Humanist vs Transhumanist Online Debate with Gerd Leonhard and Calum Chace - Audio Online

So welcome to the Future show. This is Garrett Leonhardt, your host. It's a very special show tonight. I've known Colm for quite some time and I've read most of his books and he's a really amazing guy and I'm so happy he's joining us tonight for this special edition to where we're having a battle of the minds, as we call it. We are friends despite of several different opinions and we'll be talking a lot more about that. So we have managed a perfect background here with a fancy fireplace and after a lot of renovation, this is what you get now. So thanks very much for joining us. It's a great pleasure. We are live on YouTube and of course we're live on Zoom. Everything you put in here, comments, questions, polls, whatever it is, the polls are anonymous, but everything is public. Okay? And you know what happens with Facebook and Google. They know everything about you, so whatever. If you don't want to say anything that's public, if you have security issues, don't mention anything. I should also say there is a way to call in on you on Zoom with a telephone, you know, even the landline you can plug in, you know, if you want to keep it really safe. And call the toll free number on Zoom if you're worried about security. So again, welcome very much to the show. A couple of basic things to explain and then we dive right into it. Okay, so the images are mirrored. I'm going to change this, I think. Let's try this again, the mirroring. Okay, well, I'm not going to worry about the technical things right now, so let's dive into this. Maybe just to reiterate, in the beginning, we are interested in interactivity, so we want to talk to you. We're not going to talk ourselves the whole time. We're not going to make traditional presentations. This is a very interactive and fast environment. We're going to use the Question tool, Q and A at the bottom. That's the primary way of how you can ask questions and you also get to upvote other people's questions. So if you want to determine what we're going to say and what we're going to answer, then basically use the question tool. You can use the chat to talk to us and to talk to Soha, our moderator, which I will introduce shortly, and she is in charge. Soha, why don't you come into the screen here for a second. So this is Soa Rashid. As you can see, she also has a fancy background. So Soa is the moderator and she's an associate futurist with my company, the Futures Agency. And she's been instrumental at running this event. SOA is the key person who allows people in and out. That goes for question chats. She will also share some links and all that stuff. So thank you, Soha. So after the show, you're going to be able to download this, of course, from YouTube if you wish, but also at my blog feature with Gert.com, there'll be a blog post in two hours, and I assume the same goes for Callum. So we're going to have video, audio, we'll have the polls, we have some of the Q and A, we have everything else that you need to know after the show. And of course, there's an email tomorrow with a summary. Everybody gets an automatic email. Okay, so, Callum, great to have you here. We are going today in the following order. I'm going to do roughly a five minute introduction using some fancy backgrounds I have devised. And then Callum will talk for about five, six minutes as well about his position. You know, we are in the battle of transhumanist versus humanist, if any such thing can be easily identified. And I think for the. For the kickoff, what we'd like to do is to do a short poll and find out what your position is on transhumanism. And of course, we'll shortly explain what that actually is. Transhumanism. And the same goes for humanism. But let's take a look at the poll. The poll is coming right now and this poll should be launching in your window right now. This is multiple choice, it's anonymous. So please do participate in the poll. Let us know who you are. And basically the question is, are you a transhuman? Are you just a human, or do you care less about providing an answer? Please do go ahead and vote. Let us know what you're thinking so we know who you are on the other end. I know there's quite a few people who are in the official parenthesis transhumanist movement, which is great. So we can have a juicy debate later. I forgot to mention one thing. While the poll is running, if you want to speak, actually speak like we do, make sure your audio and your video is ready. If you don't have video, it's okay, but your audio has to be ready. Make sure you're not in the Delhi subway at the time of the call or somewhere quiet would be nice. And if you do speak, please don't just raise the hand to say hello, that you're calling in from Colombia or something, but actually have a question or a comment. You have 30 seconds to speak, and SOHA will moderate that as well. So as a hand raising tool right on the screen, you can use, whether you use an iPhone or an iPad, just hit the screen, raise your hand, and then we know who wants to talk. Okay, so the poll is coming in. 72% have voted. We have 20% transhumanists. Well, that's a high number. And we have 27% saying they don't know what to think about transhumanism. Yeah, that's quite an obvious question. And there's quite a few people thinking the entire debate is odd. It's neither nor. And I will actually share the poll with you shortly. I'll just give you one more second here to actually express yourself here, and then I'm going to share this with you. The polls are happening pretty quickly. So we have three different polls. We're going to do the same one again later. So if you want to change your mind, who you are, you're welcome to do so. But whatever poll comes up, please vote quickly because we're not going to spend much time on just keeping it up there. So I'm going to end the poll and share. Okay. So you can see for yourself what the results are. This is one of the things that we can do online really nicely. So an interesting mix of people. It's really great to have you here. Let's start here and go into the introduction. Callum, do you want to say something right now or you want me to just proceed or. You are muted. I have to unmute you first. Yes. Colm doesn't get to talk until we unmute him. There he is.

Hello, everybody. Welcome. And Gert, why don't you carry on? You're doing a great job.

Okay, Thanks. I love the fireplace. Really cool. Right, so I want to start here. Right, so basically what I see happening these days is, you know, we're living in this world that's surrounded by technology, and I call this the mega shifts and the, you know, all the stuff that's around, the big data, AI and all these things. And just to define humanism, I think humanism really is all about the agency of human beings, the value of the agency of human beings. Not in the sense of the Anthropocene overdone it, but in the sense of personal freedom and progress and purpose. And this is, of course, Wikipedia. Now, there's many things that are funny about Wikipedia, but what I see here is I've talked about this many times. In the last couple of weeks with the Corona crisis, I see sort of the great transformation of this time that we're in is a great transformation. And this is why it's perfect to have this debate about, you know, how human are we and what's going to happen with all the technology that is essentially spinning around us and taking us in different directions. And so the other side of the equation, the idea of becoming superhuman, you know, omnipresent, omnipotent. Here's from Natasha Moore and her colleagues, I think from the 90s, even the humanity plus decoration. So the inclusion of techniques that are able to assist memory, concentration and all of those things basically becoming, transcending humanity, transcending human limitations, as the picture shows. That's the flip side that Callum will talk about in person. But this is really what I see as the current challenge. We clearly are in a world where technology and humanity are overlapping, hence my book a couple of years ago, Technology versus Humanity. And we're increasingly collaborating, especially now. Technology clearly is the winner of the entire COVID 19 crisis. So I wonder where that's going. And I wonder about this in particular. The idea that part of what we are is data. It's of course, biology, but how much of that do you think could be learned by a computer? You know, how computable are we? This is one of the key questions I have. And if we are computable, how long will it take for us to be computed, so to speak? And how Ray Kurzweil says, 2050, right? The singularity, the overlap of man and machine, how is that going to go? And what are we going to gain? What are we going to lose? Big part of the discussion today gain, for example, is medical. Clearly, if we have data, we have information, we have our DNA and the cloud, we can compare, we stand to live longer, be much healthier. What goes with the data, though, Is this right? It's the kind of what's been called data ism, believing that the data is better than anything else. And of course, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, for example, keeps talking about how important data is. But then the other day he said, for all the really important decisions, I don't use data, I use my intuition. So how computable are we? This is a key question I want to discuss with Calum and with you guys later. Are we just data organisms or algorithms? Harare, where is that going to go? And that kind of makes me think about what the next step would be. And I'm a little bit worried about this. You know, I'M a little bit worried about technology kind of sucking in all the things that make us human that are not data. You know, intuition, imagination, emotions, understanding, free will. Now that's a big word for discuss later. Empathy, judgment, all of the things and what currently technology is doing is offering us in return all of the things that are verifiable, you know, data, algorithms, automation, efficiency. And my concern is, and I'm hoping to discuss that later, is that this is a fantastic business, you know, turning humans into data. But is it good for us? What about the mystery, you know, the uncertainty, the serendipity in this transformation that we're seeing now like this? How far would you go? How far should we go? How far could we go? I mean, my view on that is again, to discuss later. We could probably go very far. I mean, the science will be there in not too long of a time. Quantum computing, all those things. But how far should we take this? Will it make us happy to become superhuman? Will it make us happy to change our genome? CRISPR, Cas9, longevity. Also discussion for later. Big topics for me, because I think, you know, if you're sick, clearly this would be humongous if we can, if we can solve cancer. But would we use the same technology to build super soldiers? And how would we avoid this? I know I'm asking a lot of questions here, but that's kind of an open topic, I think. This, you know, this. Sorry, the ethics council, right, this idea that I've set forth for years. How are we going to make sure that we do things that are good for the majority of us, not just good for money, not good for some people, you know, that create equality. How are we going to do that? Or are we going to end in a world like this? One of my favorite gifts. It's like becoming like God, so to speak. Obviously a very big question as well. Are we going to become super potent, powerful, and is technology going to put us in the world where we perceive it as a present, which in many cases that's true, but then it turns out to be a bomb. You know, it turns out to be something that is destructive, like Facebook, kind of a present. And now it's a bomb. And how do we control it? You know, how do we make sure technology is with us? To quote my colleague Douglas Rushkoff, who may join us later. Actually, I don't if he has time for a short comment on this. He wrote a book called Team Human and I talked about Team Human for quite some time also in a parallel track, really. But this is the question I have, you know, are we going to be on Team Human? Are we going to be on Team Robot, or is that the same? And if we're going to be on Team Human, would we do things that can be done? Would we not do them because we wish to be human? Very big questions. I'm sure there's some answers from the audience, but this is the primary point I'm worried about when I talk about transhumanism. Is it going to make us happier? Of course, we don't really know what happiness is. Self realization, contentment, all the things that make us human. Perma, as Martin Zilligman says, purpose, engagement, relationships. Are computers good with relationships? Moravatch Paradox says whatever is easy for a computer is hard for a human, and vice versa. Should we keep it that way? I would vote for going into a direction where we can maintain technology as the key to progress. But on the other hand, I would propose that the things that make us human, what I call my book the Andro Rhythms, the Human things, that we focus on those as well, and that we don't try to automate them and that we respect them, that we don't transcend humanity in that sense. We transcended technology. And that's, of course, a big argument I'm very happy to discuss with you later. This kind of concludes my introduction and I know I've thrown up a lot of questions, but I'm hoping for some answers and for a good debate later. So let's go back to our gallery view and show, see what everybody else is doing, if you guys are still there. Yeah, okay. Callum, please take over from here. Yeah, you're unmuted. Good.

