Some of Gibson’s most fascinating comments were about how our era would be thought about by people in the far future. If the Victorians are known for their denial of the reality of sex, Gibson said, we will be known for our odd fixation with distinguishing real from virtual reality. This comment resonated with me on many different levels. Just a couple weeks before, I had lunch with Craig Mundie, the head of Microsoft Research, prior to a talk he gave at Northwestern. He told us about some new directions they are taking one of their hottest products, the Kinect. The Kinect is a camera for the Xbox gaming system that can see things in 3D. One of their new endeavors with this camera is to allow you to create 3D avatars that move and talk as you are in real time, so you can have very realistic virtual meet-ups. This is now available on the Xbox as Avatar Kinect. The second direction is the real time generation of 3D models of the world around you as you sweep the Kinect around by hand, called Kinect Fusion. With this model of the world around you, you can start to meld real and virtual in some very fun ways. In one of his demos, Mundie waved a Kinect around a clay vase on a nearby table. We instantly got an accurate 3D model up on the screen – exciting and impressive from a $150 gizmo. I’ve had to create 3D models of stuff in my own research, and that’s involved hardware about 100 times more expensive. Even more impressive, Mundie next had the projected image of the 3D model of the vase start to spin, then stuck his hands out in front of the Kinect and used movements of his hand to sculpt it, potter-like. It was wild. All that was needed to complete the trip was a quick 3D print of the result. Further demos showed other ways in which the line between reality and virtuality was being blurred, and it all brought me back to the confluence of real and virtual worlds so well envisioned by the show I advised during its brief life, Caprica.

Gibson’s right. We haven’t yet moved beyond our need to identify what belongs to what when it comes to digital and physical worlds, so we constantly consecrate it with our language. Ironically, some of that very language was created by him: “cyberspace,” a word Gibson coined in his story “Burning Chrome” in 1982. During the conversation today, led by fellow faculty member and author Bill Savage, Gibson said he’s less interested in its rise than to see it die out. He sees its use as a hallmark of our distancing ourselves from who we are as mediated by computer technology. He thinks the term is starting to go out of use, and he’s happy about that — in his view, there’s no need for a word about a space that we are constantly moving through the coordinates of, as we do each time we go on to twitter, facebook, google+, and other digital extensions of self. It’s not cyberspace anymore: it’s our space.

It seemed inevitable that a question about The Singularity would be put to Gibson in the Q&A. Sure enough, it was the final note, and Gibson dispatched it with typical incisiveness. The Singularity, he said, is the Geek Rapture. The world will not change in that way. Like our gradual entrance into cyberspace, now complete enough that marking this world with a separate term seems quaint, Gibson said we will eventually find ourselves sitting on the other side of a whole bunch of cool hardware. But, he feels our belief that it will be a sudden, quasi-religious transformation (perhaps with Cylon guns blazing?) is positively 4th century in its thinking.

The idea behind Drew Magary’s great new book is simple: aging, as it turns out, is caused by one gene. Shut that gene off and you stop aging; accidents and disease are still a problem, but you’ve cured death by natural causes. Now compound that discovery with the fact that any person who gets the Cure simply stops aging. People don’t become younger, they just don’t get older, frozen at their “Cure age.” What happens next?

In an effort to find out, Magary takes us through the life of John Farrell, a New York lawyer who gets the Cure for aging at the age of 29 in the year 2019. From that point on, things go rather poorly for John and the rest of humanity. As one might expect, curing aging doesn’t cure social ills, over-population, ennui, or a host of other human hangups. Mark Frauenfelder has an excellent synopsis of the book over at boingboing.net, and I share his opinions about the book’s bleak tone and high quality.

Magary’s argument through the text is essentially this: death creates meaning. Not mortality, but guaranteed natural death due to aging. The idea that no matter what you do, how you live your life, the concept that you will be born, mature, grow old, and die creates human meaning. Magary has a point: from the riddle of the Sphinx to Tyler Durden to the final books of Harry Potter, aging and death seem to be at the epicenter of human thought. I don’t deny him that at any moment any one of us could meet a tragic end. Life is precious in part because it is not meant to last.

But here is where I struggle. The Postmortal is not about a post-mortal society, it is about a post-aging society. Lots and lots and lots of people die in Magary’s vision. In fact, he seems to argue that in the absence of death, people will not only seek death but will create circumstances that create death and thereby, create meaning. It is only when Farrell’s life is most in peril that he finds purpose in existence. But Farrell is never immortal, no one is. So my question is: is the process of aging as meaningful as the condition of being mortal?

This question vexed me, because I know a great many people who have aged with grace. They wear wizened white beards or crinkled smiles that highlight eyes behind inch-thick spectacles. Some people are just awesome at being old. They have custom canes and smoke ivory pipes and say saucy things that only they can get away with. To reference Harry Potter again, Voldemort, Mr.Flees-From-Death himself, is contrasted with Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall, both of whom are walking idealizations of what the aging process should look like.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? They are idealizations.

Reality presents a grimmer picture. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a laundry list of other late-onset diseases savage the body just enough that modern medicine can step in to keep the heart beating and the organs limping along while the mind deteriorates to the point of nothingness. Aging in the modern era is about slow unstoppable loss – of hearing, of memory, of mobility, of continence, of dignity. What part of that process creates meaning in our lives? Or is it that to get the benefits of death, we must past through the fires of desperate and futile attempts to prevent it?

Magary’s vision is encapsulated by a character who appears at the end of the book. She is a prostitute who wants to die. She had her age frozen at 18 and, as a result, is seen as a perpetual teen mentally. That is, her additional decades on the planet have done nothing to shape her perspective, beyond making her more cynical. And so it is with everyone else on post-Cure Earth. In Magary’s mind, the stop of physical aging is the stop of maturation.

In this sense, I suspect Magary’s indictment is not of those like Aubrey de Grey who seek the end of aging, but of those who resist maturation. Magary’s values are essentially conservative. It isn’t until the main character is about to die that he realizes what matters: namely, his son (out of wedlock), getting married, and protecting an unborn life. Life in the post-aging world is plagued by those who devalue marriage, childbearing, and religion. Yup, even the secular “Church of Man” is shown to be the “right” answer by the end of the novel. While I don’t deny that these are all valuable pursuits (substituting religion for the broader philosophy of the examined life) I do deny that they would be annihilated by agelessness.

