Hacking Humanity: Transhumanism

Hacking Humanity: Transhumanism

 

“Harari’s pronouncements may amount to intentional hyperbole to make a point, but his statements are remarkable for the cynicism and disdain for humanity they betray. They are revelatory of the unmitigated gall of believers in the transhuman future. Coupled with the neo-Malthusian impulses of the elite, centered around the UN and the WEF, a picture emerges of an elite whose objective is to reduce the population of “useless eaters,” while keeping the remainder in their thrall.”

by , Mises Wire
April 14, 2023

 

[This piece is an excerpt from The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.]

The notion that the world can be replicated and replaced by a simulated reality says 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 hallmarks of social engineering. It represents the world as consisting of nothing but manipulable matter, or rather, of digital media mimicking matter. It suggests that human beings can be reduced to a material substratum and can be induced to accept a technological reproduction in lieu of reality. Further, it assumes that those who inhabit this simulacrum can be controlled by technocratic means. Such a materialist, mechanistic, techno-determinist, and reductionist worldview is consistent with the transhumanist belief that humans themselves will soon be succeeded by a new transhuman species, or humanity-plus (h+)—perhaps a genetically and AI-enhanced cyborg that will outstrip ordinary humans and make the latter virtually obsolete.

The term transhumanism was coined by Julian Huxley, the brother 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,” published in the book New Bottles for New Wine (1957), Huxley defined transhumanism as the self-transcendence of humanity:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.1

One question for transhumanism is indeed whether this transcendence will apply to the whole human species or rather for only a select part of it. But Huxley gave some indication of how this human self-transcendence might occur: humanity would become “managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution . . .”2 As the first epigraph to this Part makes clear, Julian Huxley was a proponent of eugenics. And he was the President of the British Eugenics Society.3 It was in his introduction of UNESCO, as the director-general that he suggested that eugenics, after the Nazi regime had given it such a bad name, should be rescued from opprobrium, “so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”4 As John Klyczek has noted, “In the wake of vehement public backlash against the atrocities of the Nazi eugenic Holocaust, Huxley’s eugenics proper was forced to go under-ground, repackaging itself in various crypto-eugenic disguises, one of which is ‘transhumanism.’” Transhumanism, Klyczek suggests, is “the scientific postulate that human evolution through biological-genetic selection has been largely superseded by a symbiotic evolution that cybernetically merges the human species with its own technological handiwork.”5

Contemporary transhumanist enthusiasts, such as Simon Young, believe that humanity can take over where evolution has left us to create a new and improved species—either ourselves, or a successor to ourselves:

We stand at a turning point in human evolution. We have cracked the genetic code; translated the Book of Life. We will soon possess the ability to become designers of our own evolution.6

In “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” Nick Bostrom details the lineage of transhumanist thought from its prehistory to the present and shows how transhumanism became wedded to the fields of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR), where robotics is inclusive of Artificial Intelligence (AI).7 It is the last of these fields that primarily concerns us here. The transhumanist project has since 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 scientist, and science fiction author introduced the notion of the technological singularity in 1993.8 The singularity, Vinge suggested, is the near-future point at which machine intelligence will presumably supersede human intelligence. Vinge boldly declared: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”9 Vinge predicted that the singularity would be reached no later than, you guessed it, 2030. The question Vinge addressed was whether, and if so, how, the human species might survive the coming singularity.

The inventor, futurist, and now Google Engineering Director Raymond Kurzweil has since welcomed the technological singularity as a boon to humanity. Kurzweil, whose books include The Age of Spiritual Machines (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 replicated human intelligence in (strong) AI while vastly increasing processing speeds of thought. Having mapped the neuronal components of a human brain, or discovered the algorithms for thought, or a combination thereof, technologists will convert the same to a computer program, personality and all, and upload it to a computer host, thus grasping the holy grail of immortality. Finally, as the intelligence explosion expands from the singularity, all matter will be permeated with data, with intelligence; the entire universe will “wake up” and become alive, and “about as close to God as I can imagine,” writes Kurzweil.10

