The Transhumanist Future of a Radical Identity with Zoltan Istvan & David Wood #3

Welcome to The Future of You. Today I'm joined by Zoltán István and David Wood. Zoltan is an American transhumanist, journalist, entrepreneur, political candidate, and futurist. Formerly a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, he now regularly appears on television himself, discussing futurist topics. He's the author of The Transhumanist Wager, a philosophical science fiction novel, and in 2014, he announced that he was going to run for US President. He then publicised his campaign in 2015, by driving a bus shaped like a casket, the Immortality Bus, all across the United States. His journey is captured in the documentary film Immortality or Bust, and I last spoke with Zoltán on the eve of the film's release in summer 2020. So I'm really looking forward to hearing how he thinks the last two COVID years have influenced transhumanism. He now spends much of his time studying philosophy and ethics at Oxford University, where he's doing his master's and nurturing his nootropic-infused wine at his vineyards in France, Napa, and Argentina. David Wood is another prolific futurist. As the chair of London Futurists, he's well known to many of us and regularly gathers together futures thinkers for discussion and debate on every topic under the sun, from anti-aging, nanotech, synthetic biology, and personalized genetics, to superintelligence, robotics, and geoengineering. He's the author-editor of 10 books, including The Abolition of Aging and Sustainable Superabundance, and his new book called Vital Foresight makes the case for active transhumanism and advocates for us to adopt key values that will avoid the civilizational risks we face. And I'm sure he'll tell us more about that in a moment. Now, transhumanism is a vast topic. Way too much to cover in an hour-long discussion, but we did cover quite a bit of ground. We talked about what the definition was of transhumanism and tried to get some clarity about identity and transhumanism. And I talked with David and Zoltán about their views on the perception of transhumanism, specifically over the last two COVID-era years. And we talked really around the issue of whether transhumanism is now perceived as a public good or a public harm. And much of that, of course, is about whether governments should either intervene in these sorts of areas or whether they should be pushing mandates on people when it comes to medical improvements, enhancements, or perhaps in the future, augmentation. And we had a good healthy debate around that. We also talked about how many women are or aren't involved in transhumanism and what the reasons for that might be. And we had some pretty different explanations for that, which made for, again, for an interesting discussion. And we ended up talking a little bit about longevity and the right to a long life, the right to possibly an immortal life, and what we thought the ramifications and consequences might be, not for just personal identity, but for social identity and community in general. We talked a little bit about cryonics, but I'd love to return to that in another future episode. And of course, we ended on what actions we might want to take for identity from a transhumanist point of view. So if you are enjoying this podcast, please do subscribe, share, download, and even leave us a rating. It really helps us spread the word. Meantime, will transhumanism define and reinvent identity? Let's have a listen to find out. Hello to David and Zoltán. Thank you so much for joining me here today. So we're gonna talk about transhumanism. I wonder if we could start by just defining what we mean by transhumanism. I know you probably get asked this all the time on every single interview, and apologies, but I think there might be some people listening who are not that familiar with the concept. So I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of clarity on it. Zoltan, should we start with you?

Sure, you know, I take the formal definition, which is transhumanism means beyond human, especially in the Latin. But, you know, I guess when you talk about it from a technical side of things, I like to think of it as the top 10% of the most radical technologies that are being applied to human beings right now. So the top 10% of most radical technologies out there.

So what would be an example of a really radical technology that's in the top 10%?

Something like exoskeleton technology where, you know, a person in a wheelchair, quadriplegic, is able to put on an exoskeleton suit and is therefore able to walk. That is something that, you know, most people don't have access to yet, but is being applied and certainly makes them more than just being a normal human being.

David, do you agree, or do you have a slightly different take on it?

That's a good definition. We can take the word trans meaning transcend. We're transcending human limitations which we have inherited from evolution, from culture, from the philosophies that we grew up with, but All of these things in various ways hold us back. They lead to the deterioration of our bodies, the problems in our minds, the difficulties in our social structures and in our emotions. And with technology used wisely, not only can we improve our muscles and our mobility with exoskeletons, but we can address these other age-old limitations and go to places where humanity has never been before, not just physical spaces, but spaces in identity, in capabilities, in experiences.

Do you think those spaces where we've never been before, do we have a good idea of what they might be? Or do you think what lies ahead is pretty much unknown and this is about experimentation?

Well, I think we can discern the broad shape of the landscape, but my goodness, there will be surprises ahead. And after all, if you had managed to get a whole bunch bunch of apes together in a podcast 8 million years ago and said, what's going to happen when our brains are enhanced? They would not have managed to say, hey, we're going to experience Mozart's beautiful music and Pythagoras's theorem and speculate about how many moons there are in Jupiter. That would be beyond their conception. They would only be able to think of maybe we'll have more bananas, more kinds of sex, more kinds of monkey business. But in the same way, we are limited in what we might imagine we'll do with much greater mental capabilities, but we can see some limits that we will transcend. That's the limitations in our bodies that lead us to age and die, the limitations in our mind that often cause us to make really bad decisions, the limitations in our emotions which cause far too many of us to be depressed, suicidal, egotistical, divisive, and so on. So these things we can be confident we have a possibility of leaving behind.

So you mentioned their identity, and of course it's, it's the main topic that we're going to discuss in relation to transhumanism today. And I was looking at, um, it's Transhumanist Bill of Rights that Zoltán is obviously very familiar with because presumably he was the author of it. And I was looking earlier at the, um, Level 5 awareness, as you talk about it, obviously being sort of sentient, and it talks about any given animal is meta-aware to any extent. It can therefore make lucid decisions. Level 5 capabilities would include the sense of self, complex learned behavior, ability to predict the future emotional states of the self, and the ability to make motivational trade-offs. So I guess the question for you, Zoltán, really for me is what Is this sense of self in the transhumanist political philosophy or just philosophy in general? What do we mean by sense of self and identity in a transhumanist's world?