Human beings do not settle down because they age anymore than people have quarter-life or midlife or three-quarter life crises because they age. People are content or discontent based on the life they are currently living. I find it fascinating that Dumbledore and Ms. McGonagall are both single as they approach the sunset of life. Both are examples of doing precisely what Magary critiques, pursuing one’s passions while putting commitment and reproduction on hold. As it so happens, one can live a life of value to humanity, one can, in fact, contribute to the greater good, without maturing and aging as he prescribes. Only if Dumbledore and McGonagall didn’t have to age, one could argue they could have become master magicians and raised a family, had they so chosen. Why aging creates more options in Magary’s mind, I’m not quite sure.

Death, I don’t deny, creates meaning. Finitude and limits give us something against which to define our existence. But my meaning is not created by the knowledge that I will die at the ripe old age of 98 but simply by the knowledge that I will die. Maybe I’ll get lucky and live to be 500 only to be obliterated during an alien invasion. Or maybe I have a tumor right now and will be gone before this time next year. I don’t know. But knowing when we will die, be it young or old, has never been what created meaning. And gray hairs and crows feet have never been the cause of wisdom, merely the first signs of the very high cost of living long enough to acquire it.

Personally, I like the idea of having 100 years of wisdom and experience in the youthful body of a 29 year old. But maybe I’m not old enough to know better yet.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions.

Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice.

To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue. A question already moving beyond the abstract realm of bioethics and making its way into popular culture. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (hereafter DX:HR), prequel to the cyberpunk video game masterpiece Deus Ex, asks the player to take part in answering that question.

DX:HR is that rare video game that offers genuine choice. Some great games, like Mass Effect and Bioshock, allow (or famously disallow) certain choices that, in turn, reflect on the player’s moral compass. DX:HR gives the player the chance to fully explore his or her philosophy and guiding ethic regarding human enhancement and cybernetic augmentation. Choices in DX:HR don’t just ask, are you good or evil, but what do you believe?

Often, what makes a great piece of art is not the message it delivers, but the questions it demands we ask of ourselves. DX:HR, is not a great piece of art, but it aspires to be one. And in some places, it comes damn close by asking us: As humanity moves forward, what do we leave behind?

What follows is not a review but an exegesis of DX:HR and the trials of the main character, Adam Jensen. From behind his switch-blade sunglasses, we see that the future of the human race and of enhancement is not a yes or no question. Instead, we’re forced to face the bleak possibility that there is no right answer and no one to blame.

*Spoilers* from here on out.

The plot of DX:HR can be summarized thusly: Adam Jensen, chief of security for Sarif Industries, a major augmentations manufacturer, is all-but-killed in an attack on one of Sarif’s warehouse. In the attack, Sarif’s chief scientist, Megan Reed, is kidnapped, along with other researchers. Jensen is saved at the cost of his becoming heavily augmented; he is a cybernetic Lazarus. He pursues Dr. Reed’s kidnappers at the behest of the head of Sarif Industries, David Sarif. Jensen quickly uncovers a conspiracy theory with ties to an Illuminati shadow government attempting to use Dr. Reed and her breakthroughs in human augmentation for subliminal social control. As he progresses, Jensen encounters rogue military units, enhancement critics and protestors, and a host of regular people just trying to survive in an augmented world.

Astoundingly, the plot blames no one for this technology’s misuse beyond the Illuminati themselves. The technology gets to remain neutral. Even corporations are given even-handed treatment. More important, when you reach the end of the game, there is no single “end.” There is a selection among endings among which you must choose. In weighing this decision, the-player-as-Jensen is confronted with five avatars who represent the ethics of transhumanism. DX:HR leans heavily on Greek myth, as did the original, so I leverage that here to set these characters in context.

1. Hugh Darrow, inventor of augmentation. Darrow’s right leg is damaged and he must walk with a cane, as his own innovation is rejected by his body, so he cannot be augmented. Darrow views himself like Daedalus watching his creation, augmented humanity, fall like Icarus downward in a flaming spiral after flying to close to the sun. He is the paradox of the innovative status quo. Only the present can create the future, but to let the future flourish, the present must allow itself to become the past.
2. David Sarif, mass producer of augmentations and champion of transhumanism. Sarif recognizes that progress has costs, often calculated in human lives, but argues the utilitarian benefits for future generations far outweigh the harm current generations or certain individuals will suffer. For Sarif, no one person, no set of myopic morals, can stand in the way of where humanity must go. Sarif is Prometheus, a Titan and a thief, stealing augmented fire for humanity.
3. William Taggart, leader of the anti-augmentation movement, Humanity Front. That Taggart shares his last name with an Objectivist hero is curious enough, but his arguments against augmentation come out of a desire for the very thing one might presume transhumanism is trying to achieve: a human future. Taggart is a champion of natural law, a representative of the gods. Humans are limited not out of oppression but protection – to exceed is not evolution, but extinction.
4. Eliza, a self-aware AI construct half-ECHELON, half-spin doctor, that crafts media output into a single subtle message. She tells the public what its opinion is. She is Mercury, Athena, and the Oracle in one – offering information, wisdom, and prophecy. And though her countenance is Apollonian, her option for the world is Dionysian: release the brakes and drop the reigns.
5. Adam Jensen himself. Jensen dreams of himself as Icarus. As the player, one chooses to save those who are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to exercise your newfound power with extreme prejudice. At no point does Jensen betray an opinion about his augmentations that is not in sync with a decision made by the player, including basic dialog response selections.  Jensen forces the player, forces you, to confront your own transhumanist leanings – your own opinions expressed through the choices you make as Jensen will unsettle you.

From these five we develop a rounded picture of enhancement. For Darrow, it is a breakthrough that will leave many deserving people behind. For Sarif, it is a liberating force, a technology that unbridles humanity. For Taggart, it is a gift of dragon’s teeth that glosses over real problems in the name of technophilia. For Jensen, it is for me, but maybe not for thee. For Eliza, it is the technology that brings not the final order of civilization, but must be unleashed into the dark materials of chaos to rebuild the world – perhaps only by destroying the forces controlling it can augmentation and enhancement really liberate humanity.

At the end of the game, Eliza tells Jensen, “This isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” The player-as-Jensen finds oneself at the proverbial and literal end of the world in a bunker in Antarctica with a choice posed by Eliza: which human future is best? Eliza is in the place to offer this choice because of her ability to control opinion and information. What you decide through Jensen will happen at the touch of a button. Suddenly human progress is not an uncontrollable force hurtling along under the power of its own momentum. Standing at a nexus of history, one can choose to apply pressure to nudge civilization in one of four directions. No direction is backwards, but each its own version of forward. All horrifying.

