by J.N. Nielsen
Technological artifacts, no less than ourselves, stand equal before the laws of nature. We obey the laws of nature because we must, having evolved within nature and as part of nature, and the technologies we construct are constructed by us to function within the same parameters of nature that produced us. Our artifacts obey the laws of nature because they must, having been constructed by us to exemplify these laws in ways that advantage us. Part of the power of the scientific revolution was the ability to delve more deeply into nature, to understand its secrets at a more profound level of comprehension, and so to exploit the possibilities of nature that had not yet been exploited by biology, or which had not been exploited to the degree that technologies allow.
Our social institutions, including the institutions of law, are themselves technologies, but, with our social technologies, cooperation is necessary, as the laws of man do not have to be obeyed in the way that the laws of nature must be obeyed.1 Human beings cooperate more effectively, on a larger scale, and for a longer period of time than any other species on Earth. Our ability to cooperate at the scale of civilization, enabled by the social technologies we employ to organize this cooperation, is what has made us unprecedentedly successful as a species. Our weakness and vulnerability seems obvious in comparison to those species that rise on the own legs and walk the same day they are born, and those species with claws and teeth that rival weapons, or even a hide tough enough to survive an attack by such claws and teeth. Nevertheless, all of these species apparently more resilient and well-armed than human beings are now entirely in our control. So complete is human dominance of the terrestrial biosphere that we must set aside nature reserves for other species in an attempt to prevent our driving them extinct out of mere indifference.
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Of necessity, we stand equal before the laws of nature but we are not equal before the laws of man. The growing body of legislation and regulation that we have created for ourselves, and for our artifacts, hems us in, constrains our activities, and limits the use of our technologies, driving a growing likelihood that we will violate these strictures, however well intended and well enforced. In the complexity of our industrialized world, in which few individuals know all the laws that bear upon their activities, there is no clear, bright line that divides the lawful from the unlawful, with the result that many violate the law unknowingly. And, again, due to the complexity of our world, much of which may be attributed to the sheer scale of societies that seek to organize the activities of eight billion persons, most violations of the law will go unnoticed.
Thus the complexity of our world is pushing us toward the pre-modern legal condition in which exemplary justice takes the place of sure and swift justice for all, because the resources do not exist to enforce the law equally and impartially. The few malefactors who are caught are punished spectacularly2 in order to stand as an example to all: the likelihood of being caught in a violation of the law is low, but the disproportionate punishment of those who are caught is intended as a sufficiently severe deterrent that anyone contemplating similar actions will take note and reign in their impulses.
The industrialized nation-states with the most resources have taken measures to counter this development with the deployment of a surveillance apparatus enabled by a high technology society: cameras on every corner, so that anyone in an urban area knows they are under constant watch, like the residents of a Panopticon, always under observation without ever knowing who is behind the cameras, who is monitoring the video feeds, or who has been identified by facial recognition technology, to have their entire life history divulged to the silent and unseen watchers. To be perpetually under the watchful eye of the state is to deter crime before it occurs, and therefore to render the selective enforcement of crime irrelevant (or, at least, less relevant).
There is not much in this picture to inspire confidence or hope in the future, as a future of total surveillance is not obviously preferable to a future of selective and exemplary justice. The databases of the total surveillance state will hold the profile of every citizen, with the individual’s social credit score, like dynamic pricing, always in flux. Depending upon one’s compliance with laws and expectations that will change as rapidly and as frequently as an individual’s social credit score, one’s overall prospects in life will improve or deteriorate capriciously—one’s odds are no better in such a society than if become a brigand and risked the scaffold. The growth of the industry of technological control suggests the worst possible outcome for a society attempting to embody equality before the law, in which all are equal because everyone is watched all the time.
Technologies of control intentionally deprive a population of its liberties, but well-intentioned technologies have also been a source of speculation on the end of society as we know it. The nightmare of human beings exterminated by unaligned malevolent AGI, or even the slightly less nightmarish fate of being kept as pets or zoo animals by a benevolent AGI that has so outstripped human capacities that resistance or rebellion are impossible, are the dystopias we imagine today in the light of the technologies under development. These dystopias displace human beings from our dominant position, and this fear of displacement is the response to a nagging anxiety, but there are potentially worse things than displacement. Instead of the network of technologies being external, constituting an Other against which we struggle not to be constrained and smothered, the network of technologies instead may be within us, growing with us and through us. Ray Kurzweil has often argued, in response to his critics that a technological singularity would mean the end of humanity, that humanity will merge with machines, so that human beings will not be left behind, but will be the driving force of the development, fully integrated into AGI, which therefore cannot be unaligned with the human beings so integrated.
