[This piece is an excerpt from The Terrific Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.]
The notion that the world can be duplicated and changed by a simulated reality states a great deal about the beliefs of those who promote the metaverse [treated in the previous chapter] The conception is materialist and mechanistic at base, the trademarks of social engineering. It represents the world as consisting of absolutely nothing but manipulable matter, or rather, of digital media mimicking matter. It recommends that human beings can be minimized to a material substratum and can be caused to accept a technological reproduction in lieu of truth. Even more, it presumes that those who populate this simulacrum can be managed by technocratic ways. Such a materialist, mechanistic, techno-determinist, and reductionist worldview follows the transhumanist belief that human beings themselves will quickly be prospered by a brand-new transhuman types, or humanity-plus (h+)– maybe a genetically and AI-enhanced cyborg that will overtake regular human beings and make the latter practically obsolete.
The term transhumanism was created by Julian Huxley, the sibling of the novelist Aldous Huxley and the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In an essay entitled “Transhumanism,” released in the book New Bottles for New Wine (1957 ), Huxley defined transhumanism as the self-transcendence of mankind:
The human types can, if it wants, transcend itself– not simply sporadically, an individual here in one way, a private there in another way, however in its entirety, as humankind. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: guy remaining guy, but transcending himself, by recognizing brand-new possibilities of and for his humanity.
One concern for transhumanism is undoubtedly whether this transcendence will use to the entire human types or rather for just a choose part of it. But Huxley gave some indication of how this human self-transcendence may occur: humankind would end up being “managing director of the greatest business of all, the business of advancement …” As the first epigraph to this Part explains, Julian Huxley was a supporter of eugenics. And he was the President of the British Eugenics Society. It remained in his introduction of UNESCO, as the director-general that he recommended that eugenics, after the Nazi routine had offered it such a bad name, ought to be saved from opprobrium, “so that much that now is unimaginable may a minimum of end up being imaginable.” As John Klyczek has kept in mind, “In the wake of vehement public backlash versus the atrocities of the Nazi eugenic Holocaust, Huxley’s eugenics correct was forced to go under-ground, repackaging itself in numerous crypto-eugenic disguises, one of which is ‘transhumanism.'” Transhumanism, Klyczek recommends, is “the scientific postulate that human development through biological-genetic selection has actually been largely superseded by a symbiotic evolution that cybernetically combines the human types with its own technological handiwork.”
Contemporary transhumanist enthusiasts, such as Simon Young, believe that mankind can take over where development has actually left us to develop a brand-new and better types– either ourselves, or a follower to ourselves:
We stand at a turning point in human evolution. We have broken the hereditary code; equated the Book of Life. We will quickly possess the ability to become designers of our own development.
In “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” Nick Bostrom information the family tree of transhumanist idea from its prehistory to today and shows how transhumanism became wedded to the fields of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR), where robotics is inclusive of Expert system (AI). It is the last of these fields that primarily concerns us here. The transhumanist project has actually given that envisioned the transcendence of humanity via technological means. In the past thirty years, this technological transcendence has been figured as “the singularity.”
Vernor Vinge, the mathematician, computer researcher, and sci-fi author introduced the concept of the technological singularity in 1993. The singularity, Vinge recommended, is the near-future point at which device intelligence will most likely supersede human intelligence. Vinge boldly stated: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to produce superhuman intelligence. Quickly after, the human period will be ended.” Vinge predicted that the singularity would be reached no later than, you guessed it, 2030. The question Vinge resolved was whether, and if so, how, the human species might make it through the coming singularity.
The innovator, futurist, and now Google Engineering Director Raymond Kurzweil has considering that welcomed the technological singularity as an advantage to mankind. Kurzweil, whose books consist of The Age of Spiritual Makers (1999 ), The Singularity Is Near (2005 ), and How to Create a Mind (2012 ), suggests that by 2029, technologists will have successfully reverse-engineered the brain and reproduced human intelligence in (strong) AI while significantly increasing processing speeds of idea. Having actually mapped the neuronal components of a human brain, or found the algorithms for thought, or a combination thereof, technologists will convert the very same to a computer program, character and all, and submit it to a computer host, therefore understanding the holy grail of immortality. Finally, as the intelligence surge expands from the singularity, all matter will be penetrated with information, with intelligence; the entire universe will “get up” and end up being alive, and “about as close to God as I can imagine,” writes Kurzweil.
Hence, in a complete turnaround of the Biblical creation story, Kurzweil presumes a dumb universe that begins with a cosmic singularity (the Big Bang) and ends up being God by a technological singularity. This second singularity, Kurzweil suggests, involves deep space ending up being self-aware, vis-à-vis the educational, technological representative, mankind. Hence, in the technological singularity, the technological and the cosmic assemble, as Kurzweil resembles a techno-cosmic Hegelian. (Hegel figured collective human self-consciousness advancing in self-actualization and self-realization, finally becoming and recognizing itself as God, “through the State [as] the march of God in the world.”) Incidentally, according to Kurzweil, our post-human followers will bear the marks of their human provenance. Hence, the future intelligence will stay “human” in some sense. People are the carriers of universal intelligence and human innovation is the substratum by which intelligence will be infinitely broadened and universalized.