There are four options:

1. Expose the conspiracy, but cripple progress towards human enhancement;
2. Promote enhancement without reservation, removing the checks of watchdog groups;
3. Hide the conspiracy, but support watchdog groups and slow enhancement progress to a crawl;
4. Annihilate the tools of control and take yourself out of the equation. Choose not to choose.

None of these is the “right answer.” You have already beaten the game when this choice arises. And therein lies the glory of DX:HR. There is no happy ending. The game serves as a warning and a rejoinder: the future is coming, but it is built not by servos and fiber optics, but by the decisions of people. As such, the future will arrive broken and corrupt, beleaguered with the venom and stench of those who seek power at the cost of their fellow humans. Good will persist, yet it will be required, as always, to strive and struggle to be seen and heard. But still humanity moves, ever forward.

Thus, DX:HR can be distilled to this single question: Having ruled out utopia, what is the least worst option for our human future?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Guessing at which technologies will come to fruition requires the ability to determine how many intermediate technologies can reasonably be attained in a given amount of time. From there, one can extrapolate and make educated suppositions about when one could reasonably expect something like a life-like prosthetic arm would be possible.

Rosellini explained his process with DX:HR:

My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

So what are the background technologies that support this research? Are there any scary government projects with weird code names like MK-ULTRA and project ARTICHOKE that may give us some insight into where neuro-implants might be heading? You bet there are. Read on to learn about just how soon we can hope for retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces.

Q: Will, please tell me a little about your current experience, expertise, and the research you’ve been doing.

A: I have six advanced degrees spanning business, law, and science. Before I began these academic pursuits, I was a professional baseball pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks system.   After retiring from baseball, I became fascinated with shrinking electronic devices to integrate into the nervous system and help patients with damaged nervous systems. To excel in this field of translational neurotechnology, I obtained the relevant business, accounting, and legal background to develop technology and raise capital for preclinical and clinical studies. While pursuing these deal-making skills, I sought the ability to evaluate the technical feasibility of neuroprosthetic systems. In particular, my degrees are an MBA, MS of Accounting, a JD, a Master’s of Computational Biology, a Master’s of Neuroscience, and a Master’s of Regulatory Science. I am in the final phases of a PhD in Neuroscience. My PhD work is focused on evaluating the safety and efficacy of a novel form of neurostimulation, called voltage-controlled capacitive discharge (VCCD), invented by Dr. Larry Cauller.

My company, Microtransponder, Inc. has been researching the therapeutic benefits of pairing Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) with a variety of rehabilitation tasks to treat several neurological disorders such as tinnitus, post stroke motor rehabilitation, phantom limb pain (PLP), and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  We have developed a method to generate long lasting and spatially restricted changes to neural circuits using paired VNS.  As of July 2011, MicroTransponder has implanted 5 patients in a proof of concept Tinnitus clinical trial in Belgium and the results have been encouraging and will be discussed later in this document.  We have received several NIH grants for the animal research based on the robust nature of the scientific data.  Our researcher Dr. Engineer recently published a paper in Nature, regarding the paired VNS therapy and its ability to reverse the tinnitus precept in rats (Engineer et al., 2011).  Our VNS pairing method was reviewed in the April 2011 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine regarding the potential of our paired VNS therapy to treat a variety of neurological disorders.  Our preclinical and clinical studies suggest that  targeted plasticity using paired VNS therapy would be useful in many neurological disorders such as stoke, tinnitus and phantom limb pain in which plasticity is maladaptive.

Q: How did that impact your work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

A: I contacted the CEO of Eidos back in 2008 and explained that I was a big fan of the game and wanted to contribute however I could.  My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

Q: There are several technologies in the game that rely on direct connections to a person’s nervous system. If you were to make a conservative estimate, how many years away is technology like retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces?

A: In the 1870s, Richard Caton, a British physiologist, began a series of experiments intended to measure the electrical output of the brains of living animals. He surgically exposed the brains of rabbits, dogs, and monkeys, and then used wires to connect their brains to an instrument that measured current. “The electrical currents of the gray matter appear to have a relation to its function,” he wrote in 1875, noting that different actions — chewing, blinking, or just looking at food — were each accompanied by electrical activity. This was the first evidence that the brain’s functions could be tapped into directly, without having to be expressed in sounds, gestures, or any of the other usual ways.

Since then we have seen the wide scale adoption of cardiac pacemaker (electricity into the heart), cochlear implants (electricity into the cochlea), spinal cord stimulators (electricity into the spinal cord), deep brain stimulation and a host of other nerves are targets for activation using a battery, wire and electrode.

In a direct fashion to the game, DOD research arm, DARPA has been working on direct peripheral and cortical neural interfaces for mechanical augmentations since 2003 in the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

Q: The writers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution are trying to tell a story, so sticking to science may have been difficult in places. Where do you feel you took the most creative license?

A: I think there was a nice balance between science and science fiction.  We took some license on invisibility cloaks and the anti-gravity implementations.  However, I still spent some researching this and there is some evidence that this field will be viable at some point in our lifetime.

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118723&org=ENG

Q: There is a good chance that augmentations will be created by large corporations, how do you think that will impact the development of useful medical prosthetics and artificial organs?

A: This is already the case, with over 1M “augmentations” in place.  Our Vice-President Dick Cheney was a cyborg (he had a cardiac neurostimulation device).  More interesting will be the propensity to abuse the technology, which is the case with any advanced technology.  Checkout this article detailing the underground world of neuroenhancing drugs: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot

The argument for implantable neuroprosthesis having the potential for abuse is not ripe yet.  This is in part due to the state of the technology.  As of now, no implantable is able to return all function back to the diseased nervous system.   The government has the greatest potential to abuse the technology.  It is now widely known that fear memories can be erased with animals.  Some of that work has been done in our lab for the treatment of PTSD in soldiers (we did this in rats).