Great. Well, thank you very much indeed, Gert. That's a really interesting runaround and you've thrown up an enormous amount of issues. I can't believe we'll get through all that in an hour, but we'll. We'll give it a go. So. Hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in. My name is Callum Chase, and with a deplorable lack of humility, I call myself the AI Guy because I've been obsessed with the implications of rapidly improving AI for most of my life. I published my first article on technological unemployment in 1980, and since then I've written a bunch of books on AI, including the two bestsellers behind me. And after a 30 year career in business, I spent the last few years as a global keynote speaker and author, the subject of our future with AI. I do this to pay the bills, of course, but also Because I really love doing it, but mostly because I've got something to say. And it's this. Most people have not yet really understood that the rate of change is accelerating. They hear it said, and occasionally they see a compelling example, but they don't really believe it. They don't feel it in their bones. Now, the truth is, our technology is improving at an exponential rate. And in the course of this century, it will change everything about the nature of being human. And I believe we should not be passive about this. We should prepare. I think this is the century of two singularities. And my two main books cover these in turn. The book the Economic Singularity does what it says on the tin. It covers the economic singularity. And this is what happens when machines become so advanced, so capable, that they can do pretty much anything that we humans can do for money. This won't happen for two, probably three decades, but we should start to prepare for it now. And we should definitely prepare for the accelerating churn in the job market that will precede it. The other book, Surviving AI is about the technological singularity, which is what happens when we create an artificial generative intelligence machine which has all the cognitive abilities of an adult human. It quickly becomes a super intelligence, which is either the very best or the very worst thing ever to happen to humanity. Now, I've just finished drafting the third edition of Surviving AI and I'm going to give away some copies, some Kindle versions of it, to the first 10 or maybe more people who send their emails into the address that Sohar will be putting up. I'll send Moby files of that third edition. Now, Gertz and my topic today is transhumanism. I'm very happy to identify as a transhumanist, but I want to emphasize something up front. I am not a spokesperson for any transhumanist organization. I'm a member of H, and I've had the privilege to get to know quite a few of the foundational figures of transhumanism. And I count some of them as friends. But I don't speak on their behalf or on behalf of the movement as a whole. I take transhumanism to mean the belief that we should transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology. During this century, technologies like AI, smart drugs, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology will make it possible to improve the experience of being human. Astonishingly, and I think we should do this, some people will not want to, and they probably shouldn't be forced to. But they should also not be empowered to stop those of us who do. The result, I think, is that we will stop being human according to most sensible definitions of that word. We will be post humans. And I think we should accept that and even welcome it, I'd say. Again, I'm pretty sure that's not what every transhumanist think, but it's what I think, and I think it's where Gert and I disagree most strongly. I discussed this before with Gert and I love discussing it with him because he challenges my assumptions and conclusions strongly and he's extremely good at disagreeing amiably. So I'm excited to be part of this discussion and thank you again for tuning in.

All right. Wow, you're starting it off with a hard ball there. Okay. Stop being human, right? There's one concern I have about this discussion about who defines that's one thing. And the other one is like, what if some of us are superhuman and other ones are not by choice, right? Wouldn't we by choice become second rate humans? Like in terms of work and employment? Wouldn't we have a disadvantage by not choosing to upgrade? And what would that do to us in terms of economics and in terms of everything else, right? I mean, imagine a time to where, you know, you can connect real time to Wikipedia or whatever it will be then, right? And you're a super smart speaker and I'm still the lame guy that I am now trying to look at my written notes, you know, that that would put me at significant disadvantage. And so how do you feel about, you know, I don't think it can be either or I think we can't just say, you do whatever you want, I do whatever I want. You know, I think that will be difficult. And hence I think we need some sort of counsel on finding at least some sort of mainstream. There'll always be people who are not in the mainstream. Like cryonics right now is obviously not a mainstream, but people are doing it. Right. So that is a question I have for you. How would you propose to do this?

So it is clearly possible to concoct a scenario in which you get some pretty dystopian outcomes because of the difference between people who have enhanced themselves and people who haven't. Yuval Harari, who is kind of like a gentleman thug, has a very nice phrase for it. He calls it the gods and the useless. Now, if humanity speciates, splits into two separate species, that's clearly potentially dangerous. But I think it's a long way off, a very long way Off. People worry sometimes now about the digital divide, and they used to worry probably about the fridge divide, and possibly in prehistory, people used to worry about the fire divide. But if a technology is really powerful and really useful, it gets democratized very quickly. The smartphone is a great example, still only about 10 years old when it first came out. I remember the first time I saw an iPhone, I thought it was a piece of magic. I saw the price tag and I thought, I'm not going to buy one of those.

But, Kalima, you do have to admit that technology has not brought us equality in any. In fact, it's made it worse, right?

No, I don't. I don't have to admit that.

You don't agree. I mean, if we're looking at the current scenario, what's happening? Basically, it's. It's digital feudalism. It's made me able to send free messages or listen to free music, but generally speaking, it has not produced the quality.