Well, when I think when we talk about, you know, the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, we're talking about arguably entities that might be able to vote in the future. And I, for Scientific America, I'm not sure if it was for them, but it was for someone, I wrote a significant essay about robots voting in the future. It's actually New Scientist. And the idea is though that with so many devices around the world, almost 100 billion maybe now, one day those things might wanna vote. And so we're trying to create, at least from a political philosophy, a bill of rights that could kind of somehow encompass that type of idea that one day a democracy will be much bigger than just the 8 billion human beings on the planet. It might be a whole bunch of very smart animals, very smart devices, and whatever else people can create. But I think the longer-term future is really about getting outside of the box of the human brain and its, you know, 100 million connections and getting into something that's dramatically larger and more complex than that. Something probably synthetic, artificial intelligence-based, but it could also be, you know, what we call meat, the 3 pounds on our head, just something that's maybe combines hundreds of them together so that it's just more complex and smarter. And I think when we talk about What's identity? Certainly our identity will probably dramatically change as we move from, you know, just like I said, this, this kilo and a half of meat on our head to something that's dramatically more complex and will have connections that, uh, you know, that are probably thousands of times more, uh, than what we have right now, creating the level of complexity that'll be dramatically more, uh, you know, complex in our identity.

Yeah, so you talk about then level 6, which is sort of paraphrasing, but the dynamic sense of self that can be expand from like a small self, by which you mean directed consciousness, to the big self, which is the social group dynamics. Which am I guessing that is like a connected consciousness or something? You do talk about it, um, including, as you just said, sort of cross barriers between biological and non-biological. But is that what you're vision is of a sort of interconnected collective consciousness.

Well, it is. And I think, you know, we call that most likely the hive mind, kind of a general popular term. And I mean, I hate, you know, don't hate to say it, but let's be honest, the hive mind, what we're doing this moment on this podcast is already existing to some extent. That's what this is. And but as the future, you know, goes further, it's going to be in our heads directly and maybe connected to millions at once in a way that social media is where everyone has access and can interact with it. So, uh, it's written for those kinds of things. I'm not sure the hive mind is a good thing, I just want to say outright.

I'm glad you said that because it terrifies me.

I'm not that thrilled because of the privacy issues, but I do see it as maybe when you talk about terms of evolution of where transhumanism is going, we're not, you know, the individual might not want to give up its power, but the collective might take that power and become a greater transhuman entity or civilization. So You know, it's not really for me to necessarily decide those things, but it's for kind of the all-powerful— whoever becomes most powerful will probably decide those things. It probably won't be a person, it'll be a collective.

Is it the collective conscious Tao?

Yes, it could be something like that. You know, I mean, who knows? But it's certainly going to be, you know, probably AI-based and synthetic-based. And the individual will probably be pushed to the bottom.

David, what are your views on this sort of personal identity versus group or social identity? Or will it all become the same thing?

Well, I'm very keen to emphasize that transhumanism does uphold individual identity. Morphological freedom is very important, and the right to life for individuals is paramount. You know, in previous philosophies, previous religions, previous cultures, people were often expected to lay down their life for some imagined cause. Lay down your life for your king, your country. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. If I remember my Rupert Brooks, it's sweet and honorable to die for your country. Well, transhumanists say, hang on, no, individuals are paramount, and the well-being of individuals must never be subservient to some collectivist goal. So I want to emphasize that. But on the other hand, I also believe that we are intrinsically social beings. 17 months ago, I became a grandfather for the first time, and I was reminded of the saying It takes a village to raise a child. Each of us are often utterly dependent on each other. When I went into hospital for a minor operation not so long ago, I was again completely dependent on others. So there is this intrinsic social dimension to the transhumanist vision of better flourishing as well. And we need to keep both these visions in mind. We must not lose individuals to some imagined greater cause unless they are fully aware and fully conscious and fully agreed with such a transition. And for the time being, I'm certainly not signed up to have my individuality merged into any as yet not understood collective consciousness.

Yes, I agree with that. And I'm reminded of Roger Scruton saying that unless we can be clear about personal identity, in that we can't afford to treat personal identity as illusory, then we won't be able to define who the person is that the duties or rights or responsibilities or indeed actually the emotions that you mentioned earlier can be ascribed to. It's very important that we can differentiate and make it clear who the person is so that we can ascribe whether it's love or anger or frustration or envy, whatever the emotion is. Otherwise, we're going to be in quite a messy place if we can't do that. And to some extent, I think sometimes on social media we see a little bit of that where we don't necessarily really know who is behind the avatar. We don't really know if it's the same person that we think we were speaking to in real life. So I think those sorts of things are incredibly important. And, um, it's interesting to hear you say that we need the demarcation, but I think it's quite difficult to know how we would create that demarcation. And perhaps that's only something we'll know as we go along this journey into more transhumanism, because we'll be kind of feeling our way and experimenting. But you mentioned morphological freedom, David. Can you just define what that is for people who don't know? Because it is a very important tenet, isn't it, to transhumanism?

Well, it's an extension of something that's already been a core part of human society. You know, people have put on makeup, people have put on things in their hair, in their clothing, people have had tattoos, people have worn jewelry. And that's just the start of what may be possible when we move from wearables to embedded or implantables. We may have things part of our bodies which shocked the previous generation, you know, just as generations are often shocked when the youngsters get strange piercing and so forth. Why did you get this kind of tattoo? Well, it's probably going to be more of that, and people will have smart tattoos, and they will have clothing that adapts as well. And more than that, we will have the extension of what's happened already. If we think of the letters LGBT, this was raised as variance on sexual identities and gender identities, and then it became LGBTQIA+, with lots more, and I think that's only the start of what will happen. People may experimentally change their gender for a while, and they may form into different groupings as well, different ways of living their life. So it's not just morphological freedom, there may be social freedoms too, which may shock people, maybe of a conservative disposition,, but I think that's to be tolerated, that's to be supported.

Which begs the question, I think, well, to both of you, which is how much of the self, how much of you can you change and still retain you-ness? So where does the augmentation or enhancement stop maintaining you or enhancing you and turning you into something different? Do we have any thoughts on that? 'Cause it is a philosophical question, I know, but Zoltan is obviously doing his philosophy PhD, so.

Well, right now it's just a master's degree, uh, might lead to the, to the PhD. So, you know, I think when it comes down to identity, you know, when you go to sleep and then you wake up, you kind of assume you're the same person when you wake up. But the truth is your cellular nature has already changed. There's different brain things going on, firings in your neurons and whatnot. And sometimes you get really sick, you know, you also change your personality. Or, you know, you have a child, grandchild, that can change your personality. I think when people get married, they're all all sorts of hormonal changes. So I, I don't think we should be afraid of changing into something else significantly and, and saying that that would actually be a different version than us. We're certainly different versions than we were 2 years ago, let's say even pre-COVID. I mean, that it really is a different world and a different— I feel different because of the things that I've done. So I feel like in terms of transhumanism, whether I accept a cyborg body or even connect my brain to an AI, Even if it is fundamentally different than myself, it's totally acceptable because change and evolution was always part of this whole process of who we are.

