When I first learned of Transhumanism, I agreed with it almost reflexively. To me it seemed obvious that “we” needed to build a future in which the humanity could overcome its natural enemies: disease, poverty, and political corruption/mismanagement. I say we even though I meant the select few who actually had the power, or intelligence, to do so. I was more fascinated by the idea of a utopian future than I was about the execution. As I have grown over the years, I’ve come to actions in the present more than the dreams of the future.
I was discouraged by the lack of progress we often see in the political arena; real, necessary, drastic changes often take years, with human suffering being the byproduct of the process. It took years for marriage to become truly egalitarian, even though it was obvious to anybody who didn’t have a religious or political investment in seeing it otherwise. We need healthcare reform, the right to repair, affordable drugs, and various forms of autonomy (from digital to reproductive): I shudder to think how long these things will take.
Last year, I researched the encryption war of the 90’s and how PGP originally started. You see, the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, took a huge risk by initially releasing the PGP program and source code onto the web. He potentially faced very serious criminal charges because at the time, Encryption was still considered the domain of the military. The US didn’t want anyone outside (or for that matter inside) their borders to have access to the technology. Once it was released though, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Encryption was here to stay[1].
We no longer need to wait for the technology to create a better society. The PGP was an example of technologically enabled liberty. Congress doesn’t have the power to defy the laws of physics. And because encryption is no longer the domain of the military, we now can do our taxes over the internet: we can also sing like a canary about our employer’s corruption without fear of reprisal (kudos to whoever released the panama papers) but let’s just focus on the taxes for now.
Do you want transparency in healthcare cost? Build a bot to aggregate every public document related to the cost associated with health care, hospital funding, and payroll information. You would be surprised what you can find with a little Open source intelligence. Or build a platform where people can share their expenses related to various treatments (and various hospitals). While the data will not be as complete as if you actually had the cooperation of the hospitals in question (which you should), you will effectively force the issue into public awareness. The same thing can be done, and has been done[2], for political corruption.
This isn’t limited to just software either. Disease and poverty, can be tackled with open source data science. You may not be able to eradicate either of these banes by data alone, but you force policy makers to make informed decisions, because with each new data set you progressively remove their ability to claim ignorance[3]. In the case of disease, you also my unveil correlations leading to a new understanding of the disease or the factors contributing to its growth.
Thing is you don’t have to even work in the field of software engineering, or data science. You don’t have to be rich. The nature of software means you can run most of these things on a 7 year old laptop (though it may take much longer than otherwise); you don’t even have to be particularly good at it. You just need a target, lots of studying, and time. That’s how change happens, not by expecting others to do the right thing, but by leaving them with no other choice.
Disclaimer: I think that involvement in the political process in invaluable and necessary. What I’m advocating here isn’t apathy, or anarchism. I’m advocating for strategically weakening the oppositions ability to resist.
[1] The encryption war was more than just phil Zimmerman and pgp. It involved a whole slew of encryption technologies (such as the failed clipper chip and Diffie-Helman key exchange algorithm), I recommend researching it.
[2] https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/03/09/how-web-scraping-is-revealing-lobbying-and-corruption-in-peru/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/what-data-can-do-to-fight-poverty.html?_r=0
* hero image used from adobe stock w/ permission
March 1, 2017 at 5:33 am
an·ti·no·mi·an
relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.
Technology is simply the science of techniques. Techniques are tools to get things done, procedures. The improvement of those techniques is occurring at an exponential rate. Technology and science are the only real dynamic force in the world today, with culture, economics, religion, ethics, and society all now mostly just reacting to the exponential rate of technological improvement.
My take on it is that soon artificial super intelligence will stream through our smartphones, and have environmental awareness. When ASI starts interacting with us one-on-one, then we will see culture, economics, religion, ethics, and society changing rapidly.
Briefly, the Singularity Feedback Loop states that Intelligence creates Technology, and Technology improves Intelligence. We are going to see a tremendous rate of change in the next few decades due to rapidly improving technology and our rapidly improving intelligence.
Referring to words and beliefs relevant during the Iron Age to evaluate what is right and wrong in terms of our increasingly high technology environment is, to say the least, inefficient. The future will belong to those who are dynamic enough to pick up the technological tools that are emerging, and use them to both improve their intelligence, and also create even better technology.
March 1, 2017 at 1:41 pm
Antinomianism is a term that has been used both in secular and religious usages and has been used by a wide enough set of religions that it has taken a much more generic meaning. Granted, it was originally a christian concept but language, much like technology, evolves over time.
I mainly used it because of a lack of synonyms for the concept I was trying to convey. It’s not amorality because this is about individual ethics trumping societal limitations. I suppose you could use positive consequentialism.
And technology, and our ability to use it as we see fit(to repair it, to improve it, in some cases to create it) is limited by the laws of our society. Right now their is a debate in the US about making the use of genetic engineering illegal without some form of approval. What I’m saying is if you have an idea that can change the world, enact it. Find a way to release it to the rest of the world while preserving your anonymity. The rules of society could not be chains on human progress.
March 1, 2017 at 1:43 pm
Sorry for the typos, I replied on a phone
March 1, 2017 at 2:42 pm
Spider,
I concur with Brad Arnold’s point on terminology, both for the reasons he stated, and because introducing an authority as an agent in the process muddies the power inherent in individual action.
Outside of that minor adjustment, great article.
Yes, as Brad points out, as exponential intelligence grows the process with accelerate. However, taking individual actions as you describe are important elements in the design and scaling of the change out to the entire human population.
Nice work.
September 6, 2018 at 12:23 pm
It works quite well for me