Needless to say, the human-machine merger will not be universal, and it will not be evenly distributed across space or time. William Gibson is often quoted as saying, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This will remain true as the future continues to unfold, and those with first mover advantage in technological augmentation will lay the foundations of all that follows, with themselves calling the shots. Access to the most advanced technologies has always been a privilege of wealth. Even the scientists and engineers who create the most advanced technologies are beholden to the investors who fund their work, and to whom the products of their work will be made available first of all, and quite possibly before anyone else even knows that these technologies exist.
We can assume that the range of transhumanist and post-human technologies (more precisely: technologies that could be employed in transhumanist or post-human modification of human beings) are dual-use, as are all technologies. Any technology that could augment human structure or function could be used to augment human structure or function for war, most obviously by producing better soldiers. A nation-state that has prioritized technologies of human augmentation, and which employs these technologies to augment its soldiers, will have a clear advantage in any conflict that involves soldiers. The development of war may be moving in the direction of purely automated conflicts—this in itself is a worrying moral development—but soldiers will have a role to play in conflict for some time yet, and augmented soldiers may be able to outperform automated battlefield technologies now under development, which, should this prove true, would be a strong motivation for the continued use of soldiers even in a largely automated conflict.3
Poorer nation-states with fewer technological resources, less expertise, and a smaller industrial infrastructure, might opt to develop cheaper human counter-measures to high technology weapons systems that only can be built by the most advanced industrialized economies. Under this scenario, war could be returned to the pre-industrialized paradigm of the victory going to whatever power can field the greatest number of motivated soldiers, rather than the arms race in high technological weapons systems that war has become since the twentieth century.
Indeed, we could call the trans- and post-human use of technologies already a weaponized use of technology if we adopt the idea of “every man a soldier.” This idea, too, dates from the early period of technological warfare, in which human beings were understood to be merely another raw material input into the process of war—that is to say, a human being is understood to be a widget who might be a farmer, might be factory worker, or might be a soldier as the occasion demands—the mere fact that one can flood a farm or a factory or a battlefield with superior numbers and thus triumph is believed to be more important than recognizing individual talent and merit and allowing these to develop to the point that sheer numbers are less important than the intelligent (and often parsimonious) use of resources. Given this fundamentally democratic conception of social roles, an augmented population is an augmented soldiery, merely waiting for mobilization.
While transhuman technologies in any robust form may appear distant, the thin end of the wedge has already been pounded into the recalcitrant stump of human experience. No one objects to eye glasses, contact lenses, prosthetic limbs, artificial heart valves, and implanted insulin pumps. Insofar as we use these technologies, we have already transcended the human frame bequeathed to us by evolution and have already set out on the road of human augmentation. Insofar as this process begins with the first use of tools, we could similarly identify the use of tools among other species as being already a trans-species development, so that a chimpanzee employing a branch stripped of its leaves to extract termites from a termite mound is a trans-chimpanzee. In this sense, trans-speciesism coincides with tool use, which makes it a less useful concept (because redundant) than if we specify some conventional threshold beyond which these technologies modify a given species to some unprecedented degree. As a convention, this threshold might be set at different levels of technology, relegating the threshold to the past or projecting it into the future.
The thin end of the wedge is also the shallow slope of an exponential growth curve. Once trans- and post-human technologies reach their inflection point, change will be rapid and will give our previous grasp of “disruptive” technologies a run for its money. Human life will be upended, and human societies along with human life. The laws that grew out of the now-upended human societies will be as silent as laws in a time of war, and it will be the forces that upend human life that will establish the ground rules for the world to come. Power, not law, will be the driving force, and power will accrue to those with access to the newest technologies and who most effectively, and most ruthlessly, exploit these new technologies.
We need not limit ourselves to technological dystopias to illustrate a possible future social order in which equality before the law is effectively impossible. It is an interesting twist of history that it has become a moral horror merely to discuss eugenics, even if eugenics would mean a future human population of greatly improved quality of life, while we do not have quite the same moral horror for a technological program that would mean a future human population of greatly improved quality of life. Both eugenics and transhumanism have a similar projected outcome: improved health, longevity, and the possibility of a range of augmentations from increased intelligence to enhanced performance under extreme stress. But while transhumanism has its critics who hate it fully enough as it is understood at present, it would be hated with all the more intensity were we to call these this technological eugenics. We would be justified in calling the technologies of transhumanism, already in use as noted above, technological eugenics, but no one (except for its harshest critics) would want to apply this label however justified it may be.
The same kind of arguments developed by Nick Bostrom and William MacAskill for existential risk reduction as a moral priority, in light of the value of the lives of future generations yet to be born, could be employed to argue for the eugenic improvement of the species as a moral priority. A future of healthy, happy, long-lived individuals would be a future faced by fewer existential risks (having greatly mitigated the risks of disease and aging) and more likely to endure and to flourish over the long term. For all its promise, eugenics has become a symbol of moral horror, but far fewer among us judge the technological intervention in human health and longevity as a moral horror, and those who do view it as undesirable rarely class it alongside eugenics as being among the greatest of evils. It would be worthwhile to inquire into these disparate attitudes and to ask what the source is for this divergence.