Yeah, because I wonder whether it's actually not so much about whether you recognize or feel the same core self or authentic self as you did before or will again, but it's whether other people recognize you as the same person. And maybe that's the test. But I don't know what the elements of that test would be, but to me, it feels very important in a society that we can recognize the individual as being the same person. Person at, you know, in the past as the present and potentially in the future. Otherwise, there's no continuity, is there?

I wouldn't want to lose my memories. I think my memories are important to define who I am. I wouldn't want to go through some procedure that suddenly I couldn't remember who I'd been before 30. And I wouldn't want to do things that would change some of my fundamental values. I mean, I might take some nootropic wine or some other substances that might give me some extra creativity or some extra focus,. But I wouldn't want it to change the kind of fundamental attributes, that I would suddenly stop caring about individuality, which I mentioned earlier, or stop caring about the social dimension, or become a nastier person, however I've defined nasty. So I'd be happy to change myself in some ways, to accentuate the parts of me that I thought were important, but I wouldn't want to indulge in any transformation, either by my own choice or by somebody enforcing it on me, that would change my character in a way that at that time I thought would be really detrimental to my core being.

I'm really glad you've mentioned that about enforcing it on you, because this was what— why I wanted to get the clarification around the definitions and be as clear as we could about what we thought transhumanism was. Because I don't know if you'll agree— interested in your opinions, both of you— but I think there's been a bit of a a shift in perception around transhumanism. I mean, I'm fairly positive about it, and I think it's really exciting, and I want to live long enough to see what's going to happen. But over the last 2 years, I've become a little bit more suspicious around some of the changes that we might find that perhaps are mandated of us. Um, so let me just explain. I think some of the COVID era rhetoric and policymaking, not just about the virus but about mandatory vaccines and about vaccine passports, for example, have scared people. And I think a lot of people feel like, well, if we lose our bodily autonomy on something like that, what else would we lose our bodily autonomy on in the future? And I've always thought that transhumanism is very much about morphological freedom and bodily autonomy and those important values and principles. And I just wonder whether you think there has been a shift. I, I certainly noticed that there's, um, there's more negativity in the mainstream media around transhumanism. You could argue it's like, uh, revolves around a misunderstanding or not, but I would really like your opinions on where you think we are now, sort of— I won't say post-COVID, I'll say mid-COVID because I think that's where we are— but what your thoughts are around, around this public perception and whether it has shifted.

Well, I'll start, uh, you know, I was against government enforcing vaccines. I, even though I think vaccines are great and I have as many as I can, as do my children, I just think it's not the government's business to enforce things. If people want to not do it and they want to die, then that's it. I mean, it just, you know, because it's just too much of a slippery slope. Uh, when you start doing that, you start doing other things, and pretty soon you end up in, uh, something that resembles China where you can't even walk out your door without, you know, being followed and, or an AI spying on you and just, you lose too many civil liberties. And as a civilization, we've built a lot of centuries of these civil liberties up and we want to keep them because people had to die for them, our ancestors and grandfathers and whatnot. So I, you know, I think that is, you know, it's key not to be forcing those things on people, especially in terms, I mean, look, if COVID was killing 50% of the population, it might've been different, but given that it killed such a small amount people, you know, it was not something that we should have been— and don't get me wrong, it's sad people have died, of course, but it's, it's, uh, I think, uh, when you look at what the destruction of civil liberties can do, that leads to civil war. And as you can probably see from the news, I mean, civil war is on the lips of everyone in America these days. You know, every, every few days I see an opinion piece about it in the New York Times, and that's because they have— these kinds of things have divided countries and in places like America where no one, you know, there's just too much division. So I think it would have been best just to leave it alone and let people make their own decisions. And that has given a bad name to transhumanism because people have taken these mandates and whatever mandatory ideas and thought that that's what transhumanism is about. When transhumanism is really this great, I don't wanna say libertarian philosophy, but it's certainly based on a lot of traditional libertarian values. Like morphological freedom. Just do what you want to do, and if you find better technologies to put in your body to become a better person or a greater person or whatever you want to be, do it. And that's really the foundation of transhumanism. Of course, it's being skewed by COVID and the modern media and social media and things like that, and we'll see what the long-term effects of that are going to be. But I guess I can assume they're not going to be very good. And you're right, transhumanism is getting a worse reputation.

So I'm cautious about these slippery slope arguments. I mean, there are many people who say, "Oh, there's a slippery slope. If you allow people of the same sex to form relationships, then there's a slippery slope, and we'll end up with adults having sexual relations with children all being legal as well." And I want to say no. There are degrees in which we can take decisions without committing ourselves to going further down into dangerous territory. So I'm for having a good grown-up collective discussion about which limits we collectively agree to accept, in the sense that if we all agree to accept various limits, it will be better for all of us. For example, some people may say they should be trusted to decide by themselves how much alcohol they can drink before getting in a car and driving it off. It's their own choice. They are adults., and I want to say, and most of the society says, hang on, no, we don't allow that kind of freedom. There's a very successful group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the argument is it's not just what will you do to yourself if you crash, you may crash into other people. And to an extent, it's the same with vaccines. Vaccines aren't just preventing you from dying, it's preventing health resources being tied up trying to treat you later on if you get seriously ill. It's about inflicting pain on your families and others who will have to care for you. So I am in favor of people having an honest discussion and deciding, hey, actually we're going to strongly encourage something, or even in some cases mandate things. But there needs to have a grown-up discussion. And I fear these arguments to say, if, well, if we have some limitations, we're giving power to governments to limit more and more things. No, we must have, uh, constant vigilance on government, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop government creating laws because actually we are better in many cases for the laws that are made. If I look at what has extended the lifespan over the last few centuries, a lot of it has been government initiatives. Government initiatives to ensure that milk is pasteurized, to ensure that water is sanitized rather than people drinking dirty water or milk that have come straight from cows and caused large numbers of childhood diseases. Governments got involved there and mandated things. And society, all of us, had more freedoms as a result of that imposition. Now, each decision needs to be looked at individually. It's tough. It's hard. It's hard, after all, to create technology, and it's equally hard to figure out how to apply technology. And we should realize it will be difficult, and we should not shy away and have too simplistic an answer.