I completely disagree. Really. Technology, the real start of technology was the Industrial Revolution. Obviously, the agricultural revolution was a technological explosion, but in terms of really making a difference to humanity, the Industrial Revolution was where we really got going. And since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly in the last 50 years or so, the experience of being human for most humans has improved enormously. A relatively poor person today in the west, certainly, and actually also a lot in developing economies lives a better life than A king did 200, 300, 400 years ago. 400 years ago, we did have feudalism in a lot of the world. We certainly don't have feudalism now in the west, and pretty much not in.

Yeah, in economics terms, I would agree with you. By the way, Callum, if you could put. Lift up the microphone a little bit. Take the. Take the sticky stuff off. It's not working. A lot of people saying that you are scratching. So you maybe just lift this up just a tiny bit, you know, so these are the things that we're struggling with in terms of technology. We can talk about transhumanism over can't control our Microsoft.

You are the God and I am the useless when it comes to the technology.

So that was. Actually, I want to respond to this, but I think we should maybe dive into a question and capitalize this a little bit. By the way, there's lots of really interesting people here. I know Jose Cordeiro is here and David Wood is here and a bunch of other people that we know. If you want to speak, please raise your hand and we'll pipe you right into this merry club here. Of discussion. This is what it's all about. I mean, we don't pretend to have answers. We're up for an open conversation here. So let's have a look at the Q and A. So, Jose Cordairo, five upvotes. That's good. Thank you for the questions. Why do I use the word versus in the title of this webinar? Okay. He says, I hope it's only for marketing purposes. Yeah, I would agree. Yes. Do you just want to be controversial? Most transhumanists are already humanists. We just go way beyond traditional humanism. Well, you can read it for yourself, but clearly my position is not a versus position. You know, my book that came out three years ago after a lot of arguments with the publisher back then, who insisted on versus rather. And, you know, I want to call it technology and humanity. So that's my position in general. I don't think it's versus. You know, this is clearly something that we've put together as an angle of making it more easy for people to understand. I do believe there is a fundamental disconnect at some point, but other than that, there's also a lot of connects between transhumanists and my position. My position, just to make that clear one more time, is that I am on the proactionary side as far as technology goes, trying out stuff to improve our position. I believe the technology holds the key to our future in so many ways. I do think we should have sort of a icing on the cake of the precautionary approach and say, well, there are some things that we should probably be more careful about and that we should agree about as to what we want. I think it was Tim Coco said months ago when he was speaking at the European Commission. He said, technology can do great things, but it does not want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. And this is what worries me the most, is that we don't have the right intent and therefore we go wrong inadvertently, like we went wrong with Hiroshima or Nagasaki as sort of fundamental event. And this is something I think we need to get on the same page. And I think there can always be people who are on a different page, like we have today. But there has to be some sort of guidance as to what we want in the end. Do we want to become machines? Do we want to merge with technology? Do we want everybody to do that? Or do we just, you know, what do you think, Callum?

I actually do want to merge with technology, and I am much less interested in remaining human than I think you are. To me, being human is simply an animal thing. A human is an animal which can create more humans with other humans in the traditional way. I don't think that's the important thing about me or you or anybody else. I think the important thing about us is our minds. If you think about what you could take away from yourself, you could clearly take away your hands, your feet, your legs, your arms, you could whittle away, and I'm sorry, this is a bit brutal, but you could whittle away, I think, all of your body. If you could be the, know, the apocryphal brain in a vat, I think you would still be you, but if you took your mind away, you would immediately not be you.

Well, I fundamentally disagree with that. You know, it's. I think many people in psychology have said that. For example, I think it was Daniel Kahneman who said, you know, we don't think with our brain, we think with our body.

I don't think that's right. The brain stem goes down. The central nervous, sorry, the central nervous system goes down to the spine. Some, some degree, you could argue that's an extension of the brain. But the brain is clearly the essential creator of a mind, and it's our minds that are the most important things. Now, if in the future it does become possible to upload our minds into computers, I think it probably will become possible. Who knows whether it's 100 years ahead, 50 years ahead, or 2,000 years ahead, but let's say at some point it happens. Would certainly want to do that because I think the possibility of life as a, as an uploaded mind would be enormously greater than the possibilities inside this brain, which is limited to its three and a half pounds of goop because of the width of a birth canal. So I would certainly welcome that expansion. And at that point, I don't actually think we would be human anymore. I think an uploaded mind is going to be post human, and I would welcome that.

I think it brings us to the key point of the discussion, like this idea of, are humans data? Are we just like the machines? Are we algorithms, just very fancy ones, so we don't really know how they work? But ultimately we are. And I would say that it could possibly be true. I think it's far away from us actually realizing what that algorithm would entail at the current speed of things. But I think in the long run, the question is really not so much about what we can be, what we, what we want to be. Do we want to carve out a Special position. And are we entitled to it? I mean, many people would say no, not at all, because we fucked everything up, right? So we're not actually doing much good. But my argument is, you know, there is. We clearly have to find a way that we agree on 95% of it rather than 2%, because then we could have an arms race, right? I mean, we have an arms race in so many ways already on AI. And what would happen if this was subject to budgets, if this was subject to like longevity, right? You get to live 120 because, you know, you're making lots of money with speaking gigs like S Do I. That's good, right? But everybody else is still restricted, you know, not even high speed Internet. And these are issues, I think, that require some sort of careful handling. I do want to hear what the audience has to say about this. So please do tune in not just with question. We have something from David Wood here. And of course we have David Wood raising the hand. So let's get him in here live. David, are you ready? Can you speak freely? You are live on YouTube. Four million people watching, so be careful. David, are you there?

Yes, I'm here. Fantastic session. Really appreciate you setting this up. My question, gerd, is about Android films. I'm not quite sure how you pronounce that wonderful word. And I agree with you, there are many wonderful things about humans which we don't yet understand in terms of algorithms and data and information. So I'm on your side there. But I want to know if you think that all our instincts, all our intuitions, all our human nature needs to be preserved in this form, given that we seem to have inherited from the past features which are no longer very good in this highly complex, highly technological world. For example, we've got instinct towards a sweet tooth that made sense in old times, but it doesn't make so much sense today. We had an instinct towards xenophobia, being fearful of people who are different from us. That probably made sense in old times, but it's actually quite destructive today. And we have short term biases. And it's not just cognitive biases, it's other intellectual, other emotional, instinctual things. So why do you think we have to preserve all of that without changing it at all? Why can't we take advantage of all our modern insights, our Daniel Kahneman and the technologists and Ray Kurzweils and Natasha Vitamors and all these people, to help us to improve upon our algorithms and go beyond today's humanity into wonderful, better humanity of the future?

Yeah, David. I mean, I agree, of course we should do that. I'm worried about, in the process of this programmability, that we would essentially say, we don't need this anymore. We need this instead, and it becomes sort of an option menu. And then I'm worried about, A, who defines the menu? And B, I'm worried about what I may lose because I thought, I don't need this anymore.

These are good questions, absolutely, but we shouldn't rule them out of the discussion. We shouldn't. Shouldn't say, oh, it's difficult to make up our minds here, therefore, we're not going to touch it. We should instead bring in many people like you are doing, to start weighing it up, and we can figure out what are the drawbacks to various changes, and what changes do we want to go ahead. It's true if we interfere with nature, sometimes we get unpleasant surprises. But that doesn't mean to say we should stop trying to interfere. We just have to be wiser and more profound about it, and then gradually, we can make big progress.

Yeah, Callum, please do. Just chime in when you feel like it. Unmute the button here. Yes. Raise your hand. So please bring it back. Yeah, so let's just jump in and talk. You know, we don't have to wait your turn. Oh, wait, wait. There you are. Okay.

Okay. I would like to know where you would draw the line. You've talked about it being unacceptable to you for people to be born outside the human body, for instance. And would you draw the line at, say, doubling the. The intellect of a human? Would you regard that as being a step too far? Or how about multiplying the intellect of a human by a thousand times? Where would you draw the line? I'm interested to see what.

