does not have much to do with institutionalised medicine. Medical doctors are trained to diagnose and treat (and sometimes prevent) “pathological states / diseases” and return “the patient” to a “normal state”. But people who subscribe to an enhancement agenda are thinking more in terms of making themselves better (and better here means better than they were before, or better than their neighbour, or whatever).
There are presumably people who subscribe to both mindsets. But generally speaking, I believe that the agendas of the “enhancement movement” and institutionalised medicine are dispersed between two not much overlapping social worlds.
The autism thing was not very seriously meant — and I for one would be the first to question such vague diagnostic labels. Psychiatric diagnostics generally is a mess.
It is a misnomer that there are more men interested in transhumanism.
Natasha Vita-More
author of the “Transhuman Statement” 1982
author of “Transhumanism Now” 1995
Hi Natasha, I will not try to adjudicate your and Anne’s different opinions about the gender distribution of interest in transhumanism. That said, I note that you present yourself, on your website, with a quote from the New York Times: “the first female philosopher of transhumanism” (my emphasis).