However, Project MK-ULTRA or MKULTRA is a government project that started in 1948 and studies mind control through chemical interrogation and neurostimulation.  The project was first run by Sidney Gottlieb, Frank Olson and William Sargant. Although MK-ULTRA is most recognized with the LSD testing in the 1950′s and 1960′s, they have been involved with many other experiments in mind control related testing.  MK-ULTRA has tested interrogation through fear of deadly animals and Subproject 54, which through “perfect concussion” tried to erase the memories of U.S. submarine crew.  Some of the most secret projects in U.S. history all took place under MK-ULTRA, such as Projects Paperclip, Chatter, Bluebird and Artichoke.  The usage of electric shock to the brain for the creation of amnesia with hypnosis was discussed by an ARTICHOKE document dated 3 December 1951: “[Deleted] is reported to be an authority on electric shock. He is a psychiatrist of considerable note. [Deleted] explained that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the ‘Artichoke’ type of work. He stated that the standard electric-shock machine (Reiter) could be used. He stated that using this machine with convulsive treatment, he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time, and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of use of the convulsive shock. He stated that the lower setting of the machine produced a different type of shock. When this lower current type of shock was applied without convulsion, it had the effect of making a man talk. He said that this type of shock produced in the individual excruciating pain.  He stated that there would be no question that the individual would bequite willing to give information if threatened with the use of this machine. It was [Deleted]‘s opinion that an individual could gradually be reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level”(P. 44).

Q: What augmentation do you think has the most potential to benefit humanity?

A: I believe our targeted plasticity using vagus nerve stimulation might be the single greatest innovation to benefit patients coming out of the labs in the next 10 years.  The idea that we can harness the brain’s natural plasticity and redirect to reverse disease states is a big idea that can really help patients.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

So when Square Enix decided to pick up the reins from Eidos and create a new installment in the series, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR), I was quite excited. The first indication DX:HR was not going to be a crummy exploitation of the original’s success (see: Deus Ex 2: Invisible War), was the teaser trailer, shown above. Normally, a teaser trailer is just music and a slow build to a logo or single image that lets you know the game is coming out. Instead, the development team decided to demonstrate that it was taking the philosophy of the game seriously.

What philosophy? you might ask. Why transhumanism, of course. Nick Bostrom, chair of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, centers the birth of transhumanism in the Renaissance and the Age of the Enlightenment in his article “A History of Transhumanist Thought” [pdf]. The visuals of the teaser harken to Renaissance imagery (such as the Da Vinci style drawings) and the teaser ends with a Nietzschean quote “Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.” Later trailers would reference Icarus and Daedalus (who also happened to be the names of AI constructs in the original game), addressing the all-too-common fear that by pursuing technology, we are pursuing our own destruction. This narrative thread has become the central point of conflict in DX:HR. Even its viral ad campaign has been told through two lenses: that of Sarif Industries, maker of prosthetic bodies that change lives, and that of Purity First, a protest group that opposes human augmentation. The question is: upon which part of our shared humanity do we step as we climb to greater heights?

When was the last time a video game asked you an existential question about the nature of our species? The tension between the proponents and opponents of transhumanism in DX:HR is heightened by the ambiguous opinion towards enhancement of the main character, Adam Jensen. Jensen’s own enhancements are a result of the need to save his life after a traumatic attack. Unlike Tony Stark, Jensen does not craft his own mechanized additions, but must instead come to terms with the cybernetic hand he has been dealt. DX:HR is not interested in cybernetics as merely a fun backdrop for a video game, but instead treats enhancement as the serious ethical issue that it is. The world of the game is set in a “Neo-Renaissance” where even the characters’ clothing reminds us that transhumanism is born out of the Age of Enlightenment. As a prequel to the original Deus Ex, DX:HR takes us into a world where augmentation and cyberization are still new to humanity and shows us how painful the transition into a transhuman future might be.

To dive deeper into these issues, I had a chat with Mary DeMarle, the lead writer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, about how the ethics of enhancement and augmentation were considered when crafting the game’s story and characters.

Q: How did you approach the topic of augmentation? What were your thoughts about cyborgs and human engineering before you began your research?

A: As soon as I knew we wanted to center the game around the concept of human augmentation and where advancements in neuroprosthetics might take Mankind, I knew I needed to do a lot of research. I started with a book entitled, “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreaux. It was a great introduction not only to the subject of human engineering, but also to the various theories and arguments for and against it. After that, I split my research efforts in two, spending some of my time reading up on the technological advancements, and some of my time reading up on the philosophical debate. I have to admit that, before starting all this research, I had tended to think of cyborgs and human engineering as the stuff of Science Fiction — something I love to read and immerse myself in conceptually, but not something I might actually see in this reality.

Q: How have those views changed as you’ve worked on this project?

A: I think the biggest change was the realization that cyborgs and human engineering are not only possible, but probable in our lifetime. When you talk to people who are working in the field — people like Will Rosellini, our technical consultant — and you learn about current projects and how close we are to achieving some of the advancements we depict in the game, you can’t help but be amazed. I’ve also had the opportunity to talk with people who have not just overcome disabilities through advancing technologies, but who have gone on to achieve things most “able-bodied” people never will. In the process, I’ve seen the potential and the incredible allure of human augmentation. At the same time, a lot of my research into the dangers of experimentation and unregulated industries has made me understand the other side of the debate. It truly is a rich, complex issue that becomes all the more fascinating the more you dive into it.

Q: Can you please give a brief summary of how augmentations are invented and popularized in the world of the game? What are the motivating factors for those who oppose augmentation?

A: As part of the game’s backstory, we envisioned a series of technological, historical, economic, and cultural events in the decades leading up to 2027 (the year in which the game takes place) which together lead to the advancement and proliferation of mechanical augmentations. In the technological arena, leading researchers discover how to significantly improve the way implanted (artificial) electrodes and the human nervous system interact, leading to a revolution in neuroprosthetics. At the same time, an increase in the number of people needing prosthetic limbs — due to military conflicts and a few devastating natural disasters in parts of the world — creates a unique demand for the tech. In the economic realm, a devastating terrorist attack destabilizes the oil industry, adding to the world’s existing economic woes, and catapulting the world economy into a severe crisis. Governments respond by opening up oil shale reserves for development; by and large the people getting jobs in this and other high risk, physically demanding industries turn out to be those who are mechanically enhanced. Unable to compete for these lucrative jobs, several “able-bodied” people sue for the right to amputate their own healthy limbs. Meanwhile, on the cultural front, several highly popular artists, entertainers, and athletes begin sporting new augments and winning unprecedented accolades. People begin viewing mechanical augmentations as something everyone could (and maybe even should) have, and their popularity takes off.

Not everyone is pleased, however; people opposed to the technology end up, by and large, falling into three camps. Those who feel threatened by it (not everyone can afford mechanical augmentations and if someone doesn’t get one, might he end up losing his job to someone who does?); those who object to it on religious grounds (God made human beings in his image and trying to change or “improve” them is morally wrong); and those who object to it for intellectual reasons (using biotechnology to alter the human body risks fundamentally changing who we are as a species. Therefore, scientists and researchers are tampering with human nature without even realizing the danger they are putting Mankind in and should be closely regulated.)