Yeah, I mean, I take that point, but I think at the same time as that, mandatory— well, those mandatory dictates were coming down from governments, or some governments in the world anyway. There was also the case that wisdom, or what I would call science built up over years, was being sort of undone somehow. So the idea of natural immunity was just pushed to the side and the definition was completely changed and rewritten. And I think the two things happening at the same time meant that a lot of people felt like, oh, it's got to be the technological solution and that's going to be mandated on us. And I think that I think that turned what I think, you know, transhumanism as a public good into a public harm in many people's minds, which actually I think is a shame, actually. And I don't know how we come back from that. But the question it kind of leads on to was one of the things I think about Build Back Better, I certainly wonder about, is whether it really means now in this kind of COVID era, if it's not so much about building a better environment for humans, but building better humans for the environment. And Steve Fuller sort of alerted me to this in, I think, one of the talks I saw him at when he talked about the Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance report that came out during the Bush administration where he— I think he even says it's the transhumanist moment. I don't know if either of you agree with that, but it obviously talked about these converging technologies of biotech, infotech, cognitive science, and nanotechnology as being converged for the first time. But also being put to use to improve our mental and physical performance as citizens. And I just wondered what you thought the sort of legacy of that is, whether it is still for us as individuals to, um, to get on the transhumanist bus— and we know Zoltán has a bus— to get on that bus, or whether it is actually going to come down to the government incrementally introducing some of these converged technologies, you know, for the public good. So just comments on that, really.

Well, I mean, I think, uh, people are gonna embrace transhumanism for capitalistic reasons and for reasons of opportunity. And I think the government shouldn't force anything really on anyone. Maybe, I mean, you shouldn't be allowed to drive drunk or something like that, but, uh, that's quite different, I think, than saying, you know, people need to have bionic eyes because they're going to be able to see better. You know, I think people have to make those personal decisions themselves, but I can tell you that if they don't have a bionic eye and they're trying to get a job that deals with, you know, looking at landscapes or doing architecture or something like that, where a bionic eye can immediately do those things and, you know, read the configurations and understand all these things, for example, and makes you that much better of an employee, well, you're going to take the bionic eye. And I think that's what's happened, you know, in the modern world is capitalism has pushed a lot of the reasons we embrace things, because you want to stay ahead or you want to get ahead. And I think that's why transhumanism will succeed ultimately, is not because it's necessarily the, the right philosophy, or even though I think it is, or, or the best philosophy. I think it's ultimately just going to succeed because there's a lot of opportunity to improve your livelihood, uh, whether it's economic, it's social, it's philosophical, whatever, even religious. I mean, people can use religion, they can combine with their mind with AI and discover God, new ideas of being a meditating. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to use technology to improve all the things that humans value. So that's why I think humans will embrace it. Uh, and I'll be very skeptical if the government, uh, although I would love the government to be more involved in pushing these technologies, but right now it's kind of like they might do a worse job of it and then they kind of screw up everything. So I'd probably prefer just companies themselves to push this stuff forward. And the government may be there to provide anti-monopoly practices and things like that. So there's a lot of new startups because the last thing we want also is Facebook and Google and Apple to run everything. And that's why I think, you know, it's good the government maybe polices that a little bit, and that's fine for me. But I don't want the government itself pushing these things down people's throats.

But presumably, I mean, you, you ran for office, didn't you? Would you have been pushing these things in office, or what would your approach have been then?

Well, my approach was really to take a lot of the defense spending of the United States, which is massive, like, you know, so, so many trillions of dollars, and put that into science and healthcare. And just to say, look, let us try to develop things that actually help the citizenry, their health. Because, you know, it's like we spend 20% of the GDP in America on far-off wars and stuff like that instead of the— and just 2% on healthcare and science, United States. And so I just want to reverse that. And I thought that was a very simple way to help the people. Instead of building bullets, we design cures for cancer. And, you know, it's not that governments have to do that. They could just be sponsoring companies that want to do it, giving incentives, lowering taxes, which is what they're doing for the electric vehicle market right now, which I think, you know, is is a pretty smart racket for both, for both business and for the government to kind of give those incentives. So that's how I would have run the country, is really just saying let's make— turn ourselves instead of a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex. I'm happy with everyone making a fortune. I just think that, uh, I can't believe that we've become a nation that built it on the military as opposed to science that would actually help humans overcome things like cancer and diabetes and Alzheimer's.

Is that what you would do in the UK if you were in charge of And the transhumanist party was in charge in the UK, David.

Well, I think capitalism has done lots of remarkable things, but it's not all powerful. There are various things that capitalism has not managed to do and probably cannot manage to do. It gets into various failure modes from time to time. Zoltan mentioned the drawbacks when monopolies arise and they clamp down on innovation, but that's only one of many failure modes. Of free markets from time to time. Lack of attention to externalities, asymmetry of information. And the key thing, and Zoltán's already mentioned this, is sometimes you need more investment in longer-term projects than the private funders are willing to do. And the venture capitalists, the big corporations, they are sometimes very cautious about putting longer-term investment into what would be public goods. They may say, why should I invest in this? We won't be able to make a profit out of it, even though it will benefit everybody. So, that is what government spending has done. And one thing that government spending and defense spending achieved is it built the smartphone. Controversially, but this is an interesting analysis, many of the technologies in the smartphone, such as GPS, such as the touchscreen, such as the internet, such as many of the wireless protocols, so the whole host of them actually came about because of funding from governments and from research. And of course, there were brilliant capitalists who built extra things on top of that. But until the underlying technologies had reached a certain maturity, it would not have been possible. And sadly, to come back to your question about NBIC, we have not had the progress in the N part that we clearly could have had. The nanotechnology that was envisioned in that report isn't just nanomaterials such as graphene, or even some of the 3D printing on smaller and smaller scales. It's something much more remarkable than that, that Richard Feynman in 1959 foresaw, and then K. Eric Drexler in the middle 1980s foresaw, it's molecular-scale machinery. And that has not happened, and we have not done anything like as much as we could have done because it would have taken much longer-term research than private companies were willing to do. Government should have got behind that much more thoroughly, and if they had, we could have had so many better technologies today than we actually do have. So I would join with Zoltán and encourage Governments to alter how the wealth of the country, wealth of the world is deployed. Lots of wealth is tied up very unproductively, and it can be applied for collective good with a better transhumanist vision of what's possible. You know, the super longevity, the super intelligence, the super happiness achieved via truly advancing NBIC. Convergence: nanotech, biotech, infotech, cognitech.