What.

What the boundaries of your humanity are.

Very good, but you put me on the spot here. Thank you. So, yeah, I mean, I believe that there are some things that are differentiated also by whether this is a disease or something that we're trying to address to solve a problem. Like, you know, if I have an accident, I lose both legs. I can get fancy legs if I have the budget, and that's good. Right. Should I then say, you know, I want to be a faster mountain climber. I'm going to buy those legs.

Yes, you should, because not being able to. Not being able to jump from the bottom of Everest to the top of it is a disease. It's a limitation.

Yeah. Okay, so on that part, I don't agree. I think that that is the difference in application, not in Terms of technology. Right. And also, I believe, for example, if we're looking for ways to upgrade and to become omnipotent, you know, basically becoming without limitations, then I would also be very concerned about things that dehumanize us as a consequence. For example, I mean, I'm not a woman. I don't have to give birth. I grant you that this is a big issue, but the idea of saying that we're going to shortcut a fundamentally human thing, which is to give birth with your body, into finding a machine substitute, that is the very definition of dehumanizing. It's not like taking a cholesterol pill or a statin or even a heart transplant. This is also entirely voluntary.

This is a great opportunity to ask a woman to join the debate because we have.

Right, please.

I'll bet Natasha's got something to say about that.

Let's get Natasha in here. Right, Please. Natasha, please. Fire away. I think you are. You have been switched on. Hi there.

Gerd and Calum. Enjoying both of your presentations and such a lively discussion. Well, it's interesting because females, women have been the sole bearers of reproduction, and that's historical in the animal species, but not completely definitive. There are some hermaphrodites, for example, the C. Elegans nematode, a small. The most simple animal, doesn't have a woman, a female, it has a hermaphrodite. So if. If we say that it's a woman's position or it's been the woman's role historically in our animal species to reproduce, is that a good thing? When we take a look at the number of births, the high death rate of births over history, and the circumstances of infertility, which has grown exponentially over the past decades, when people want to have birth, it becomes more than a female or woman's issue, it becomes a species issue. And when we're thinking about population decline, which is trending, Japan, other countries are recognizing and looking at pandemics, that then the issue of sustaining our species and reproduction becomes a species issue and not a woman's issue.

Thank you, Natasha. I agree with you on that. Except for I would say you're arguing completely rationally now, like a scientist, which is good, but I mean, what about the flip side of things, right? I mean, what if I weren't arguing?

I'll take off my scientist hat and put on my woman hat.

Yeah.

I lost a baby in pregnancy. I almost lost my life. So I know the horrors of that and the sadness, the deep pain and anguish of it. There was something in the news recently and this ties into the broader scope of the discussion. And it was an announcement in the news that said there's so many women who are health caregivers internationally. When you look at the stats between the males and the females who are are on the front line outside the police and the fire departments largely. But in the medical healthcare industry, the percentages are more female than male. And the question in the news was, is this a correlation or causation? So I thought about it and I thought, for God's sake, heavens no, it's not a causation. Just because people have COVID 19 doesn't mean all of a sudden women are going to go, okay, let me be entrepreneurs of health. No, it's innate in the woman's psychology. And this lends itself to your understanding of the human animal, Gerd, and the humanness in being a humanist and also to calum in looking at wanting to shed maybe this animal veneer and allow the quality of the human brain and consciousness and thinking modalities take us to other areas that we haven't been before. It is exciting, but finding that that correlation, I think is more important than the causation because with the causation you can go down a rabbit hole and get in a loop that is not effective. Thank you.

Very good point, Callum. Do you want to chime in or do you have a comment on this or on the tag onto that or move on to other.

No, I'm always interested to know why people want to limit themselves. And I confess I didn't understand your last point, Natasha, about correlation versus causation, but I think you're suggesting that there are ways in which we shouldn't enhance ourselves. I wasn't quite sure why, and I'm.

Actually never sure why the correlation is that as an animal we're evolving and evolutionary humanism and the whole point of evolution is to grow and evolve. If we stay animal, and especially looking at the COVID 19, it would be causation that we would need to evolve based on the fact of our vulnerability. And if we want to live and sustain our species, we're going to have to evolve, period. The end. And that's the core of transhumanism, to make a more humane humanity and to continue our evolution at the juncture of so many difficulties, whether it's the COVID 19 or another pandemic or climate fluctuations or, you know, devastations, all those different things. That's why. But I see it more as a causation there and then the Correlation I was mentioning is that it doesn't matter if it's the female or the male that has the tender mode or the passion or emotion to sustain our species. It's our responsibility to sustain our species. Thank you.

Very good point, Natasha.

Yeah, please, sustain our minds. Sustain what's important about ourselves, and would argue enhance what's important about ourselves. You know, humans are very interesting creatures. I'm pro human. I like humans. Most of my best friends are humans. And we have much more interesting lives than, for instance, chickens and certainly much more interesting lives than nematode worms. But in the possibilities of the fun that a living entity could have and the, the understanding and the wisdom that a living entity could have, we're really, really limited. We get to. We never get to travel off this tiny, tiny little speck in a small and fairly unfashionable solar system, in a small and fairly unfashionable galaxy. There is so much more of the universe to explore and understand and enjoy. So I think we should be looking to enjoy more and more of our cosmic endowment. I think being human is a fine start, but it's a really tiny limit to place on ourselves.

Yeah, I think what, you know, we'll have a question very soon from Anna Brodsky, but I would just want to say one thing. The thing that worries me most about this discussion and these issues is that this, this concept of unlimited choice of doing things with ourselves. Right. Kind of leaves it wide open for any permutation that, you know, whatever budget and science allows.

And why not? I think you have to prove harm if you want to stop somebody enhancing themselves. The onus is on you to prove harm. Sure.

But I would. I wouldn't be so far pressed to say what the harm is of a baby being born in a machine rather than a woman or a man, for that matter. If that was possible, you know, clearly there would be harm there, in my view. And I think this is also why. Well, because what goes on, of course, we shouldn't dwell on this topic too deeply. Right. But I think what goes on between a baby and the mother in the womb in those nine months is not something that a machine can do. And maybe that machine can, in 500 years, possibly do that. Right. But there's many things that we know absolutely nothing about, and this is just what happens there. Right. And we're just going to replicate it, just like we say, you know, if you want to date, you use Tinder, you don't have to. You know, this is a. It's a Simulation. Right. And this is. I think we should leave it at that point, you know, to talk more, a little bit less about the. That issue, but the reproductive system, about.

Which you and I. Much less.

Yeah, right. We're sort of. We're foreigners to that discussion, really, but I certainly wouldn't want to make rules for women on my behalf, but that would be not a good idea. But I think in general, this is what worries me most. A this sort of out unlimited thing of saying that, you know, we'll do whatever is possible. And the second one is the money is involved with technology. The money involved that comes out of turning human things into data and into technology is outblowing everything else we've ever seen. And that is very tempting. Look what Facebook did to social media, destroyed media for the chance of pitching us with bullshit ads. This is essentially what happened. And if the same thing is going to happen with longevity, I'm not interested. Somebody's going to turn this into a giant business that leaves everybody else disadvantaged.

I don't go along with this surveillance capitalism narrative, and I don't think that I don't use Facebook myself. Never have. I'm a Facebook refuse, Nick, for particular reasons. But what I see of other people using Facebook is I see it actually being a force for good rather than harm. I know that's a wildly unfashionable thing to say, but I see families and friends enjoying each other's relationships at distance in ways which were much, much harder to do before. And almost all technology is like that. Most technologies, when they are introduced, people say, oh, you know, that's, that's a terrible thing and we shouldn't allow it. There's a brilliant for saying of Douglas Adams that any technology that was invented, you know, before you were born is just, you know, it's a normal, natural part of life and you take it for granted. Any, any technology that's invented between when you're about 16 and about 35 is really exciting, really fun, and you can probably make a career out of it. Any technology that's invented after that is bad, wrong, and it should be banned.