Q: How would the average person in the street feel about augmentation in the world of the game?

A: It depends on who the person is and where he lives. Some will see it as a wonderful thing; a chance to improve life for one’s self and others by taking control of your own evolution and becoming all that you can be. Others will see it as dangerous and say we shouldn’t be playing God or tampering with Human Nature. Still others will despise it (and those who use it) due to fear, jealousy, and basic ignorance. Others won’t have made up their minds yet, since they can see both the benefit of the technology and the ways in which the debate itself is tearing at the fabric of society.

Q: I’ve been following the viral marketing campaign for DX:HR. First Sarif Industries was introduced (via their website/advertisements) and then their ads were countered by Purity First activists who exposed the dark side of augmentations and defaced the Sarif website. What is at stake in the conflict between those companies designing and building augmentations and those who oppose human augmentation?

A: On one hand you could say that the basis of the conflict is philosophical, so what’s at stake are people’s very strongly held beliefs. One side believes that achieving self-controlled human evolution is Mankind’s destiny and that fear of the unknown should not prevent us from realizing it. The other side believes that Man does not have the wisdom of God and must let nature run its course. But of course, there are a variety of other factors at stake as well. Mechanical augmentations are part of a highly lucrative industry, and some people want to ensure that this remains true without rules or regulations so they can “cash in.” Others fear the unregulated, uncontrolled spread of the technology within the “ignorant masses” and will do anything they can to control who gets to use it and who doesn’t.

Q: Adam Jensen, before his accident, is torn between augmentation and remaining “all natural.” How does that perspective shift over the course of the game?

A: Adam hasn’t decided how he feels about the whole augmentation debate at the start of the game, precisely because we wanted to use his initial indifference and ignorance as a way of exposing the debate to players. He gets tossed into the middle of things when his company is attacked and he’s forced to become augmented. He never has a choice in the matter, and as he struggles to understand who attacked him and why, he gets exposed to the full brunt of prejudice on both sides. Since you are playing Adam, you get to experience this firsthand as well. Thus, how Adam’s perspective changes over the course of the game really depends on how your perspective shifts. You’re the one playing him. You are the one making choices and witnessing the consequences.

Q: What are your personal opinions around augmentation? Do you think prosthetics should only be available to those who’ve lost limbs? If the technology progresses enough, would it make sense to deliberately replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one?

A: I think augmentation can be both a positive and a negative thing. It’s a tool — and like all tools, it really depends on who’s welding it and why. Individuals should be able to decide what is good for them as individuals (so long as their choice doesn’t harm others) and if the technology progresses enough, it may very well make sense for people to choose to replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one. I, however, would probably choose not to.

Q: Using your crystal ball to look into the future, how realistic do you think a “Purity First” style conflict is? Do you foresee conflicts between those who choose to alter their bodies and those who oppose cyberization?

A: It’s really hard for me to say. People have an awful tendency to want to force their views on others, and intolerance of what is different can definitely devolve into violence. I think the reasons we’ve ascribed to both sides of the debate in the game — fear, greed, jealousy, religious and/or personal beliefs and ethics — are valid enough to spark conflicts, so I think it definitely could happen if the issue ever grew contentious enough. But I would hope that saner minds would prevail.

This is the third of a series of posts about the evolution of consciousness. In the first post, I laid out a basic theory that goes something like this: consciousness began to evolve about 350 million years ago, when we emerged from the water on to land. Why? By enabling vision to work over distances many times greater than in water, this move gave us the ability to perceive multiple futures.  As a result, the ability to consciously plan ahead became important.  In my last post, I detailed why long distance vision reigns supreme when it comes to planning (as opposed to other long distance senses such as hearing or sense of smell).

In this post, I want to make the argument more comprehensive. The crucial environmental condition for evolving neural structures to support planning is that there is an interlude— space to breathe— between perception and action. Without such a gap, only simple, fast, and direct transformations between sensory input and motor output can keep an organism safe from predators. But the long-range sensing abilities discussed in the last two posts are just one category of possibilities for such a gap to open: there are other fancy brain abilities unrelated to sensing that can also open this gap.

Here, I consider two such capabilities: memory and communication. An animal can plan to do something based on memory (“I remember good breakfast was always in this direction”), communication (“hey buddy, around the corner is a good place for lunch”), and, as discussed already, perception (“I see something tasty looking over there”). Let’s go through planning via memory and communication, and compare these to the perceptual route. Combined, the three different mechanisms are the very grist of the mill of consciousness-as-planning.

Remembrance of possible futures. If you have an accurate mental map of a space containing memorized landmarks, then you can devise multiple plans without sensing and execute them by going from landmark to landmark, where those landmarks are spaced no further apart than your sensing range (which could now be very short, and even work through touch). For example, imagine the landmarks are bushes of berries, and they are spaced apart a distance equal to or less than the range of the sensory system you are using to perceive the bushes. You’ve visited these bushes so often, you’ve memorized each bush’s position with respect to the others. (Such maps exist in all animal brains where they’ve been looked for. Their neural basis is under intensive investigation. Fairly elaborate ones have even been found in honey bees.)

Now, before you make your first move, you devise a plan for harvesting efficiently: 1) You know that you will be out until dusk, and you want to be able to see your home before it gets too dark, so you decide to start with the furthest bush and end with the bush closest to home; 2) You typically remove all the berries from a bush before moving on, so it’s important not to waste time in revisiting bushes you’ve already picked. So you devise a trajectory through the bushes that has no overlaps. Both aspects of this strategy can be provided by remembering a bush’s position. In fact, birds and bees use strategies of harvesting from plants that avoid revisits, and need to use memory for this.

Communication of possible futures. Bees have fantastic navigational systems that let them roam hundreds of meters from their hive to find a food source and describe its location to their nestmates back home. They use their relatively coarse visual system to obtain a local cue (optic flow) that lets them detect how far they’ve gone, and they sense direction using their ability to sense the angle of polarized light. They come back, and then communicate distance and direction to nest mates via their dance language. This means the hive mind has an extended sensory range and can collectively explore multiple places to find food. The same is true for humans, with their symbol systems. We can go over the hill, come back and tell our friends that there’s an ice cream stand beyond where we can see.  (Our ability to review this ice cream stand on Yelp, thereby enabling anyone in the world to find it on Google Maps, increases humanity’s possible futures exponentially to the point of creating a new phenomenon of choice anxiety.  But that’s another post entirely…)

Both memory and communication, then, can extend our perceptual capabilities, and thereby give us the room for multiple possible futures. One of the core parts of the idea I’ve been discussing here about how/why consciousness emerged in animals is that the neural basis for planning would have really been pushed once we had long range vision (after we came up on land). Could the ability to plan have come about because of improved memory or communication abilities, rather than long distance sensing?  While possible, this seems unlikely. Here’s why.