I think we're all in agreement there. We're going to talk about longevity in a minute because obviously it's a massive investment area with VCs and private funding right now, and it could be potentially, it could be an investment area for more governments, of course. But just before we go on to that topic, I wanted to ask you a very specific question, which I was just chatting with David about actually. Something I noticed about the transhumanist publicity, if you like, there aren't that many women talking about transhumanism in mainstream media. I, to me, there don't seem that many involved in it behind the scenes, but I might be wrong and you can correct me on that. I wondered if you agreed with that and why you thought, if you do agree with it, why you thought that might be the case, and does that need addressing? What, what do you think on this?

So there are some women active. There's Natasha Vita-More, the executive director of Humanity Plus, And on the board of Humanity+, the secretary is another woman based in Northern Ireland, Nell Watson, and the treasurer is Amy Lai, who is originally from China and grew up in North America. But you're right, if we have a typical transhumanist meeting— I was in one yesterday— I would say probably three-quarters of the participants are male and only one-quarter are female. As it turns out, it's not the same all over the world. If you look at Russia, for example, there were many women at that conference who were Russian or from Russian backgrounds. So it's a different culture there. Japan, it's the same. There aren't many transhumanists in Japan, but there seem to be as many women transhumanists as men. So I think it may not be a global thing. I think it may be an attribute of something that's in the Western world, where we often encourage women too early to make a decision about their careers, and we push women away from the technical career path. But that's a great shame because of course we should have more women engineers. But also we need more of— careful what I say here— we need more of the softer skills in the transhumanist discussions. And so we have to figure out how to resolve that. And it is a question that comes up in transhumanist areas from time to time. Zoltan, can you rescue me from this?

Well, I'm not going to.

No, I mean, I'll try to be fair. Fully honest, there's not enough women in, in my opinion, transhumanism. There's a couple reasons that I think women may not be as inclined to take such a jump away from traditional lives than I think men, and, uh, that makes them a lot better housekeepers in terms of taking care of the world we are in. Uh, like, my wife thinks I'm, you know, batshit crazy half the time, and she's a medical doctor with many research degrees. But the reality is that she wants to keep my life with our children here, and I'm talking about joining artificial intelligence and beaming myself up to space and things like that. Now, I think a lot of women don't have that desire to leave behind the community. When I, when I say housekeeping, I mean in terms of a community, a society, a world. And I don't know if that if that's a biological propensity or if that's just what's it. I can tell in my wife's case, it's definitely biological propensity. I mean, she's right. I would probably go to space, leave my children behind, and try to become a transhuman entity somewhere far off because I'm driven to that kind of exploration. That's not good for society. That's not good for community. That's not good. I mean, it's good in terms of one of us going, but it's not good for my children. So I think that's the discrepancy that I have found in transhumanism. And so how do we make it appeal more to people who are more grounded? And I know I may have gotten myself in trouble here. I'm happy to get myself in trouble. I'm looking to— looking, looking for the cancellation, you know. No, but I mean, the reality is that— and I deal with this all the time with my wife, where she doesn't, um, she has real solid values and she doesn't want to throw them away for these grandiose kind of dreams that I have about merging with robots and brain implants and things like that. She wants to see my kids go off, become doctors like she is. And that's a much more grounded philosophy. And I think that's where women really come into play, is they are sensible in that very sense. Whereas I think a lot of the transhumanists that I know are truly innovators in the grand sense, willing to destroy some of the things they've created in order to innovate more. And that's a, you know, there's a balance there.— and in fact, that's why I think, in my opinion, raising a child, you know, you have the two different, you know, yin and yang, has always been really good for the children, is you create these two different models that come and hit your child and they grow up having a really good balance. And when it doesn't have that balance, it can go, I think, a wrong way. And I think, you know, that's what's happening in transhumanists. I'd love to see more women though, and I have made it a huge point of writing about and also just trying to get more women in, but I think that fundamental part, what I just mentioned, is really, uh, what's sort of holding a lot of women back from being more involved.

Yeah, it's very interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. I had— one of the things I had observed was that I think every time transhumanism comes up, certainly in the UK, and this might be to do with the historical perspective of it, and there's a bit of a resurgence around, but it tends to end up in exogenesis and artificial wombs. And I think there's a lot of women who kind of look on that maybe a bit with a bit of suspicion. Not that— I mean, lots of women use surrogacy and other sorts of things. It's not just— not to make any value judgments about any of that, but I think some do worry that it's not just a biological thing. It has the potential to do something to the female, to the women's social status almost, you know, as a woman and as a mother. And so I, I think, um, I think there is a bit of a discussion to be had about what is the transhumanist belief system around motherhood, you know, in the traditional sense and in a more modern sense, maybe. Yeah.

And let me just say, you know, when I take my children out for a walk in the woods and we see a really— I see a high tree that I want to climb, and I immediately want to push my daughters to climb it with me. It's always my wife who's kind of pulling back and saying— and I think that's hopefully why those kids don't get hurt and can put on the next generation of kids. I really do think there's a strong biological reason for women keeping the family unit together and being the kind of stronger part of the nucleus than the man in terms of that. And that's, you know, everyone brings their advantages, you know, to the table. And I think that's really the core of what's going on here with why there's not enough women in transhumanism. They're holding the human fort together.