And then I know that quote, but.

I think five minutes later we've, we've. We just taking it for granted.

I think the example of Facebook, other social media shows that too much of a good thing is the bad thing. And this has become one of the themes of my speeches where I'm saying we want the good things, but how do we decide what is too much of a good thing? Technology in many ways has become Both a religion and a drug. And this idea of saying that whatever is on the top of that heap is the target. Right. I don't subscribe to it because I think we have enough of too much of a good thing in so many ways where I'd be worried about the side effects, the externalities of technology and how we're going to address those. Are you going to make a business out of limiting technology?

No, I want to make a business about democratizing technology.

Right. So maybe that's the same point. I don't know. Maybe we'll get there. Let's take Anna Brodsky here for a comment. Anna, are you there? Please, fire away. Yeah, is you still there or have you gone away to get some coffee or, you know, some of some of the social media drug as we were talking about earlier. Anna, are you there? There's a hand raised, but. Okay, I'm going to allow you to talk. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's not available, so. Okay, we'll take a question here from the question menu. Right. If you agree. So we have Ruizaya, a question for Callum. With the existing inequality, how can we democratize transhumanism? Don't you think that humans first need to change their value system before they change their nature?

Well, if humans need to change their nature and their value system, maybe transhumanism can help with that. There's a really interesting article that Nick Bostrom, one of the early transhumanists, wrote called A Letter from the Future, if I'm not mistaken, in which he described or tried to describe what life might be like for an uploaded mind which was exploring the universe. And he made the interesting point that it was able to modify its own attitudes and so that it lived in a constant state of bliss and presumably had extremely positive values as well, without losing the essentialness of that mind. So I don't see transhumanism as in any way injurious to healthy thinking, to positive thinking, and to happiness and fun. And I think I may have lost the thread of what the original question was, but I hope I've answered it.

But it was going in a good direction there. So again, if you want to chime in, please raise your hand and we'll try to get you in. Don't raise your hand if you don't have a microphone because then we can't hear you. And also, feel free, I think there's a comment from Natasha here saying the letter to Mother Nature is originally for Max Moore, which I think is your husband. Right. If I'm not mistaken. And I just watched, by the way, a Great video on YouTube from Max Moore about transhumanism where he explains very nicely in pretty cool bullets. You should give it a try. It's one of the best explanations I've seen so far. And I think you guys have a big event coming up as well in July, so do keep us posted on this. So we have a couple more hand raises. Yeah, there you are. Very good. By the way, we tend to not take too many people again. So if you already spoken, we probably don't take you again. But let's try Anna Brodsky again. Okay. If you are there. So what can you bring in Anna Brodsky? No, she's gone. Let's try Tony. Oh, there you are, Anna. Okay, turn on your microphone, please. So please turn on the microphone for Anna. There you are. Okay, please go away. We can hear you.

I asked a question as well in the Q and A, but I actually have some comments on what you've already said. Would you prefer me to read out my question or make just ask one.

Simple question or one comment? You have 30 seconds, please.

30 seconds. Okay, and I will go for. Okay, I have my comment, which is I think that technology facilitates equality, privatization, co ops, technology to fuel the divide between the rich and the poor. It's kind of like that biblical saying, it's the work of the devil to pervert the word of the Lord. When it comes to innovation, any sort of innovation, what defines that impact, the cultural impact, emotional, biopsychosocial, environmental impact of that innovation is the trajectory along which it develops. Transhumanism occurring along a nonviolent trajectory, for example, would facilitate attachments and connections. It could be a beautiful thing. Transhumanism occurring within access, equality could see the ascension of our species into something, to use the Italian word, oltre. It's one of those nice European words which is a combination of beyond and above. And transhumanism occurring along a violent trajectory with. Like your point about Facebook and capitalism, would facilitate inequality and competition. Could be a nightmare. High tech, torture and war. We could destroy ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, I agree on many things you're saying. I think basically technology, as William Gibson has said, technology is morally neutral until we use it. And this is the challenge. So that's what I want to present as my humanist challenge. I'm worried about. About that. I'm not worried about technology per se. I'm worried about how we use it. And we see many examples around us where we didn't use it very wisely. And certainly American style Internet capitalism hasn't brought equality. It's my view, if you look at the us, there's six cities in the US that have gained all the workers and the money from the Internet and technology boom. Everybody else does not have it. And what happens in America now, You know, people are getting fired. They're certainly not getting the benefit of technology. The opposite is true, really. So in that view, I would argue that we haven't really done the best we can do to make it morally more compelling. Right. This whole discussion about.

I think perhaps then the conversation is less about technology and more about economics, more about whether we have an economic system which is geared towards equity, towards access, equality, or whether we have an economic system which is geared towards funneling resource access from the poor to the very rich.

Very good point, Anna. Let's switch and have Callum respond to this and then we're going to get the next question. Thank you very much for the contribution. Thanks for having me.

So Anna has very helpfully reminded, as well as asking a great question, she's also very helpfully reminded us of what the previous question was aiming at, which is whether technology is necessarily a driver of inequality. And I would argue, and I think this is the point Anna was making, that it actually tends to drive equality. If you look back a few hundred years, there were a very small number of people who had reasonable lives and most people had really horrible lives. You know, you had more than better than even chance of dying before you were five years old. You would have all sorts of diseases and rotten teeth by the time you were 20. There was a ton of violence around all the time. And, you know, the levels of inequality were absolutely staggering. Slavery was the norm, not a rarity. Now, there's lots of parts of the world where people still have a miserable time, but for most of the world, a lot of the really terrible problems which have plagued humanity for most of our history have been at least diluted and often conquered. And that's because of technology. It's because we're able to grow a lot more food now. It's because we're able to clothe ourselves and house ourselves much more effectively. I don't see any reason why more and more technology won't continue to do that. I think it will.

Here's my argument. I agree with you on this, but clearly, because we're on the exponential curve, what is true in the beginning of the curve does not have to be true when we go up the curve because the impact is much larger. So a technology like the steam engine or a railway or even the Internet itself, it has increased that curve. But now with the curve to where almost everything we have imagined will become possible. And therefore, I think different rules apply there because the magnitude much more existential. I mean, it's one thing to take a cholesterol pill or whatever many 300 million people are taking, and it's another thing is to go inside and change your genome so you will not have high blood pressure. So on the exponential scale, I think it's much more existential and much larger. The whole decision making is larger. And this is why it says kind of apples and oranges, you know.

Well, a world in which people can use CRISPR Cas9 and subsequent technologies to improve their genome is a world where we will have less disease. And there's probably no greater form of inequality than the inequality between the healthy and people who have crippling diseases.

As long as we stay with diseases. But if we use the technology, like William Gibson says, in other ways, that is not to address diseases, which is of course above all clearly good. Right. But. Super Soldiers longevity for sale. We haven't talked about longevity, but we're.

Going to go there. Yeah, we should talk about longevity. Yeah, yeah. So, Gert, let me ask you as a non transhumanist, how old do you want to be when you die?

That's a good question. I have a poll for that coming up. My answer on that would be, I think, getting old in a good way. I would propose that living longer would be in principle good. Unlimited. Of course, that's an illusion anyway.

Why is that an illusion?

Well, I think, let's say on the next sort of horizon of the next 20 or 30 years, this is not. I mean, we're talking about extension rather than unlimiting.

I don't think we'll get terribly far towards transhumanism in the next 20 years. I think transhumanism really kicks in beyond that, probably. Yeah.

