Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin

Introduction

      “MANKIND WILL surely destroy itself.” Whether predicted in a thunderous denunciation of our flaws or with mild worldly regret, an apocalyptic future has become a cliché. Will it be global warming or global cooling? Nuclear winter or radiation poisoning? Famine due to overpopulation, or pollution-induced sterility? These are some of the possibilities I grew up with. But today, it is becoming increasingly common to hear of another route to the demise of humanity: we will improve ourselves, becoming something new and better, and in doing so we will destroy what we are now. We have this opportunity because science and technology are giving us the power to control human evolution, turning it from a natural process based on chance to one guided by our own intelligence and will.

      This idea—that human progress points toward human extinction—is held by people who go by a variety of names: transhumanists, posthumanists, extropians, advocates of H+, or singularitarians. It can be difficult to keep these terms straight, as they each represent schools of thought whose agreements and disagreements can be complex and ingrown. For the purposes of this book, all these schools of thought will be given the generic label transhumanism.¹ The essential insight that defines transhumanism is, to borrow a phrase, that “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”² Transhumanists argue not only that modern science and technology are giving human beings the power to take evolution into our own hands to improve the human species, and then to create some new species entirely, but also the ability to improve on all of nature. Much like the older apocalyptic visions, the transhumanists believe that mankind as we know it and nature as we know it are on their way out; but for most transhumanists, that is the deliberate goal sought, not a consequence of our hubris to be avoided. Indeed, the transhumanists believe that if we are to prevent some of the more common apocalyptic visions from becoming reality, we must redesign humanity so that our ruinous flaws can be eliminated. To avoid mere destruction, we must embrace creative destruction.³

      Hence, the end of man can be the beginning of . . . who knows what, exactly? But, we are told, it will doubtless be some wondrous new home for intelligence, able to do things far beyond our present ability to imagine. If my baby boom generation was warned that the challenge of the future involved ensuring the continued existence of human beings in the face of all the threats posed by our own activities (and to some extent by nature itself), for the transhumanists it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a future that has any place for us at all, except perhaps as curiosities.

      Such views of the future can strike sensible people as idiosyncratic or even loony. But this book will show why that understandable first reaction should not be the whole story. There are some serious reasons why transhumanists have come to measure progress by the speed at which mankind disappears, and those reasons are more deeply rooted in mainstream ways of looking at the world than might at first be obvious. At the same time, as we shall see, there are also very good reasons to reject the transhumanist future, and to work toward a future in which, as William Faulkner put it in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, “man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”⁴ Those reasons