I'd like to say something about ectogenesis. There was a London Futurist meeting a few years back in which the speaker made an offhand remark, says, oh, ectogenesis is clearly a technology that nobody really wants, it's just a technological fantasy. And in the pub, he was surrounded by 3 quite upset women who all said they were quite interested in this, you know, they had made their personal choice and they wanted the option of having such a child by such a mechanism. So maybe the majority of women wouldn't think that way, but there was a significant number of women in that meeting who were adamant that this was a technology that ought to be explored. And yes, of course, there will be social implications, just as the social implications of contraception. You know, some people said, if this contraception is going to cause the downfall of civilization, but, you know, we figured out how to cope with it. It's the same with online dating. You know, it used to be an embarrassment. You say, oh, I met my partner via an online dating site. Oh, how weird are you? And then we got used to it. And so it may be that in the future we will take it for granted that it's a valid mode of being a mother, to have a child born in a synthetic womb.

I don't know, I agree. I think it's down to personal choice again, but it'd be interesting to interrogate what the philosophies are behind it rather than just thinking about sort of a traditional view of like family structures and motherhoods versus a technocratic version. I think there's something more nuanced and interesting to discuss in the middle. I don't know if either of you have read, um, Dr. Claire Chambers has got a new book out, I think it's this week actually, called Intact: A Defense of the Unmodified Body. And actually, she was talking about it a couple of nights ago on a webinar. It's not an attack on augmented or enhanced bodies at all, but she is— she does seem to be saying that we shouldn't be experiencing our bodies as something that's failing. And if we are— I mean, David, you mentioned the idea of limitations of our body. I think I'm paraphrasing it, so I hope I get this correct and this is what she meant, but she seems to be saying that if we feel like our bodies are failing, it's not a personal thing, it's down to societal norms and the judgments that are handed down on the way we perceive our bodies and what is a failure and what is a limitation. Because maybe it isn't a failure or a limitation, it's just that we are societally putting some— and she would say political stance around the way we think of the body, you know, in terms of shaming it. I thought it was very, very interesting. And she was really saying it in any sense that you feel like you lack something in, in your body, it's a political stance more than a personal thing. And I thought particularly— well, for both of you really, but particularly Zoltán, because you were a politician, or nearly were, or perhaps still are, or maybe even have those ambitions still, I don't know. But, um, what do we say to that? Is the way we think about the body and the modification, or the non-modification of the body a political stance?

Well, I, I absolutely think it's a political stance, and I disagree with anyone who says, uh, you know, that the body is not failing. The body is failing in a comparative way, you know, when you compare it to a calculator that wants to do, you know, arithmetic with numbers that, you know, run to 20 or something. Our brains just can't do it that quickly, at least most brains can't. And therefore, uh, we have some kind— we're making something compared to this device that can do it? Or the same thing, you know, with a computer, or the same thing with a robot, like our planes that can fly. I mean, why can't we go fly that fast? Well, we don't have wings, we don't have these things. We need to improve ourselves. I mean, and, and I think it just— it comes down to a personal philosophy of, do you believe that the body is the best design that we can do? If you were God, you had all the power in the world, would you create a human being? And then the answer is no. You would never create something that gets cold or that needs air to survive, that needs to go poo in the mornings after coffee. None of these things you would do. You would create something much stronger, maybe something more AI-based, maybe something more synthetic, but whatever it would be, it would not be this frail human body that we have where hundreds of thousands of people, or at least 150,000 people die every day, and about a fifth of the world is disabled in some sense, and people starve all the time, you know. I mean, nobody would create this kind of terrible tragedy. I think the body is the tragedy. Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful in the sense that we're here and at least we exist, but we're going to look back in 1,000 years and just say, oh my God, we were— it's almost like looking at ants. That's what we're going to look back and see, the human body today. And we're going to say, why didn't we move to the future faster? The body was always a failure, the human body.

Unmodified body would result in most people dying before the age of 5. Involve the average person dying at the age of 30. Women would have one pregnancy after another, after another. I had my body modified, and my eyesight wasn't great from the age of 9 until the age of 50. My eyes got worse and worse and worse. Should I have just said, hey, I'll cope with these awkward glasses and so on? I'm very glad I had my eyes lasered by laser surgery. It's been something I'm very happy with. Could I have just grinned and bared it and bore it as accepting it? I think accepting things that don't need to be accepted is foolish, frankly. You know, we should accept things that we have to put up with, and it's one of the great sayings in life: God, give me the grace to accept the things I cannot change, but also give me the courage to change the things that I can change, and give me the wisdom to know the difference. Well, maybe in the past, you know, we had to put up with lots of deaths in childbirth and the long strings of pregnancies and bad eyesight and all the other issues, And maybe we had to accept it then, maybe the Buddha was right at that time, but now I say we no longer need to accept it. And if we don't take advantage of this, we are inflicting unnecessary pain, limitations, and restrictions on people around us. Instead, we should know the wisdom as to what is possible to change.

I think, to be fair to her, I just say that I think she makes a distinction between functional enhancements and sort of enhancements that are done for emotional reasons. I think she was concentrating more on the latter. Sorry, Zoltán, you can say.

Well, what David said at the end, when you, when you don't do these enhancements, this is where I agree— disagree with that professor entirely. In fact, my last paper was on disability, and there's so many people that are justifying disability, and I feel that we have a moral obligation to totally fix, totally cure, totally upgrade all and any disabilities And I'm not saying, you know, we should force that on people at all. But what I'm saying is that if you're just an individual and you are suffering from something, or you can't reach the apple in the tree because your legs don't work, you have a moral responsibility to try to become your best self. And the best self is always evolving into something stronger, better, you know, more transhuman, essentially. And I think that's really what it comes down to with transhumanism, is that we all believe that there's a core motivation in us to become better, and we're going to use science and technology to do it. And anyone that says— and that's the politics of it. The politics says that if you support transhumanism, you're going to try to support improving your life and the lives of others through science and technology. And anything else is really supporting it the other direction. I want you to suffer. I want you to become worse. I want you to, you know, when you say I want someone to be content with their disability, you know, I know people saying, oh, Zoltán's a nablest. They've been saying that forever. But ableism is something that leads to suffering. And, you know, as transhumanists, we want to overcome suffering. That's kind of the core part of it. And so you need to utilize science and technology to become the strongest, best, and most prolific person that you can be. And that's certainly not a negative or an evil thing to ask of people or to say you have a moral obligation to.

So if we can only live to 120 or 150, Is that a failing body? Is that a disability? Is that less than perfect and we should be striving for more? Tell me about longevity.