More just recently, Yuval Noah Harari– the Israeli historian, WEF-affiliated futurist, and advisor to Klaus Schwab– has actually likewise hailed this singularity, although with alarming predictions for the vast bulk. According to Harari, the 4-IR will have 2 primary consequences: bodies and minds will be changed by robotics and AI, while human brains become hackable with nanorobotic brain-cloud user interfaces (B/CIs), AI, and biometric monitoring innovations. Simply as humans are functionally replaced, that is, they will undergo the total control of powerful corporations or the state (or, what’s most likely, a hybrid thereof, a neo-fascist state). Rather than a decentralized, open-access infosphere of blowing up intelligence readily available to all, Singularitarian technologies will become part of the toolbox for domination. The supersession of human intelligence by maker intelligence will include the use of such data and information processing abilities to additional forecast and control social behavioral patterns of the international population. In addition, the biotechnical enhancement of the couple of will serve to exacerbate a currently large gulf between the elite and the majority, while the “superiority” of the improved functions ideologically to justify differences permitted by such a division. That is, Harari recommends that if developments proceed as Vinge and Kurzweil forecast, this greatly sped up information-collecting and processing sphere will not constitute genuine understanding for the knowledge of the large majority. Rather, it will be instrumentalist and reductionist in the extreme, helping with the supremacy of human beings on a worldwide scale, while rendering opposition difficult.
In an article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Nuno R. B. Martins et al. explain just how such control could be carried out through B/CIs, which the authors declare will be possible within the next 20 to 30 years:
Neuralnanorobotics might also allow a B/CI with controlled connection between neural activity and external information storage and processing, through the direct monitoring of the brain’s ~ 86 x 109 nerve cells and ~ 2 x 1014 synapses … They would then wirelessly transmit as much as ~ 6 x 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human– brain electrical details by means of auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm3) with the capacity to manage approximately 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid information transfer to a cloud-based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and information extraction. A neuralnanorobotically enabled human B/CI might function as a customized avenue, permitting persons to get direct, instant access to essentially any aspect of cumulative human understanding (focus mine).
Such interfaces have already reached the commercialization stage with Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Kernel, and through DARPA, to name a few.
When neuralnanorobotic innovations that carry out information and algorithms that make decisions user interface with the brain, the possibilities for getting rid of specific type of experiences, behaviors, and ideas becomes possible. Such control of the mind through implants was already prototyped by Jose Delgado as early as 1969. Now, 2- method transmission of data in between the brain and the cloud efficiently suggests the possibility of reading the ideas of topics, disrupting such ideas, and replacing them with other, machine-cloud-originating details. The desideratum to record, label, “informationalize,” rather than to understand, not to mention critically engage or theorize experience will take special top priority for topics, offered the possibilities for controlling neuronal switching patterns. Offered the instrumentalism of the Singularitarians– or, as Yuval Harari has called them, the “Dataists”– definitive, action-oriented algorithms will dominate these brain-cloud interfaces, preventing professors for the vital assessment of activity, and wiping out free will. Offered sufficient data, algorithms will be better able to make choices for us. However, they will have been based upon intelligence specified in a specific method and put to specific ends, putting significant emphasis on the speed and volume of data processing and decision-making based on data interpreted as “understanding.” Naturally, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind. Yet, unlike Huxley’s mind-numbing soma, brain-cloud user interfaces will have an ideological appeal to the masses; they are promoted as improvements, as vast improvements over basic human intelligence.
Harari peels back the curtain masking transhumanism’s Wizard of Oz guarantees, suggesting that even before the singularity, robotics and machine intelligence will make the masses into a brand-new “ineffective class.” Offered the expensive cost of entry, just the elite will have the ability to pay for real improvements, making them a brand-new, exceptional species– notwithstanding the claim that Moore’s Law closes the technological breach by tremendously increasing the price-performance of computing and therefore halving its cost per system of measurement every two years or less. How the elite will keep special control over improvements and yet subject the masses to control technologies is never addressed. But perhaps a kill switch might be implemented such that the elite will not be subjected to brain-data mining– unless one runs afoul of the agenda, in which case brain-data mining could be (re)made it possible for.
In a 2018 WEF declaration, Harari spoke as the self-proclaimed prophet of a new transhumanist age, saying:
We are probably amongst the last generations of homo sapiens. Within a century or 2, Earth will be controlled by entities that are more different from us, than we are various from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. Due to the fact that in the coming generations, we will learn how to craft bodies and brains and minds. These will be the main items of the 21st century economy (emphasis mine).
No longer capable of mounting a difficulty to the elite as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and having no function, the feckless masses will have no option or function. Exploitation is something; irrelevance is rather another, says Harari. And hence, as Harari sees it, the staying bulk will be condemned to invest their time in the metaverse, or even worse. If they are lucky, they will gather universal basic income (UBI) and will best occupy themselves by taking drugs and playing computer game. Of course, Harari excuses himself from this fate.
When it comes to the elite, according to Harari, their expected supremacy to the masses will soon become a matter of biotechnological truth, instead of simply an ideological pretension, as in the past. The elite will not only continue to control the lion’s share of the world’s material resources; they will likewise end up being godlike and delight in reliable push-button control over their subordinates. Further, by means of biotechnological ways, they will acquire eternal life on Earth, while the bulk, previously consoled by the fact that at least everyone dies, will now lose the great equalizer. As the supernatural is outmoded, or compromised on the altar of transhumanism, the bulk will inevitably surrender their belief in a spiritual afterlife. The theistic religious beliefs that come from the Middle East will disappear, to be changed by brand-new cyber-based religions coming from Silicon Valley. Spirituality, that is, will be absolutely nothing but the expression of reverence for newly developed silicon gods, whether they be game characters, game designers, or the elites themselves.
Harari’s declarations might total up to deliberate hyperbole to make a point, however his statements are remarkable for the cynicism and disdain for humankind they betray. They are revelatory of the unmitigated gall of believers in the transhuman future. Coupled with the neo-Malthusian impulses of the elite, focused around the UN and the WEF, a picture emerges of an elite whose objective is to minimize the population of “ineffective eaters,” while keeping the remainder in their thrall.
[This piece is an excerpt from The Excellent Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.]