A problem for both memory-based and communication-based planning is that they depend on the goal being relatively stable in spatial position. For example, you can plan to go hunting in a place where tend to be are lots of antelopes, but to kill a particular antelope, you can’t hunt purely on the basis of memory—unless it happens to be paralyzed or dead, which is generally not the case.   Similarly, bees would not do so well to come home to their nest and communicate the position of a source of nectar if that source of nectar happened to be a very strange plant—a plansect, if you will—that had wings and was constantly moving around.

The point is clear: for stationary food sources or goals, both memory and communication work well in support of planning. But for unpredictable food sources, like the very nutrient rich body of another moving animal, memory and communication can get you part of the way (“antelope over the next hill!”) but can’t close the deal. Planning different possible paths to the most nutritious sources of energy requires long-distance perception.

Perception of possible futures. I therefore hypothesize that the biggest payoffs to our early land-based ancestors came from advances in long-range perception combined with small buffer of working memory to hold some different possible futures being considered. This combination lets you hunt a moving animal that may be devious and require rapid contemplation of multiple possible approaches to capture.

If this logic is correct, then consciousness may only come about in a world where animals developed a taste for eating other animals. Interestingly, experts in the evolution of the nervous system have suggested that it was only after animals started preying upon one another that diffuse neural nets (similar to those in sponges and jelly fish) condensed into what we now know as the brain over 500 million years ago (e.g., Northcutt and Gans’ “New Head Hypothesis” from the early 1980s). However, by my argument, carnivory alone would not have been sufficient for the birth of full-fledged awareness: you and your prey need to move onto land, where you can see it from a distance and envision several ways of successfully capturing it.  Once weighing these various options becomes useful, evolution can work its powerful ways in slowly accreting the necessary neural structures for thinking about these futures.

Image courtesy of GeoKansas.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman – drive him to do what must be done: rebel.

So what am I saying here? That humans are bad and apes are good? Not at all. My argument is that in many science fiction films, we tend to question the ethics of the science itself and the ethics of pursuing that science. That is, there is a difference between saying “should science try to do X?” and “how can we study X in an ethical manner?” In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco noted that someone might claim that “This is a Frankenstein story, or that you’re playing God.” But that mindset questions the pursuit of science in general, not how one can pursue a hypothesis ethically. It is how we experiment and what we do with the scientific results that matter. In the case of Caesar, humanity utterly fails to care for the mind that enhancement has created. Dana Stevens at Slate aptly described the film as “an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.” And as with most prison-break movies, we’re on the side of the prisoners, not the warden, for a reason.

I argue that Caesar’s enhancement and that Caesar himself are ethical, but that the treatment of Caesar by every non-ape in the film (save Charles) is unethical and based on fear, arrogance, willful ignorance, and naiveté. Yes, that means that not only are the obvious villains in the wrong, but so are the other humans in Caesar’s life.

Word of warning: spoilers below.

To address my claim, we must first investigate whether or not enhancement itself harmed Caesar’s ability to be ethical. In the film, Caesar has a happy and inquisitive disposition. He likes exploring, solving puzzles, playing chess, and reading. Fast-forward to the revolution. Caesar directs his troops through the city, but not with the intent to cause mayhem and destruction and with express direction not to slaughter or maim. On multiple occasions, Caesar prevents wanton killing and only against Jacobs, the film’s ethically-bankrupt capitalist, does Caesar authorize death. Caesar’s goal is freedom, not revenge. So we are presented with a person, Caesar, who becomes more moral as his intelligence increases and his enhancement takes hold. He opposes killing and his primary goal for himself and his fellow apes is escape, not conquest. One struggles to make the case that a person who is unjustly imprisoned and abused does not have a right to seek liberation. I think we can make the case that Caesar’s behavior can be deemed ethical and, within the context of his treatment in the film, reasonable.

But how can this be? What sort of treatment would render Caesar’s rebellion justifiable?

Where to start? There are some obvious villains. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the Big Pharma CEO who pushes for accelerated drug testing and the sacrifice of the chimps all in the name of profits. Jacobs is crafted to be hated. He knows that ALZ-112 might cure Alzheimer’s, but his need for return on investment leads him to kill the program. Only when there is evidence of intelligence increasing properties of the drug does Jacobs come around and reauthorize testing. I must admit, I was shocked by the idea that intelligence enhancing drugs equaled a paycheck in the mind of Jacobs, given the potential resistance to such a technology. But I digress. The point is that Jacobs is ultimately arrogant and uncaring about the animals upon the backs of which he makes his living, but he does little to impact Caesar’s life.

So is it the caretakers at the ape sanctuary? Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cruel and stupid, no doubt. That they have the backing of a faceless uncaring government bureaucracy does little to shock me. Somewhere in the world, there is an ape sanctuary that looks far too much like the one in this film. For every ape in the sanctuary, including Caesar, the caretakers are the second villains in their lives: the first are the original people who were raising each ape. In Caesar’s case, these men are not the instigators of the problem, but the catalyst for Caesar’s final rejection of humanity. The caretakers grind salt into the wound, but they did not make the first cut.

So who did first wound Caesar? I would argue that the main antagonist is not the cruel “caretakers” in the ape sanctuary, nor is it the Big Pharma CEO Steven Jacobs. Instead, I believe that James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, is ultimately responsible for forcing Caesar to rebel. Will Rodman is a mad scientist with a heart of gold. He makes a series of decisions no proper scientist would or should ever make: he brings a chimp that has been experimented on home and he tests his experimental drug on his father. This behavior is not that of a lucid person trying to do right, but of a lunatic lurching wildly towards love through every barrier that ethics and logic might erect. Will Rodman’s decision to test ALZ-112 on his father, Charles (Lithgow), is an almost unbelievable transgression. Yes, Will’s action comes from a place of love and concern for his father, but his recklessness only provides momentary relief from the horrors of Alzheimer’s before the drug fails and Charles experiences a brutal regression on par with that of his obvious namesake, Charlie, in Flowers for Algernon.

