Belial, Behemoth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Satanas, Lucifer
The central concept of transhumanism could be summarized in a method: it’s doable and fascinating to maneuver from a part of blind evolution to a acutely aware one. Turning into a “homo faber,” as Anne Foerst says: taking management over an existence that for hundreds of thousands of years has been dictated by intrinsic components (organic, bodily, and cognitive limits) and extrinsic ones (cultural, non secular, and ethical limits) and liberating oneself from human and divine evolutionary constraints. The transhumanist, from this viewpoint, is Luciferian, as he rebels towards creation, but additionally as a result of he brings data and progress (to keep away from misunderstandings, it needs to be remembered that Lucifer, earlier than changing into one of many names of the Satan as a consequence of Judaic-Christian cultural appropriation, was Phosphóros, “gentle bringer” and a star whose brightness heralded the daybreak). But when God is useless and the Übermensch isn’t but born, will superintelligence (‘überAI) be our evolutionary aim (or finish)? Will now we have to begin coming to phrases with the inevitable, that’s, to outlive, our solely hope can be merging with AI?
Organic is the New N-word
Within the not-too-distant future, those that select to not merge with synthetic intelligence is perhaps considered as we have a look at the Amish or the Korowai immediately, whereas enhanced people may have an abyssal benefit over their diminished counterparts. A superpower. Will they (we?) lastly be übermenschen? And maybe, this means of hybridization has already begun. Silent however inexorable. Is there a distinction between utilizing ChatGPT to assist us throughout work or having a brain-computer interface (BCI) that transforms our mind inputs into outputs? Some argue there’s a distinction, as an implant would enhance the flexibility to mix in a inhabitants of lowered people, overcoming the dichotomy between enhanced and never. They dwell, in brief. And so they dwell amongst us. And if I’m alive, then you might be useless. Nobody immediately would complain that those that put on glasses have an unfair benefit over those that don’t. However what if this benefit had been hidden in an implant? The human eye has a decision of about 7 Megapixels, however what if we might enhance it to 70? 700? 7,000? Consider a job that requires distinctive imaginative and prescient: an enhanced watchmaker and a diminished one would look similar from the skin, however the former would work with superhuman accuracy. This might result in discrimination now not based mostly on ethnicity, gender, or faith however purely on the “organic versus synthetic” dichotomy. It might even be hypothesized, with some margin of security, that in 20-30 years, this would be the solely doable discrimination.
AI and the issue of Techno-diversity
And to neologisms like “femicide” may very well be added others like “diminished-cide”: “a type of violence systematically exercised not on ladies, however on diminished human beings within the identify of an ideological superstructure now not patriarchal, however synthetic.” Will those that select to not merge with AI take their place within the ideological leper colony of tomorrow? In that national-populist leper colony, immediately reserved for the gypsies, the LGBTIQA+ neighborhood, the political refugees? Accepting this chance will indicate dividing the human world into two classes, the place inevitably, one will take a place of predominance. And the way will we deal with the problem of the disappearance of range, a excessive value to pay within the identify of homogenization (albeit enhanced)? In a world the place all people are merged with the synthetic, the richness of human range could be misplaced. We already see it with OpenAI. If everybody writes with ChatGPT (nearly 200 million customers as I work on this paragraph), everybody can grow to be a author instantly. A practical illiterate turns into Hemingway because of immediate engineering. Once we are all equal, all enhanced, then the battle for uniqueness and competitors might need to be bioengineered in a superhuman society. This can be a stance that opens dystopian situations, and it isn’t SF to foretell that, within the coming many years, governments and insurance coverage corporations will promote AI integration to create a society of robots. Will we have a look at Homo sapiens as we have a look at Neanderthals immediately? It isn’t laborious to foretell that, in 10-15 years, we would entry ChatGPT (or, within the case of a Neuralink BCI, extra doubtless, Grok/xAI) straight from our brains and even carry again to life the brains of the deceased. As we will already get pleasure from an artificial meat burger from extinct animals (Australian meals firm Vow, for instance, managed to create a mammoth meatball), we would carry historic figures, artists, and writers again to life. Nevertheless, The query stays whether or not these useless conform to be woke up.
Demise or deliberate obsolescence?
This anti-death idea already exists beneath the identify of morphological freedom, that’s, now not being restricted by the pre-established boundaries of our physique, however having the ability to resolve if and the place to switch our consciousness: into the cloud, onto a USB stick, into an exoskeleton, and so forth. Increasingly corporations are demonstrating, no less than embryonically and theoretically, that the know-how essential to fight the best taboo of our species – loss of life – is perhaps only a few many years away. For us who work within the journey trade, then, an extra income would additionally open up: when people start to divide between “bodily” and “uploaded,” we would must “open” digital lodges (as within the Amazon Prime collection Add, the place the protagonist, upon his loss of life, is “uploaded” into the luxurious Lakeview lodge within the metaverse). Who will assume the function of mortiferous income supervisor? Positive, the problem of hospitality turns into frivolous within the face of even larger questions that the defeat of loss of life would carry. The primary amongst them is the non secular one. Think about the affect it might have on religions like Hinduism, which foresees a number of cycles of reincarnation earlier than reaching Nirvana. Christian religion, then, facilities its whole theoretical corpus across the existence of an afterlife and the soul’s resurrection. But when man turned immortal, then your complete theological framework of perception would grow to be out of date. And what if the second coming of Christ himself weren’t, in reality, the approaching of a TechnoChrist? If that “resurrection of the flesh” had been nothing greater than a prophecy for thoughts importing? “Once they rise from the useless,” it’s written within the Gospel in response to Mark, “they may neither marry nor be given in marriage; they are going to be just like the angels in heaven.” We might be “angels” (ethereal and incorporeal beings, first clue) within the “heavens” fabricated from clouds (cloud computing, second clue), the place bodily and tactile relationships could be unattainable (digital actuality, metaverse, spatial computing).
Memento Mori
Once more, the matrimonial method “until loss of life do us half” would lose all that means. What loss of life would separate {couples}? The bodily one? Digital suicide? Would marriage nonetheless have worth as soon as one’s consciousness is uploaded into the cloud? If my predictions are right, my three-year-old son will dwell lengthy sufficient to flee the annoying inevitability of loss of life. Earlier than his bodily departure, we would attain such know-how as to permit us to “select” whether or not to die and switch off our “important pc” as soon as and for all or create a duplicate to “add” onto a distinct medium. Good for him, however is not this too brief a time to resolve these bioethical and theological questions? In the intervening time, the problem remains to be (though more and more much less so) relegated to the pure discipline of hypothesis, however there are already corporations that, albeit to a lesser extent, assure digital immortality or no less than the creation of digital twins, like Replika, a platform on which for years I’ve been making a twin of my father. Memento mori? Maybe. Or maybe solely till we overlook. Neglect to die.