If a eugenic program of selective breeding were enacted, it would produce a lineage of human beings who would constitute an aristocracy that no one could ever join if not born into this lineage—a naturally born aristocracy impenetrable to upstarts and pretenders. No amount of money or influence would allow an individual who was not part of a eugenic bloodline to buy their way into such a bloodline, because the inheritance is not a title or property or power, but biological.
Traditional aristocracies were subject to all manner of compromises and corruption. There were cases in which commoners became kings, the obscure acquired titles, and parvenus rose to positions of privilege and influence. In a truly biological eugenic program, such compromises would be pointless: if you wrangle yourself a place in the hierarchy, that doesn’t mean you acquire health and longevity, or avoid Alzheimer’s or senility in advanced age.4 One would expect, under these circumstances, that there would be non-eugenic individuals who would reproduce with eugenic individuals, so a class of mixed descent would be a likely outcome. If the eugenically selected class closed itself to those of mixed descent, which it ought to do if it wishes to retain its single raison d’être, individuals of mixed descent would reproduce with others of their kind or with those excluded from the eugenic class, meaning that the improved genetics of the eugenic class will slowly trickle down into the general population, which would improve the lives of all. Just as with biological eugenics, technological eugenics will slowly trickle down into the general population. This trickle down of improving technologies is one of the arguments most frequently used to argue for the benefit of developing technologies that, upon first appearance, are prohibitively expensive and therefore are available exclusively to the privileged.
A program of biological eugenics would require a level of social discipline that no human society has shown to date; a program of technological eugenics, already the de facto policy of all industrialized nation-states, can arise out of mere indifference to what these technologies entail. In other words, the barriers to biological eugenics are high, while the barriers to technological eugenics are low or non-existent. Moreover, the pathway to technological transhumanism has already been laid out before us. Perhaps it is the apparent inevitability of transhumanist technologies that prevent us from reflecting too carefully upon a future already seemingly entrenched. Questioning the path we have already taken would be to seriously entertain the possibility of retreat from that path, and thus to question what constitutes progress.
A class of augmented individuals, whether they derive their advantage from biology or technology, may well be able to understand concepts and consequences that escape all other social classes, who would then be at the mercy of the technologically enhanced. William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” The biological or technological eugenic class would feel the pull of this imperative, and the rest of us will be powerless to stop them from acting upon it. As Thucydides famously observed, the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Insisting on being a law unto themselves, because the strong do as they will, the rise to dominance of a class that assures its privileges through technological eugenics would be effectively indistinguishable from a class that assures its privileges through biological eugenics. Perhaps we can imagine ourselves as part of technological eugenics class because we, too, could, in theory, be technologically augmented and join the class of the powerful, however far we are in fact from the opportunity to do so. Technology, then, becomes the elusive ideal that always calls to us, always seems just on the verge of delivering all that it promises, while always falling short. And, because it remains an unrealized ideal, it is never fully discredited, and the true believers will continue to promote it as the solution even after it has failed repeatedly.
NOTES
1 It is unfortunate that we use the term “law” to refer both to the regulatory principles of nature and the regulatory principles of society, as the two are sufficiently distinct that using the same term suggests a conflation. We are, however, saddled with the usage, and introducing new terminology at this point in history, without a robust theory to support the change in terminology, would be pointless. In any case, it bears mentioning that the confusion that may arise from using “law” in these two contexts does not alter the fact that the laws of nature brook no compromise, while those of man do.
2 Exemplary justice in the pre-modern period took the form of horrific torture and brutal methods of execution. As the contemporary conception of spectacle has moved on, exemplary justice today consists of publicized humiliation and character assassination.
3 Kurzweil’s contention that a human-machine cyborg would outperform either a human being or a machine taken in isolation implies that a cyborg soldier would outperform a human soldier or a robot, meaning that human beings after merging with machines will be as central to war as ever; automated warfare will not render us obsolete.
4 One possible exception to this, while we are considering the possibilities of transhumanist technologies, would be individuals who could afford to purchase a purpose-made body, compliant with whatever the current eugenic standard is, into which their consciousness could be transferred. We do not know if technology could produce a body equivalent to or better than a eugenically produced body, and we do not know if it will ever be possible to transfer consciousness from one body to another, but we do not yet know this to be impossible, so it can at least be entertained as a possibility, and this possibility suggests a technological work-around to a ruling class entrenched through biology.
J.N. Nielsen is an autodidact philosopher with a wide range of interests. He writes from Oregon. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 