Transhumanism Is Already Here
How does one become inhumane? In what sense do mental frameworks act to structure neural networks for integration with Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
The debate over nature versus nurture seems to be done, with the majority of professionals now believing that we all come into this world with some aspects of ourselves already hardwired. We are not tabula rasa then, who we already are when we exit the birth canal is then influenced by our environments. By our mothers most immediately, then families, friends then society.
Learning to become inhumane starts early. Children, being natural savages, treat each other according to their natures and the situations, with those tending toward more psychopathic expression being that, bullying mercilessly. Those of an empathic bent learn compassion by commiserating with the bullied or experiencing bullying themselves. The lesson is learned, early on, that power lies with the merciless. That, often, community is built around the whims of those who impose their will upon others.
Not all societies are this way, but many are. Our global, Western culture certainly trends toward psychopathic expression. Many of our morality tales, our collective mythos and popular entertainment express some version of the Hero’s Journey, wherein the protagonist must go through trials and tribulations, battling some archetypal enemy and experiencing defeat, before rising again to triumph in the end.
We are programmed to understand the world in these terms. We learn through experience what our personal role is, in this greater, societal expression of interpersonal interrelationship. In the days of the Analog World, before computers became ubiquitous and the Internet reigned supreme, human interrelation was personal and intimate, more direct and sensual than we are currently used to. The dominance of computerized socialization has left us more isolated, which has been trending toward greater and greater egocentric ideation and elevation of self above group expression.
Caring for others, compassion, has become more ideological and less visceral, more general and less specific and intimate, resulting in an increase in sociopathy amongst the general population of the Western nations. The acceptance of more and more technological advances as daily accoutrements to our lives, has occurred at a steady and remorseless pace, to the extent that we are now, currently, effectively integrated with AI by our own choice. Inhumanity has become ubiquitous, unthinking and part of our daily lives, almost unawares.
How many of us can go an entire day without using our phones? How many of us feel lost or bereft if we cannot find them? How many of us substitute google for our memories? How many of us access all of our friends, hobbies, work and play online?
AI has been developing simultaneous to internet technology and as we draw closer and closer to real, multi-platformed quantum computing, the capacities of computer memory banks to expand to mimic those of the human brain are developing as well. Right now, we use our phones, our watches, even our glasses to engage with the digital world interactively. Why would it be necessary to install a chip into a person’s body when we are carrying and wearing technology that can track us by choice?
Transhumanism is ‘a philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies able to greatly modify or enhance human intellect and physiology’, according to Wikipedia. We are immersed in that technology right now. We choose that technology each and every morning we wake up and turn off our phone alarms.
Transhumanism is not coming. It is already here and you are already no longer just human. You are primed for AI — largely divorced from your humanity and trending inhumane — a willing participant in the greatest experiment in human history.
Our technological society has intuitively created a sociopathic milieu to divide and conquer us, each from the Other, and the Covid-19 pandemic is only exacerbating the separative effects of what we were already experiencing. our distance from each other weakens the bonds of human connection and we turn more and more inwards, toward what is now a digital expanse extending into the quantum infinite, with no end or beginning in sight. Where the digital world ends, our world begins. Where our human world ends, something inhumane and far beyond our ken awaits its own awakening.