I think people should be able to live healthily for as long as they wish to live. Eventually, people may get bored and have nothing more to do and may decide to terminate. Even then, I think cryonic suspension would be more sensible because there might be incredible things that happen in the future that might cause one to want to be reanimated. But this is about freedom, and if our bodies are constraining us to die at any age, it's a tragedy. You might say, well, he's lived 120 years, that's a full life, there's nothing more to do. On the contrary, I'd say somebody who had 120 years worth of wisdom would be incredibly valuable, and it's a great tragedy when that effectively library of knowledge burns down and it's all lost.

When we talk about defying ageing or the end of ageing, etc., does that mean there will never be an old person? Because I was thinking about this from the point of view of identity. I was thinking if we could live either forever or for a very, very long life, presumably if we're not ageing, certainly at the rate we do today, we won't be considered old, will we? So then as my identity, what, what does that do to my identity? Am I always young, or am I sort of in a limbo land where I'm not neither young nor old? You know, can someone who is defying aging ever be seen as old? If not, what are they? How do they identify, for example?

Well, that would be a part of our definition, which is less interesting. You know, nowadays we try to transcend many pigeonholing We try to think, well, regardless of somebody's ethnic background, that shouldn't force us to think of them in particular ways. We should be much more fluid in how we accept people from different backgrounds into totally different roles. So in the future, we won't care so much whether somebody is 80 or 60 or 120. We won't take that into account when evaluating them for things, and that will be a less important aspect. It's still there in our background, like I may I may like to tell people I grew up in the northeast of Scotland. I may like to tell people I went to university here and I had this job. That's not the most important thing about me. And in the future, my age won't be a particularly important thing about me either.

So do you think that we will become a collection of attributes and credentials rather than value judgments?

Well, I'm not sure about that. I think we will have the credentials and the experiences. Well, I think we will still be making hard decisions. There'll be different kinds of hard decisions from the ones today. There will be hard decisions that don't involve so much terrible suffering and despair, but there'll still be challenges and difficult things to weigh up.

Zoltán, how long do you want to live for?

Well, I would love to live indefinitely, and certainly I would probably say forever. I mean, I think when you say, "I don't want to live," if you want, you want to die. I mean, you're actually— it's a philosophical question. Why? Because you don't like your life. So I say I want to live forever. But, you know, more importantly is really this, you know, this fundamental belief of why we're trying to extend lifespans. It's because we love life. We want to see our children grow up and love life and all these other things. And so to say in any sense that I'm willing to die, or I want to die, or I'm ready to die, means that your love of life has turned to negative, or it's in a real sense. And you can say, oh no, no, I enjoyed my life for however long I wanted. But no, no, if you have the real choice in front of you, you push the button that says die, it means you don't want to be alive. And I think that's really where transhumanists are all pushing the button that says we want to live longer because we like this thing called existence.

Do you think that disrupts the natural cycle of things? I have a suspicion you'll say no.

No, no. But this is one of the most fundamental questions I get asked about transhumanism and longevity. And And people seem to think just because you don't die, there'll be no more creativity, there'll be no more visions and no more innovation. But people forget that technology is growing so fast that we're going to be not only merging our brains with AI, but merging our brains with each other and having totally different feeling senses, maybe 20 senses. I mean, hundreds of senses. Who knows what the future really brings? There's so much— the expansion of the universe, the expansion of the intelligent part of the universe is going to be so amazing. That the fact that we don't die has nothing to do with the sense of drama or death or making our sense that we're missing out on something. There's going to be complexity that comes from the expansion of AI and things like that constantly changes, that constantly keep us innovating, that constantly keep it rejuvenating. And I think when people say, oh, you must die so that the next generation comes in and they do something different. There's plenty of difference in the universe right now. There's plenty of creativity coming through science and technology. So I don't buy that argument that we need to die to make room for the next generation so that there's more innovation. Innovation comes from the— you know, we've taken evolution because of AI and silicon and whatnot to a whole different level. And so we're going to be occupied. We're never going to be, in fact, be able to keep up with all the trend, you know the change that's happening in the world. So death is no longer even needed from that simple philosophical point, because it seems like so many non-transhumanists like to say, oh, we need to die in order to, to have the change of the guard. Well, the change of the guard is coming from the innovation we're creating right now, and that's going to go, uh, you know, crazy once AI really starts hitting the picture 10, 15, 20 years. And then we have quantum computing. I mean, who knows how much creativity— we're going to be way overwhelmed. Singularity is going to be something completely, like, way beyond what our kind of brains can understand right now. So we're never gonna ever get bored, and we don't need new generations to create for us.

And would you be happy to carry on almost just as a mind, as cognition, or does it have to be a continued longevity in an embodied form? Can you split the two, or is it— is it— does it all come as a package, this this long life?

Yeah, well, I think, I think first off, it's not just splitting. Like, people seem to think, like, once you download your consciousness to computer, it's just going to be you. I mean, the very first thing David and I are going to do when we upload our minds is make more Davids and more Zoltans. And then those Zoltans and Davids will probably evolve into other beings. And I mean, you know, it's like, that's the natural thing, how a virus would do, and that's how a human being would do it if they were able to do it. So it's not— I don't even see myself as just one person. I see myself as spawning an entire new generation of different types of people that might end up being very, very different from me. And just entities— some are digital, some decide to go, you know, grow bodies, some decide to grow tails. I mean, who knows what it'll be like. So, you know, it'll be kind of a clone, but it'll be such a diverse world. So I don't even see the question in terms of just myself. I see it as how many billions and billions more of, of the life force that I have in me can evolve.

Transhumanists do differ on this. Most transhumanists say, well, for the short term at least, we want to have continuity within biological bodies, improved biological bodies. And then the question is, well, if we have the option to move our minds into computers, into virtual reality systems, and destroy our original bodies, would we do that? And some people take it for granted, hey, that would be fine, that would still be me. Others say, no, it wouldn't be me at all, I'd be dead, and it would be some copy of me, and it wouldn't be the same thing. And I don't know how to make my mind up about that philosophical question. So I'm waiting for the singularity or whenever, when an AGI, artificial general intelligence, is going to explain to me what consciousness really is. And then I might be happy to be uploaded, or I might decide that no, uploading wouldn't be good. So for the time being, I think that's one of the questions that remains open in the philosophy of consciousness.