After the singularity curve comes in, basically. But that question to me is difficult to say. I think, would I want to die just because I would have to die? You know, I don't know. That's a. That's a good one. I have to think about that.

I think if you, if you're prepared to say that you want to die when you get bored, rather than when what Darwin has given us nature, if you prefer, then I think you're already a transhuman. I think. I think you've argued yourself into being a transhuman. Congratulations.

I gotta go now. I've got my. All right, this is a good time for the poll. Thanks for pointing this out. Right, so here's a poll for all you guys out there. Don't fall asleep at the wheel here or at the. At your zoom control or your remote barstool. So we have a second poll coming up. How, at what age would you like to die? Now, this is a bizarre question. I know it is. But it's a question, I think, that is pertinent to the discussion. And we're going to discuss longevity. Right after that. I would propose, and maybe also take some questions. So please vote. Right. Hypothetically, at what age would it be okay with you to die, assuming you will have great health?

Good, you've clearly fixed this because you've made it impossible for me to vote. I bet you've made it impossible for all the transhumanists to vote.

That's right. There's only one vote. That's my button here. Right. This is the Swiss democracy style. Right. Just kidding. So please do vote, all of you. We're going to do this fairly quickly. The longevity question is a big one. And as I'm working on my day to day stuff, which is not totally disrupted by this whole virus post corona debate, this question pops up left and right. It popped up four years ago when I was writing my book about technology and humanity and I was asking myself those very questions. And I'm thankful for Colm and many others of you to prod me along in this discussion to think further and to be open to this conversation, which has been a very good thing. It's funny to see, I think, how this discussion about technology and humanity has gone a little bit in the background now with all the current affairs. But I think it will come back in a very big way after this. For me, this is really the number one topic. It's a topic about what we want to be, what we can be, what we should be and what we would agree to be. And you can see that reflection right now in the, in the current discussion about, of course, how we address the virus. So I'm going to close the poll. Please keep voting fast. Okay. I think right now we have a lot of people saying, when I get bored. Well, that's obviously an answer.

It's the right answer.

Okay, I'm going to end the poll and go public with this. Okay, Please, you can have two more chances to vote here. We're going to publish the poll on the website. Okay. So end the poll and share the results. These are the results. So yeah, this was the low hanging offer when I got bored. But we do have a substantial amount of people saying that they want to be in that sort of range from 80 to 120, which is interesting. Can you see the vote, Callum?

Yeah, I can. And I'd love to hear somebody explain why they want to die when they're 80.

Okay.

I'm not all that far off that myself, and I can tell you it's not a great prospect.

Yeah. So it's interesting that, you know, I hadn't expected that. I was thinking it was going to go more in the other direction. If you have a comment on longevity on this very discussion, we have four raised hands and David will have to wait a little bit because you were there already. Let's.

Although, actually, we didn't answer David's question, which is very rude of us.

Okay. Okay, let's go back to that in a second. Okay. We still have the whole night here. So, Tony, are you ready to chime in or address a question, please? Tony, fire away. Can you hear me? Yep. This is the question of the Internet. Can you hear me? Okay, go ahead. Thanks very much for giving me a chance to speak. I start with the premise that probably we all agree that we cannot stop AI anymore. It has just happened, the genius out of the bottle. And the only way that it could perhaps be stopped is to eliminate civilization, if not the humans. So AI is there. It's a natural progression and exponential development, speed of development of AI that will lead almost naturally to post humans. I would rather use post humans than transhumans. And I agree with almost everything what Callum has said, but my heart is with Gerd. On the other hand, what Gerd is saying, what you are saying, can be married with the Kalum's view. I don't see any impossibility for a high level, say, super intelligence not delivering the goodies. It will happen. But talking about transhumans and what Gerd was saying, that it would make people perhaps unequal, that is not my word. First of all, I think that the primitive transhumans, and by primitive, I mean with extended memory and processing, will happen within the next few years, say within this decade. And the danger is not that we will be unequal. The danger that we will have some truly superhumans in terms of their capability to make decisions, disputes of. Of decision, and the clarity and the length of projection unparalleled to any humans. And think about Mr. Putin or Xi Ping having clandestinely implanted that kind of chips in their brain. And that is the unfortunate aspect of transhumanism that we have to deal with. So overall, Tony, I think it is an excellent discussion and I just continue to stay with it. Thank you. Okay, thanks for your comment, Tony. This kind of reminds me when we talk about AI and feel free to chime in on this. Callum. I've recently been reading Stuart Russell's new book, which is amazing, right? It's called Compatible Human Compatible. Right. It's such a good book, I forget the title when you read it on the Kindle. There's a main theory in the book which I like a lot, and that he says that AI at this point hasn't really understood or learned the objective, objective of what it is supposed to be doing. So it has all of the facts and the obvious things and the binary part. Right. But the objective between humans is always implicit in so many ways. And this is the thing I'm concerned about when I look at AI as being appraised as the panacea, is that it doesn't understand the objective as well as every single person would immediately understand. He quotes an example of saying to the AI or robot, go get me coffee. And the robot may not know the objective, which is, you would like coffee, but not if possible, right? Not to kill everybody at Starbucks to get the coffee quicker. And this is the kind of thing that's happening with AI today, and I feel like it's heading in this direction where that's becoming, like, the solution, but it really isn't.

So the main point of Stuart's book is to say that what AI developers should do is to make sure that their systems are always uncertain about what the goal is. They always have a level of uncertainty, so they have to keep checking back with the humans to find out what the goal is. So that robot that goes off to look for coffee, it realizes, okay, so there's. There's three people in the queue in front of me, and if I wait for that queue to disappear, my goal will be impeded because the coffee will be late. I think I'll kill the three humans. But before I do that, I'm just going to check with my owner or my programmer. Program is the wrong word, the developer, because that might not be part of what they want. And it does check. And the developer says, yeah, you're quite right, that wasn't what we wanted. So that's his approach. I think it's called inverse reinforcement learning. It's a brilliant idea, and I suspect he's onto something very, very important. It's very similar to an idea that Eddie Eliezer Yudkovsky has called coherent extrapolated volition. Now, the idea that AI is the answer to all problems is until we get super intelligent. Certainly it's obviously nonsense. It's just a technology like all other technologies. It can be incredibly useful and almost certainly will be more useful than it is harmful. But nobody thinks it is the panacea, an answer to all problems.

At the moment, I think AI for me is a great example for what I call IA intelligent assistance that's largely beneficial, except for maybe some implications on jobs, but it's essentially fancy software that learns and can do all these things. That's what we have today when we get to the next level, AI of becoming more and more broad and then eventually AGI or asi. Right. This is where I would say at some point it's too much of a good thing, which would lead me to worry about that objective being lost. Like you said, not checking back with us or checking for the real purpose. And that's, I think that's the AI discussion there.

By the way, one of the reasons why the machine has to keep checking back with the humans to check what the goal is, is that humans almost never do know what the goal is. We are all really, really confused about our own goals. And, and there's 7 billion of us, nearly 8 billion now. And we certainly disagree with each other violently about what our goals are, which is one of the reasons why the machines have to keep checking with us because we are so confused about our own goals.

And this is one of the things that is another concern. And it's basically the same direction when I feel like computing is primarily binary right now because we don't have quantum machines yet. So to go between the atoms, as for humans is nothing. We are by nature multinary, so to speak. Right. So we take all this input and then we say, oh, this doesn't matter, let's do that. Right? We don't have this intractable problem.

So some of that fuzziness is extremely unhelpful. You know, all our.

Absolutely.

But our cognitive biases, they lead us into great trouble all the time.

But, but, but this is where we get to the core, which you do away with the fuzziness in order to make it all comprehensible and efficient and take all that out. Right. I would argue that some of the fuzziness is what makes the quality of us to be human. If we were to remove all of that and become binary, or the machines would become marginary, one of the two, then would that be good? Do you think that would Be good.

