Transhuman - Part 2

Okay, as promised: part two of my series on transhumanism. If you need to find part 1, you can read it here: http://dougmeredith.blogspot.com/2017/05/transhuman-part-1.html

(WARNING: I am a smart person who keeps abreast of these topics due to personal interest. I am NOT a scientist working in these specialized fields, which is why I am sticking to very broad strokes.)

Let's go alphabetically in our discussion and start with the concept of a *biological* singularity - there's a broad range of scientific advances in the hopper that could lead us to a rapid evolution beyond "standard" human. I can't say at what pace they will reach fruition, or even in what order, but the basic tools are already in place - the speculation is not about whether they will all work, but what they can achieve within the boundaries of cost, effectiveness, and safety.

Probably most well-known would be the development of stem cell technology. In case you missed it, here's the two-second snapshot as I understand it: as a fetus, all our different types of cells start out as one broad type (the stem cell) and then differentiate into other types based on a whole host of factors. We also have some of them as adults, acting as a limited repair system for cellular damage.
Why is that important? Because the right stem cells can become nearly anything - need a replacement heart? One could theoretically be grown artificially for you. Suffering from brain damage? Cultivate some neurons. What's even better is that we can now cause already differentiated cells to revert back to limited stem cells, which means that we could grow that heart from your own cells, negating any risk of rejection.

Now let's add in genetic modification and the growing field of epigenetics. With the discovery and refinement of CRISPR (which has nothing to do with keeping your veggies fresh), we're getting waaaay better at directly modifying DNA in precise, significant, *and inheritable* ways. Beyond the potential to permanently excise a wide range of genetic disorders, we could tweak "working" DNA to upgrade our biological systems' effectiveness or simply to make something work differently.
Epigenetics is the often-overlooked sibling of genetic modification - as our understanding of DNA increases, we're also coming to understand that many traits are not solely derived from our genes. Essentially, various other factors can modify, turn on, or turn off portions of our genetic code. Even more importantly, these modifications can ALSO be inherited like genes.

There are dozens of other medical breakthroughs currently being researched, but I think the above three are illustrative of how powerfully we are starting to grasp at the very roots of our biology. There's still a LOT of work to do in terms of translating and truly understanding everything, but let me reiterate: it's a matter of "when" instead of "if".

How does this lead us into a singularity? First, these various techniques could either legitimately cure or provide permanent, renewable levels of treatment for every disease - not a single cure-all, but an ever-expanding toolbox able to quickly tackle various situations. Second, therapies could halt or reverse the process of biological aging on a cellular level. What that boils down to is not, despite the hype, immortality - it removes the factors of death due to illness or old age, but you can still die due to severe enough sudden injury. Still, the specter of death would go from being a definite thing after a span of no more than roughly 100 years to an end that could take thousands of years to arrive.

What would a human become after a millennium of existence? What happens when death fades into the background? How do we deal with population growth when the death rate drops so drastically?

There's another singularity lurking alongside that one: artificial, controlled genetic modification. How far can you drift in terms of gene tailoring before you simply stop being homo sapiens anymore? That's an especially pressing point when one considers that these changes *can be inherited by your children*. How long before we fragment into various species who are no closer relations than we are to the chimpanzee?

As with all the developments I will be discussing, the answer is not to turn back or run away - the potential good is simply far too significant. Indeed, perhaps we will come out on the other side of the singularity better than we went in. Perhaps an increased lifespan, for example, will encourage longer-term thinking. *We cannot truly know*, which is what makes a singularity worthy of the name. What we *can* do is try to arrange things on this side of the event horizon to get ready for it and, where possible, do our utmost to maximize the chance of attaining the best outcomes.

Transhuman - Part 1

I wanna talk about transhumanism for a minute.

Wait. What? Not politics? Not health care?

No. Those are urgent and important, but I want to take a minute and look over the horizon - to stare at the oncoming singularity.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, transhumanism is the study of the various avenues humans might seek (blindly or knowingly) that would change us so greatly as to no longer be homo sapiens sapiens anymore; rapid, self-driven evolution, if you will.

Mark my words: assuming our present world does not literally come completely crashing down upon our ears in the next century, the question of transhuman evolution is not a matter of "if" but "when" and "how". We had best be deliberating on the answers we want to find at the other end.

Here's the trouble, though: the singularity. It's a concept used in technology to describe a point at which innovation skyrockets exponentially, making it impossible for us to forecast what life would be like beyond that moment. It actually derives from a black hole - there's the event horizon, the last point at which light is able to escape the massive pull of gravity, and then there's the singularity. You cannot see into the singularity because not even a single photon gets out to illuminate what is beyond.
Scary, no? Good. It should be scary - awesome events should inspire awe, terrific events should involve some amount of terror.

Here's the REALLY scary thing: there's not one singularity approaching, but dozens of them. That's why I say this is inevitable on our current course; one of the options will come to fruition sooner or later. Probably several will merge into one another to create an uber-event greater than the sum of its parts. Yet this also won't be a sudden shift; it will be a growing storm that builds into a larger maelstrom. There will probably not be a literal moment entitled "THE SINGULARITY", although we will no doubt look back from beyond it and label one arbitrary point as such. We like to do that with our history, after all, even when it's rarely so easy.

There are three main avenues of singularity that I want to explore: computing, cybernetic, and biological. Then I want to explore how these three threads are most likely to fold together and morph each other over time. Needless to say, that's way too much for one Facebook post so I'll be breaking it up into several over the next couple of weeks.

One way or another I hope you will *not* be bored.