For Caesar, Will’s inability to pursue science ethically has the most horrible consequences. Of all the people in the film, Will should have known better than to provide a nurturing and loving environment limited enough to ensure Caesar’s intelligence is insufficiently stimulated, his knowledge of human norms and society stunted, and that any mistake will result in his improper imprisoning with fellow apes. Will also fails to recognize the incredible degree Caesar’s intelligence and, as a result, treats Caesar as an animal, not as a person with an IQ beyond that of most humans. At one point, Freida Pinto’s character, primatologist Caroline Aranha, says “You are trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” She is talking about Will’s attempts to cure Alzheimer’s and developing a drug to improve and fix the brain. Caroline is worried about trying to control nature. However, the fact that Will believes Caesar needs a leash, even into adulthood, is a better target for her critique. One does not leash a fellow person, one explains to and reasons with a fellow person. Will should not be trying to control Caesar. Will is arrogant and willfully ignorant, Caroline is naive and fearful, both fail Caesar. Just as with Frankenstein’s monster, the failure is not with the creation but with the creator.

Both Dr. Frankenstein and Franco’s Will Rodman utterly fail to protect or properly nurture their creations. In both cases, a single act of violence is sufficient for the creator to disown and abandon the creation to fend for itself. What was Caesar’s crime? Defending an Alzheimer’s sufferer, Charles, from an angry jerk of a neighbor. But since Caesar is an animal, he has no rights or recourse. Caesar is locked away with hardly a goodbye in the equivalent of a hardcore prison after his first misunderstanding with a culture that is alien and confusing. Trapped in a frightening and brutal environment, abandoned without sufficient explanation by the only father he’d ever known, and with a mind capable of comprehending the injustices against him, Caesar’s rebellion is a logical conclusion. Exposing his fellow apes to the more aggressive Alzheimer’s/brain-repair drug ALZ-113 is the application of enhancement as a tool of liberation. Caesar’s first word, “No!” is the animal equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.

Caesar and his ape rebellion do not rampage or seek revenge. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not simply a story about how apes came to be intelligent. That’s only half of the story. The other half is the failure of humans, the failure of those closest to the apes, to recognize the new brilliant minds that had been created and to care for those new persons. Intelligent persons have a right to freedom and self-determination. Enhancement enables liberty. Simply being the result of an experimental new treatment does not take away one’s personhood or right to justice. If that justice and freedom is not provided, it must be taken. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film that strives to show the humanity in our closest evolutionary cousins and the resulting tragedy of our inhumanity towards them.

For more on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, check out my interviews with James Franco, Andy Serkis, and director Rupert Wyatt.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Images via Rise of the Planet of the Apes Trailer

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

Captain America is not a serious scientific film. Nearly every piece of technology is furious hand-waving. Vibranium? Vita-rays? Rocket-powered propellers? The cosmic cube? Awesome, yes, but not real. These, however, are narrative tools, not attempts at hard scientific prediction and therefore not something to be critiqued. What the comic-book-tech of Captain America allows for is an exploration of the ethics of enhancement. Here, more than perhaps any other fictional film I’ve seen, Captain America displays striking balance and nuance – it gets enhancement right.

Based on your knowledge of the film and/or comics, this post may contain *spoilers*, so consider yourself warned. And if you’re looking for review of why it’s a fun movie, A.O. Scott in the NYT captures my sentiments about the film perfectly: pulpy Nazi-punching goodness. Now, on to enhancement!

There are three major factors that make the enhancement of Steve Rogers and his crimson domed antithesis, the Red Skull, unique among comic book lore. The first is that Steve Rogers was deliberately enhanced by someone. There is no accident, no crisis-as-catalyst-and-crucible event, no mystic charm, and no superhuman heritage to explain or justify Rogers’ becoming superhuman. Rogers is superhuman because Dr. Abraham Erskine develops a superhuman serum for that express purpose. Here, the science of enhancement is itself portrayed in a positive light. In what seems like every other superhero origin story, powers are acquired through scientific hubris. Be it the unintended consequences of splitting the atom, tinkering with genetics, or trying to access some heretofore unknown dimension, comic book heroes invariably arise by accident. The super serum, the vita-rays, and the outcome of the experiment on Rogers are all a scientific success. They happen precisely the way every person in the room hopes they will. Dr. Erskine is not a madman but a humble, ethical, and brilliant scientist trying to make better people. As such, he looks for the best in the humans he hopes to enhance. In short, Steve Rogers might be the only major superhero who is the result of scientific experimentation going to plan.

Second, Steve Rogers deliberately chooses to become enhanced. I had expressed my doubts about Rogers’ consent being genuine, but the film makes his determination and clarity of thought evident. Unlike many heroes, who seem to acquire their powers out of recklessness around science (Banner, Parker, Richards, I’m looking at you), Rogers very consciously decides to go through with Dr. Erskine’s procedure. He, in fact, might be one of the only heroes who ever knew he was going to be come a hero before his transformative event. That foreknowledge is critical for demonstrating that enhancement isn’t something that is only desired by egomaniacs. Rogers seeks strength and speed to defend and protect others. His body did not match how he saw his true self. Again, we see an anti-science motif of comic books turned on its head. Normally, those who seek superpowers are unworthy because they believe they deserve to be better than others, thus, the experiments go wrong. This attitude is embodied in the Red Skull, whose evil quite literally boils to the surface when he injects the super serum. However, Rogers’ reasoning is that others deserve to be protected and defended. Altruism, not egoism, is the driving force behind Rogers’ desire to become enhanced.

Third, and most important, is that enhancement in the film is not merely “functional” enhancement. That is, Rogers is not just stronger and faster. In a private moment, Dr. Erskine explains to Rogers that the serum and vita-rays affect “everything that is inside. Good becomes great. Bad becomes worse.” Erskine is not talking about physical traits here. Rogers’ “bad” traits (i.e. his laundry list of medical issues) are not aggravated by the serum, but cured. The good/bad that becomes great/worse are moral qualities and capacities of the person. Captain America is literally super-moral. His already above-average sense of moral clarity and determination to do what is right becomes amplified in the same way that the lust for power and pleasure from slaughter are magnified in the Red Skull.

Moral enhancement, a fairly recent talking point among thinkers in the bioethics community, is handled deftly in Captain America. Enhancements do not change who we are or from where we come, but serve to empower and improve traits which we already possess. For Steve Rogers, those traits are what we wish for most in our heroes: beneficence, altruism, and humility. Note, among his list of valued traits are not unwavering loyalty to national authority (despite his irritating flag fetish) or deference to some commanding power. Instead, Rogers’ own judgment causes him to defy orders at almost every turn. Why? Because Captain America’s sense of ethics is itself enhanced. He is a better human being because of Dr. Erskine’s process.