I don't think that machines are binary in practical applications. You know, when machines learn how to drive and they're pretty very good at driving. Now, they're not just. Yes, no, on off systems, they make all sorts of really.

But the reality is they're really bad at driving.

Flex. No, they're not. They're really good at driving. They really.

Driving. They're driving while I sit behind the wheel. Then they can drive. Right, but can they do something?

Google now has cars going out with members of the public who haven't signed an NDA. They're not Google employees and there is no driver in the front seat. Now, they don't have. They don't have many of those yet, but they do have quite a lot. And Google's cars have driven 20 million miles now without, without causing a single serious accident. There's no human who's done that.

I always use a self driving car example as one that I think proves my concept, which is that AIA intelligent assistance is pretty good and pretty far along and I can read my newspaper or do my emails in the car or eat a hamburger. Right. But I'm still in the car. And until that happens where I'm actually in the backseat and I do nothing, that is a giant leap. Level five, autonomous driving.

Right, well, level four, you don't need level. Level five means that the car can drive in all circumstances and in all jobs.

We don't need that together now.

Yeah, level four is fine and level four is not that far off. You know, we will have level four cars out in the wild. You know, taxi drivers will be being replaced within. It's not all going to happen overnight, but it'll start within five years or so.

Okay, let's leave the cars alone for a second. Do you want to go back to David's question? Do you remember what it was or.

It was to you, so I'll leave you to answer it.

Okay, what was it? I don't remember that.

No, I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm guilty because I think I jumped in and derailed.

Aha.

So.

So, okay, so no chance to answer the question. Let's hop to longevity quickly and then we'll take some more questions. Okay, Just for information, we have about 10 minutes left. I know we could talk forever. And we do intend to talk forever at some other occasion. And by the way, Callum and me are available for those occasions online and offline. If we should ever be able to travel again, we'd be happy to come and put our Feet into a virtual fireplace. But longevity, do you want to start with that? Do you have a statement on this? What is your position on this?

Personally, I want to carry on living until I get bored. I think that's the right answer to that question. And what I'm always interested in is why people don't want that. I find it incomprehensible that somebody would want to set an arbitrary age at which point they have to die because of some strange reason like evolution or God or Mother Nature or something.

I couldn't agree with you more, but I think I disagree on the means of getting there and on the concept of that. I mean, if you're looking at companies like Human longevity Inc. And 50 others like this in Silicon Valley, it's the business of longevity. It is clearly the biggest possible business. If it works, obviously. And you say technology democratizes sooner or later by itself. And I really haven't seen that very much. And I doubt that will happen here given the magnitude of undertaking. When we talk about, I mean, you can go to HLI and you can have your biome and your biosphere and all of that scanned for $11,000. Right? And I think that would be really interesting. But for that, in order for that to work, it would have to be scaled to literally billions of comparable data sets and all that kind of stuff. Right. Which will requires significant investment and also for a long time be the privilege of those that have the millions of dollars. And so my thing about longevity is, yeah, we are already getting quite good at living longer. I'd be concerned about democratizing it on a widest possible level. I think we have enough inequality based on energy and connectivity and all that stuff already. As we can see now.

I think, don't think we're going to go from one day in which you, you know, most of us die at 100 to the next day when very rich people can live forever and the rest of us still died 100. And then it takes 100 years to catch up and then, and then suddenly everybody else can live forever. It's going to be gradual. So. And I bet that for a while rich people will live longer than poor people, because guess what? That already happens. And it always, always has happened. But as time goes on, all of us will get a chance to live for longer and longer. The wealthiest, the most privileged people in society will probably always be ahead of the curve. But in a sense also they are guinea pigs. You know, one thing we know about, when a new technology comes out, very rich people get a version of it, which doesn't work very well. They are the guinea pigs. And then after they've bought their diamond encrusted version of it and paid for a lot of R and D, it democratizes and comes to the rest of us reasonably quickly, as it has with smartphones.

I have high hopes for this. I think if we were to touch on that topic in terms of making it more accessible for people to live longer, it would have to be democratized by decree in some way.

It'll be democratized by competition.

Gert, I don't believe in the invisible hand and all that stuff. This is.

I mean, we can clearly see what's made this affordable. It's what's made every prior technology affordable. I don't see why it's not going to happen again.

It is also, unfortunately, what has caused America the descent in chaos. The invisible hand of the market, which basically shoveled the money in one corner and let everybody else just suffer for it. So I think that invisible hand concept, I don't agree with that at all. I think if we're going to have a sustainable capitalism, that would be a requirement for the longevity thing to work for me. And personally, I think if we can ever solve those issues, like cancer, genetic engineering, you know, we can use that. It needs to be a public property of a sort. And that is a subject to an entirely different discussion. Okay, that was a good touch. Let's go back here. Do we have comments on this, on longevity? Any comment on longevity? Dave, you want to get David back in? We didn't answer his question, so let's take David back in. Okay, now you get to speak again, David. So, yeah, please, are you there?

I says I've just been muted. All right, let's try again now.

You're there. You'll be back.

Fine. So the most important point to make is that transhumanists vary in their views about capitalism and their views about to what extent we should just let the free market to do its own will and to what extent there should be intervention in the free market. There is the libertarian wing, which tends to say, no, let's just follow what entrepreneurs and capitalists want to do. And there's a techno progressive wing that says actually some intervention is very important. And I wouldn't want anybody to go away from this thinking that all transhumanists are great fans of the invisible hand. Personally, I think the greatest invention of the last century is probably the mixed market economy, where we get capitalism doing incredibly wonderful things. And when it fails, as it does occasionally, there Is such a thing as market failures. When there is monopolies or failure to take into account externalities, then we need democratic oversight. There are of course democratic failures and political failures too. So it's complicated. But I wouldn't want everybody to think that that transhumanists are single minded in terms of politics. In terms of longevity, I see some comments in the chat saying that we'll never solve longevity. People wanted to solve it all through history. They always failed. It was exactly the same with powered flight. For most of history. People thought it's just a naive fantasy. And they had stories like Daedalus and Ikaris which wanted to show that it was a foolish thing.

But David, say again, you get into your maximum of speaking time here.

Well, there's a lot of important points to be made.

I know, I know.

But we have the ability to overcome gravity with sufficient engineering. We will also overcome the pools of entropy with human nature too. That's what life is. And we will copy what many other animal species have done. Some animal species don't age. We humans can copy from that with our ingenuity. There is plenty of space on this earth for many more people. The insight of economists such as Andrew McAfee is that we are now achieving on the whole, more from less. And we can do more more from less. Less over time. And we can make a much better use of this planet. We can have many more people on this planet and it's for everyone. It's not for the elite. We must ensure by the free market and also by political democracy that everbee and it will be wonderful when we can achieve it.

Yeah, I agree with almost everything that David has said there. And that book he referenced, More from less by Andrew McAfee, I think is quite possibly the most important book of the last year. Really highly recommend it.

Great. So I want to jump to a question here that has been popping around here for a while. Anonymous attendee. So he says my prejudice is this. Most transhumanists dream male fantasies. That implies a desire for inequality. Nietzsche's Uberman is always involved. So how is it different to the dream of a super race transhumanist?

Yeah, I think that's just rubbish. I'm sorry.

Okay, good, good.

There are women transhumanists here as well. Why is this a male fantasy? I think that's. That's pejorative rubbish.

Thank you. It got six upvotes, but I agree it's rubbish. Let's move on. Okay, so we have another comment here. Yes. Okay. Biohacking. Alexandra, thanks. For the comment. So interested to hear our views about biohacking column now jump right in there with.

Okay, I'm for it. I think we should do more of it. Seriously. I think, you know, any. Any means at our disposal to improve our cognitive and physical abilities is a good thing. Unless you can. Unless we can demonstrate harm. So if I. Yeah, yeah, if I.

