Thoughts about our species ’ future : themes from Humanity ’ s End : Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement

This paper summarizes a couple of the main arguments from my new book, Humanity’s End. In the book I argue against radical enhancement – the adjustment of human attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings. I’m curious to see what reaction this elicits in a journal whose readership includes some of radical enhancement’s most imaginative and committed advocates. Humanity’s End is motivated by the conviction that the debate about human enhancement must move beyond the binary “yes, I love it; no, it’s evil” dialectic that has tended to dominate philosophical discussion up till now. When we focus on the multiple means – cybernetic, genetic, nanotechnological, and so on – by which humans are likely to be enhanced, we find significant moral differences. Some human enhancements should be endorsed; many should be rejected. An additional motivation for Humanity’s End is a sense that the technologies of human enhancement are on the verge of something really big. If Ray Kurzweil is right, then improvements of the information technologies that may be used to enhance human attributes track an exponential path (Kurzweil 2005). A feature of these ever-increasing patterns of improvement is that they deliver dramatic improvements quickly. Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns is controversial. Perhaps new means of enhancement won’t arrive according to its schedule. But I know from my own nostalgia for rotary dial telephones and incredulity about computers that wirelessly access the Internet that human adaptation to technology lags behind the pace of technological change. We mustn’t just assume a