I haven’t seen a movie that was this pro-science and pro-human goodness in a long time. I may not have seen a movie that was this pro-enhancement ever. Did I mention it also involves Nazi-punching?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Image of Captain America via Marvel.com

The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?

As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.

But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place? I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution was asked a while back by his readers: What are the exact conditions for counting “transhumanism” as having been attained? In an attempt to answer, I responded with what I saw as the three key indicators:

1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
3. Rights discourse would shift from who we include among humans (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans.

As I groped through the intellectual dark for these three points, it became clear that the precise technology and how it worked was unimportant. Instead, we need to figure out how technology may change our lives and our ways of living. Unlike the infamous jetpack, which defined the failed futurama of the 20th century, the 21st needs broader progress markers. Here are seven things to look for in the coming centuries that will let us know if transhumanism is here.

When we think of the future, we think of technology. But too often, we think of really pointless technology – flying cars or self-tying sneakers or ray guns. Those things won’t change the way life happens. Not the way the washing machine or the cell phone changed the way life happens. Those are real inventions. It is in that spirit that I considered indicators of transhumanism. What matters is how a technology changes our definition of a “normal” human. Think of it this way: any one of these indicators has been fulfilled when at least a few of the people you interact with on any given day utilize the technology. With that mindset, I propose the following seven changes as indicators that transhumanism has been attained.

1. Prosthetics are Preferred: The arrival of prosthetics and implants for organs and limbs that are as good as or better than the original. A fairly accurate test for the quality of prosthetics would be voluntary amputations. Those who use prosthetics would compete with or surpass non-amputees in physical performances and athletic competitions. Included in this indicator are cochlear, optic implants, bionic limbs and artificial organs that are within species typical functioning and readily available. A key social indicator will be that terminology around being “disabled”and “handicapped” would become anachronous. If you ever find yourself seriously considering having your birth-given hand lopped off and replaced with a cybernetic one, you can tick off this box on your transhuman checklist.

2. Better Brains: There are three ways we could improve our cognition. In order of likelihood of being used in the near future they are: cognitive enhancing drugs, genetic engineering, or neuro-implants/ prosthetic cyberbrains. When the average person wakes up, brews a pot of coffee and pops an over-the-counter stimulant as or more powerful than modafinil, go ahead and count this condition achieved. Genetic engineering and cyberbrains will be improvements in degree and function, but not in purpose. Any one of these becoming commonplace would indicate that we no longer cling to the bias that going beyond the intelligence dished out by the genetic and environmental lottery is “cheating.”

3. Artificial Assistance: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) integrated into personal, everyday behaviors. In the same way Google search and Wikipedia changed the way we research and remember, AI and AR could alter the way we think and interact. Daedalus in Deus Ex and Jarvis in Iron Man are great examples of Turing-quality (indistinguishable from human intelligence) AI that interact with the main character as both side kicks and secondary minds. Think of it this way: you walk into a cocktail party. Your cyberbrain’s AI assist analyzes every face in the room and determines those most socially relevant to you. Using AR projected onto your optic implants, the AI highlights each person in your line of sight and, as you approach, provides a dossier of their main interests and personality type. Now apply this level of information access to anything else. Whether it’s grilling a steak or performing a heart transplant, AI assist with AR overlay will radically improve human functioning. When it is expected that most people will have an AI advisor at their side analyzing the situation and providing instructions through their implants, go ahead and count humanity another step closer to being transhuman.

4. Amazing Average Age: The ultimate objective of health care is that people live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Whether that happens due to nanotechnology or genetic engineering or synthetic organs is irrelevant. What matters is that eventually people will age more slowly, be healthier for a larger portion of their lives, and will be living beyond the age of 120. Our social understanding of aging will lose the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society will treat aging as a disease to be mitigated and managed. When the average expected life span exceeds 120, the conditions for transhuman longevity will have arrived.

5. Responsible Reproduction: Having children will be framed almost exclusively in the light of responsibility. Human reproduction is, at the moment, not generally worthy of the term “procreation.” Procreation implies planned creation and conscientious rearing of a new human life. As it stands, anyone with the necessary biological equipment can accidentally spawn a whelp and, save for extreme physical neglect, is free to all but abandon it to develop in an arbitrary and developmentally damaging fashion. Children – human beings as a whole – deserve better. Responsible reproduction will involve, first and foremost, better birth control for men and women. Abortions will be reserved for the rare accidental pregnancy and/or those that threaten the life of the mother. Those who do choose to reproduce will do so via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) ensuring pregnancy is quite deliberate. Furthermore, genetic modification, health screening, and, eventually synthetic wombs will enable the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born. Parental licensing may be part of the process; a liberalization of adoption and surrogate pregnancy laws certainly will be. When global births stabilize at replacement rates, ARTs are the preferred method of conception, and responsible child rearing is more highly valued than biological parenthood, we will be procreating as transhumans.

6. My Body, My Choice: Legalization and regulation will be based on somatic rights. Substances that are ingested – cogno enhancers, recreational drugs, steroids, nanotech – become both one’s right and responsibility. Actions such as abortion, assisted suicide, voluntary amputation, gender reassignment, surrogate pregnancy, body modification, legal unions among adults of any number, and consenting sexual practices would be protected under law. One’s genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one’s own discretion. Transhumanism cannot happen without a legal structure that allows individuals to control their own bodies. When bodily freedom is as protected and sanctified as free speech, transhumanism will be free to develop.

7. Persons, not People: Rights discourse will shift to personhood instead of common humanity. I have argued we’re already beginning to see a social shift towards this mentality. Using a scaled system based on traits like sentience, empathy, self-awareness, tool use, problem solving, social behaviors, language use, and abstract reasoning, animals (including humans) will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood. Personhood based rights will protect against Gattaca scenarios while ensuring the rights of new forms of intelligence, be they alien, artificial, or animal, are protected. When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place.

Individually, each of these conditions are necessary but not sufficient for transhumanism to have been attained. Only as a whole are they sufficient for transhumanism to have been achieved. I make no claims as to how or when any or all of these conditions will be attained. If forced to guess, I would say all seven conditions will be attained over the course of the next two centuries, with conditions (3) and (4) being the furthest from attainment.

Transhumanism is a long way from being attained. However, with these seven conditions in mind, we can at least determine if we are moving towards or away from a transhuman future.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of psychedelic human eye by Kate Whitley via dullhunk on Flickr Creative Commons.