We can demonstrate plenty of harm with biohacking. Right?

Biohacking ourselves or biohacking other people?

Both.

Oh, well, I should not have the right to biohack you, but I should have the right to buy a hack myself. I think.

I tend to agree on that one. I think that is the problem is, you know, with the border between biohacking and what you do on the genetic level on the germline is very often confused. So biohacking being technology wise and the other one being on the germline of every person, or rather you and then by extension everybody else. And that is the big question I have. When this happened last year with the CRISPR Cas9 operation in China. Right. Brought up this point to a very large degree. So how exactly do we decide. How exactly do we come up with a dividing line? Biohacking, putting a chip on my arm or whatever. Those are things that I think it's. Yeah, it's kind of like fashion. So if you're going to be like Neil Harbison or what's it. I think Neil as the antenna. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't understand. But hey, you know, is this a little bit. Okay, that's your own liberty, where it crosses into other people's liberty, then I would be concerned about. Especially when it's about upgrading versus downgrading. Right. And I think this is a big discussion that we haven't really solved. You know, how the upgrading versus downgrading versus comparison, you know, it's already. The divide is already there in terms of being mobile, being connected, being on zoom or not being on zoom or working from home. Not working from home. You know how we can balance those things. We have another poll for you and then I think we're gonna wrap up very soon. Before we do that, Kellen, would you tell people where they can find out more about you and your fabulous work?

Sure. So I have a website, www.pandorasbrain.com pandoras brain.com where you can find my books, my talks, and I blog fairly regularly there. And I've got Twitteria. So I'm on Twitter quite often.

Great. Yeah. So we are both members of the Futures Agency, which is my company that Works with futurists around the world. We have many people with opposing views and we have lately specialized on bringing those together packages of discussion. So it's the featuresagency.com my website is futurewithgergergerd.com GERD like gastrointestinal reflux disease. The same, but hopefully better. My book is technology versus humanity techvshuman.com it's available now in 14 languages. And again, everything is going to go online in roughly about two hours. Don't go away yet because we still have a bit of a wrap up to do here. And by the way, this was kind of the first test for something that we're doing in the future called the Future show, which involves exactly this kind of conversation. So not so much the talking heads conference style, but you know, a very lively personal conversation. So this serves a bit as a blueprint of this. Let's go back to the first poll, shall we? Or do you want to do the last one? Let's go back to the first one, the transhumanist question. So you get the chance to say that again to see if there's going to be a difference. If we've changed your mind, don't worry about, you know, having to change your mind. Please just kind of vote if there's more transhumanists now or if there's more clarity about this. I'm afraid there are many, many questions. I made a list the other day because I'm working on an idea for a book for next year and I put it on the wall saying all the things having to do with transhumanism and this man machine converges and the list just literally went down all the way to the floor. I'm like, okay, I don't think I'm going to answer that question anytime soon, but I'm happy for all of you guys to help me with this to see if we can reach some point of my view is in the next 10 years we're going to come to conclusion on many of those key issues that have been poking around for quite some time. And the technology really hasn't afforded us. But the major thing for me is quantum computing. When quantum computing arrives, we're entering a whole different realm of possibilities for this convergence of humans and machines. I think Callum would agree on this. And then the question is, you know, that computing power, a million X available to everyone and that's not even a decade away. I don't think. What does that mean for this discussion? We don't really have the fuel for making humans computable today.

If the exponential growth in the improvement of compute power continues, then the machines we have in 10 years time will be about 120 odd times more powerful than once we have today. In 20 years time, there'll be 8,000 times more powerful. In 30 years time, there'll be a million times more powerful. And Moore's Law does look like it's continuing. It's evolving. It's, it's taking different forms, neurological chips and probably 3D chips and quantum computing and so on. So in 30 years or so, we'll have machines which are a million times more powerful than today. That is a huge impact. It's going to change. It's going to change everything about the nature of being human.

So here's some, here's some shared stuff.

I think, I think, I think now that you are a transhuman, Gert, you've just demonstrated today that you are a transhuman. You've won the argument because I'm a.

Simple slider, I suppose. But you know, the thing that has changed the most is that people think that transhumanism is really an extension of humanism, which that wasn't a very small percentage before. So, yeah, I suppose we have mission accomplished it to some degree. Right, let's finalize here with the final poll and then we'll all let you go into your well deserved drinks by the fireplace here. Thank you very much. So here is a voting. Oh, there's a new button here. Allow panelists to vote. So this is. How would you rate the debate? Okay. There are some technical questions about how the tech was, and we always like to hear about that. Generally speaking, I'm quite happy with zoom and the quality of zoom, even though the navigation is sometimes a bit disastrous. But so please rate the event. The audio was good, if you enjoyed the event. Arguments were clear. Gerd's arguments were clear. Please vote on that. And in the end, you agree with Calvin or you agree with Gert, or of course, you get the cheap way out agreeing with both of us. I think now the panelists can actually vote.

So I've just voted for you, Gert.

I was going to say, please vote for your vote. Simply vote in the good old American habits. You please vote for yourself.

I'll confess I did that.

Okay, all right. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, very good. Yeah, we have sort of a good medium point. They keep voting. I'm going to close it very soon. So vote quickly. The votes, the polls will all be published as well, very soon. And I encourage you to stick around for and take a look at the website. The Conference digital. The Conference Digital. That's where we publish all the ongoing conferences and the free events and, of course, the feature show live, the next iteration of what we're trying to achieve here. I must say, it has been a pretty amazing learning curve the last six weeks. I've never felt that much in the need of reinvention. And I've also connected with hundreds of people that I previously didn't have time for, which is great. I think this crisis, in the end, is also a gift in so many other ways, even though it would be quite insulting to say that to people who are struggling very deeply. And I think we need to bang. We need to hang together and show solidarity with each other. That's, I think, the key outcome from this debate. And I certainly hope that will be how the European Commission sees it in the very near future as well. So let me publish this. Okay. How would you rate the event? And the winner is $1 million in cash prices and coupons. So, yeah, I'm happy to hear that you. You enjoyed the event. Columns were clear in the end.

Yeah.

Okay. Thank you very much. That is the wrong word. I'm going to shut this down. So. No, I think this was definitely a good thing. It was great to have you all aboard. Any final.

Yeah, I would just like to say that, Gert, the only reason you lost the argument is that you started with an impossible position.

Yeah, that's usually what I do. That seems to be my specialty. You know, it's funny, you know, when I was in the music business, I went to the record labels in, like, 1999, and I said, the music is moving to the cloud, right? And they're like, oh, you escaped from a loony bin or something? And I was like. And then Napster came along, and before We Know It, 2005, Spotify, Music in the cloud. You know, so I got. I got whacked a little bit for being too early. That's my. That's, like my fate. That's why I'm sometimes a little bit putting on the brakes now not to be too early all the time.

So in that famous comment about whoever's. It was Amara's Law about we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. You're too much in the short term.

Yeah. It's interesting you say that. Yeah, I should. I should consider that I'm kind of, you know, maybe I should wrap up with the Moravec Paradox, which I think pretty much holds for 2050, I think. Right. The computers can do easily what is hard for us, and vice versa. And that gives me something to think about, and also in this convergence of man and machine, as to what that means for our future. So I do hope that we can stay connected. Visit my YouTube channel, Gertube.com and look at the download of this whole thing. And please spread it as far as you can. Thanks very much, Colm. Thanks, Soha. If you're still, you're still behind the scenes here, but maybe you can pop out for a final wave. Show your fancy background. There you are. Thank you, Soha, for helping with all of this. And thanks for all of you for attending and being guests and spreading the word. Thank you very much. And I'll see you down the road.

Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye.

Okay, bye.