Maybe you have to wait until you have more versions of yourself, and then you can hold a symposium. And debate and discuss it and decide. I mean, maybe that's one of the ways that we will make rational decisions in the future with versions of ourselves almost.

Well, and they're already working on that with social media. I mean, there are, in fact, for example, there was that German pilot who apparently committed suicide and killed himself. And I wrote an article about that saying that there are devices out there and Google tracking things that are designed to actually try to make it so that you don't do that. You know, Abraham Lincoln, one of our former presidents, would have said those are the better angels of our nature that'd be watching over you. And so, yeah, I think in the future we're all gonna have that. I mean, the same thing within driving a car. Already my BMW won't let me hit a deer. It stops, you know, in the road. So, there are already these things already happening. And can you imagine what it's gonna be like in 25 years?

Yeah, I definitely wanna be around to experience it. 'Cause I do actually think that all of these innovations, the enhancement or augmentation, will enable us to sense a different kind of world around us. I do think that we have a limitation in the, in the way that we can sense the world, and therefore the reality that we can perceive. And when we have these extensions or augmentations or enhancements, they will affect our sensory capabilities. So we'll probably— it'd be like the Doors of Perception, won't it? We'll have, we'll have a new reality perhaps dawning on us, I guess. But, uh, want to watch out for— well, this has been incredibly illuminating, and I hope it has to the audience as well. And I hope we've not only explained more about transhumanism, but it could go and where we have similarities and differences and some of the areas that still need debate and discussion, which of course there are many. But just before we go, we're going to have a quick sponsored message and then I'm going to ask you what you think the action for identity that you would most like to see happen over the next sort of, I don't know, 10, 20 years, what should that be? So we'll come back to you in one second. The Future Review is sponsored by Future Made Consulting. Writing for outlets like Forbes, Reuters, Coolhunting, and Wired means I'm always on the lookout for those who can inspire me on alternative futures and work with me to activate them. That's why I tap into the brains at Future Made, a network of established professionals in research for strategic thinking. They help me spot trends, roadmap innovation, and fully prepare for what comes next. They've worked with a host of global brands, businesses, and organizations, whether it's consulting, speaking, or curating future on projects big and small. They even do training to teach you these skills too. Whether you're a CEO, CMO, or just in the business of starting up, Future Made can help you grow business, design product, and make decisions, all with the future in mind. Find out more at futuremade.consulting. Made with the future in mind. So Zoltán and David, action for identity. What should we be thinking about? What should we want to happen now to improve our future in terms of our own identities from a transhumanist point of view?

We need to understand a heck of a lot more from an authentic point of view. There is so much distortion, so much hype. One of the drawbacks of some of the Silicon Valley culture is an uncritical extrapolation sometimes of things that aren't for real. So I am working on a project called the Vital Syllabus, which aims to gather reliable, free, no access issues, engaging and authoritative information that will help people to understand fully what the possibilities of these new technologies are, and to evaluate them from a variety of different philosophical points of view. And unless we have that better understanding, frankly, we're likely to make bad decisions about the future of identity.

And is that syllabus an extension of your book, Vital Foresight? Because I'm reading that and enjoying it immensely.

Well, it is indeed. So I wrote this rather thick book, you know, Vital Foresight The Case for Active Transhumanism, which is 500, 600 pages. And basically it makes the case that unfortunately we do need to understand lots of different angles, otherwise we will be misled in our predictions, expectations for the future. So we need to understand a lot about economics, a lot about technology, a lot about social aspects, a lot about business, the strengths of businesses, the strengths of capitalism, the weaknesses of businesses, the weaknesses of capitalism. The legal issues, and yes, the philosophical issues. There's a lot to be brought together, but if we can hold it all together, we are more likely to perceive accurately the threats to our future, but also the wonderful opportunities that are there.

It's synthesis as well as analysis, is it not?

Exactly.

Zoltán?

Well, when I think it comes to identity, I, you know, I give a little bit of a warning here. I have increasingly over the last few years discovered that I think social media is probably very akin to smoking cigarettes. Something where we didn't know it at first, what it was doing to us. We thought we could just all do it, and all of a sudden we're realizing that society is breaking down on multiple levels. And when I think we uncover all this, we're probably going to find out that social media was broadly responsible for various, uh, things including insurrections, civil wars, and just people acting very bombastically, people starting to, you know, take themselves too seriously and things like that. So if I was talking about— I'm thinking about identity when I talk about where civilization is going. I think people have to take a very critical look at what social media is doing to their mind and how it's making them perceive who they are, because I think a lot of what's happening is it's not real. It's not actually the way it is when you go to like a party and you meet 20 people as the same thing as meeting 20 people on Facebook. So when it comes to identity, people be very critical, overly critical about how their behavior and how their influence on social media is actually related to who they really are in the real world.

Is that not what we're going to experience though, when we are disembodied versions of ourselves in some of these worlds? It's going to be very difficult to navigate, isn't it, without psychological help or other kinds of help that we perhaps haven't anticipated.

Yes. In fact, I think— and I'm not saying this is a good option right now, but I think what's going to come down, there's going to be a lot of AI bots that do things like— in very similar to what I said with the German pilot who committed suicide with the passengers on board— is we're going to have a lot of people overlooking us, but not necessarily people, but programs that we set ourselves to say we're not allowed to do this or we can do this. But there are just so many people that react so crazy, and then they become more crazy, and it feeds off itself. I think there have to be mechanisms in place that actually allow people to try to find the deeper truths about themselves and how to become a better person, rather than fall into this just void of emotionality where sometimes they just end up breaking. And, and society is breaking down as a result of it. So I think we better figure that out before we get into the hive mind where we can't stop ourselves from really becoming becoming a full-on chaos, you know, world of chaos.

Looks like China are going to avert that by banning the use of some of these virtual worlds and gaming and social media though, yeah?

Yeah, no, and I mean, I'm not in favor of banning anything yet. I'm in favor of those big giant companies, Facebook and Google, working out things that actually help people understand things. And, you know, it's Banning almost never works anyways when it comes down to things like this. So it's really more a matter of how can we use social media for instructional purposes that actually benefit humanity? And there's got to be a formula. We just haven't figured it out yet.

Okay, well, I think that's a brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about transhumanism and, um, and identity. I hope I can get you back again, both of you, at some point in the future, because there's so much to talk about. But we managed to cover quite a lot here. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.