April 30, 2005
DOUG BEAZLEY, EDMONTON SUN
Raiders News Update
And you thought airports were hell on regular people. For Steve Mann, renowned University of Toronto engineer and "cyborg," getting on a plane can be a harrowing ordeal - even without the in-flight meal. Mann is a pioneer in the science of "wearable computing." He typically spends his days in a boiler suit stuffed with portable computers and laced with wires. Sensors monitor his vital signs, and a digital visor built like a pair of Ray-Bans augments his vision.
Three years ago, a fully wired Mann was barred by airport security from boarding a flight in Newfoundland. Mann said he was strip-searched and injured by airport staff when electrodes were ripped from his body, and lost $56,800 worth of sensitive equipment. "I was dizzy and disoriented and went downhill from there," he said.
PREPARE FOR MORE
It could be the new "ism" of the 21st century: cyborgism, discrimination against the machine-enhanced. If so, you're going to be seeing more of it, as more people take advantage of new technologies to expand what the human body can do.
"We're already a cyborg society," says Simon Smith, founder of the webzine BetterHumans and devotee of another 21st-century ism: transhumanism.
Think of transhumanism as the logical outcome of a gadget-obsessed society. You know someone (or are someone) who can't leave the house without a cellphone, IPod and Blackberry. Transhumanists see a future in which people will incorporate that technology into their bodies - become digital. And it doesn't stop there.
"We fundamentally reject the idea of human nature," said James Hughes, executive director of the World Transhumanist Association and author of Citizen Cyborg.
"What was normal living 40,000 years ago would be unacceptable to us today. There is no normal, no natural state of humanity."
But there are degrees of "unnatural." Transhumanists identify a few preconditions for the future they want: a public willing to use science to tinker with their bodies and minds, technology that links the central nervous system to machines, and genetic techniques that expand physical abilities.
We've already got the first two, more or less. There are people walking around right now with electronic cochlear implants that allow them to hear better. Laser eye surgery is routine; in the future, the same technique might expand the range of human vision.
Prescription drugs modify our moods and emotions; "lifestyle drugs" like Viagra improve quality of life in the absence of illness.
Dozens of labs around the globe are racing to perfect devices that allow the disabled to control computers and robot prostheses using chips implanted in their brains. A team of scientists in California has already built what they claim is an "artificial hippocampus" - mimicking the work of that part of the brain responsible for storing long-term memories.
As for the third, it's on the way. Scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. are at work on a vaccine that builds muscle mass: a buff body in a bottle, without effort.
Major pharmaceutical corporations are working to develop drugs that improve how our brains work, by stimulating neuron growth and new neural connections.
Transhumanists argue that, from where we are now, it's only a hop to a future in which people live in technology, and vice versa. Imagine computer implants in your grey matter, letting you link up with your laptop without touching a key.
Learn German in under a minute. Experience virtual reality that's better than the real thing. Board meetings would be a lot less boring, sex a lot more complicated.
"Eventually, we'll enjoy more than the standard five senses," said Hughes. "The line between machine and flesh will become blurred."
In their wilder moments, transhumanists see humanity transcending biology by uploading consciousness into a computer and becoming both "virtual" and immortal - the sort of idea that gives nervous fits to traditionalists.
Political economist Francis Fukuyama, a member of the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics, recently damned transhumanism as the "world's most dangerous idea."
Fukuyama claims the philosophy threatens to erase human nature by killing the constraints that define it, and that it would set up a caste system made up of the privileged few who can afford to enhance their bodies and minds, and a downtrodden majority condemned to second-class status.
WE MAY HAVE NO CHOICE
Transhumanists counter by saying the new technologies can only benefit mankind if they're made available to everyone. But as computer science accelerates, Hughes argues, people may have no choice but to augment their brains just to compete: we can't beat 'em, so we'll have to join 'em.
"If you consider the possibility of a self-aware machine intelligence able to modify itself, you could be looking at a Terminator-type scenario," he said. "We may be forced to augment ourselves just to cope with what's coming.
"Because an artificial intelligence bootstrapping itself into self-awareness is the scariest scenario of all. Such an intelligence would be more utterly alien than anything we've encountered. How could we adapt?"
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