Thus, in a complete reversal of the Biblical creation narrative, Kurzweil posits a dumb universe that begins with a cosmic singularity (the Big Bang) and becomes God by a technological singularity. This second singularity, Kurzweil suggests, involves the universe becoming self-aware, vis-à-vis the informational, technological agent, humanity. Thus, in the technological singularity, the technological and the cosmic converge, as Kurzweil resembles a techno-cosmic Hegelian. (Hegel figured collective human self-consciousness progressing in self-actualization and self-realization, finally becoming and recognizing itself as God, “through the State [as] the march of God in the world.”11) Incidentally, according to Kurzweil, our post-human successors will bear the marks of their human provenance. Thus, the future intelligence will remain “human” in some sense. Human beings are the carriers of universal intelligence and human technology is the substratum by which intelligence will be infinitely expanded and universalized.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari—the Israeli historian, WEF-affiliated futurist, and advisor to Klaus Schwab—has also hailed this singularity, although with dire predictions for the vast majority. According to Harari, the 4-IR will have two main consequences: human bodies and minds will be replaced by robots and AI, while human brains become hackable with nanorobotic brain-cloud interfaces (B/CIs), AI, and biometric surveillance technologies. Just as humans are functionally replaced, that is, they will be subject to the total control of powerful corporations or the state (or, what’s more likely, a hybrid thereof, a neo-fascist state). Rather than a decentralized, open-access infosphere of exploding intelligence available to all, Singularitarian technologies will become part of the arsenal for domination. The supersession of human intelligence by machine intelligence will involve the use of such data and data processing capabilities to further predict and control social behavioral patterns of the global population. In addition, the biotechnical enhancement of the few will serve to exacerbate an already wide gulf between the elite and the majority, while the “superiority” of the enhanced functions ideologically to rationalize differences permitted by such a division. That is, Harari suggests that if developments proceed as Vinge and Kurzweil predict, this vastly accelerated information-collecting and processing sphere will not constitute real knowledge for the enlightenment of the vast majority. Rather, it will be instrumentalist and reductionist in the extreme, facilitating the domination of human beings on a global scale, while rendering opposition impossible.

In an article in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Nuno R. B. Martins et al. explain just how such control could be implemented through B/CIs, which the authors claim will be feasible within the next 20 to 30 years:

Neuralnanorobotics may also enable a B/CI with controlled connectivity between neural activity and external data storage and processing, via the direct monitoring of the brain’s ~86 x 109 neurons and ~2 x 1014 synapses. . .

They would then wirelessly transmit up to ~6 x 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human–brain electrical information via auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm3) with the capacity to handle up to 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid data transfer to a cloud-based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction. A neuralnanorobotically enabled human B/CI might serve as a personalized conduit, allowing persons to obtain direct, instantaneous access to virtually any facet of cumulative human knowledge (emphasis mine).12

Such interfaces have already reached the commercialization stage with Elon Musk’s Neuralink,13 Kernel,14 and through DARPA,15 among others.

When neuralnanorobotic technologies that conduct information and algorithms that make decisions interface with the brain, the possibilities for eliminating particular kinds of experiences, behaviors, and thoughts becomes possible. Such control of the mind through implants was already prototyped by Jose Delgado as early as 1969.15 Now, two- way transmission of data between the brain and the cloud effectively means the possibility of reading the thoughts of subjects, interrupting such thoughts, and replacing them with other, machine-cloud-originating information. The desideratum to record, label, “informationalize,” rather than to understand, let alone critically engage or theorize experience will take exclusive priority for subjects, given the possibilities for controlling neuronal switching patterns. Given the instrumentalism of the Singularitarians— or, as Yuval Harari has called them, the “Dataists”— decisive, action-oriented algorithms will dominate these brain-cloud interfaces, precluding faculties for the critical evaluation of activity, and obliterating free will.17 Given enough data, algorithms will be better able to make decisions for us. Nevertheless, they will have been based on intelligence defined in a particular way and put to particular ends, placing considerable emphasis on the speed and volume of data processing and decision-making based on data construed as “knowledge.” Naturally, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind. Yet, unlike Huxley’s mind-numbing soma, brain-cloud interfaces will have an ideological appeal to the masses; they are touted as enhancements, as vast improvements over standard human intelligence.

Harari peels back the curtain masking transhumanism’s Wizard of Oz promises, suggesting that even before the singularity, robotics and machine intelligence will make the masses into a new “useless class.”18 Given the exorbitant cost of entry, only the elite will be able to afford actual enhancements, making them a new, superior species—notwithstanding the claim that Moore’s Law closes the technological breach by exponentially increasing the price-performance of computing and thus halving its cost per unit of measurement every two years or less. How the elite will maintain exclusive control over enhancements and yet subject the masses to control technologies is never addressed. But perhaps a kill switch could 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)enabled.

In a 2018 WEF statement, Harari spoke as the self-proclaimed prophet of a new transhumanist age, saying:

We are probably among the last generations of homo sapiens. Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us, than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. Because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. These will be the main products of the 21st century economy (emphasis mine).19

No longer capable of mounting a challenge to the elite as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and having no function, the feckless masses will have no recourse or purpose. Exploitation is one thing; irrelevance is quite another, says Harari. And thus, as Harari sees it, the remaining majority will be condemned to spend their time in the metaverse, or worse. If they are lucky, they will collect universal basic income (UBI) and will best occupy themselves by taking drugs and playing video games. Of course, Harari exempts himself from this fate.

As for the elite, according to Harari, their supposed superiority to the masses will soon become a matter of biotechnological fact, rather than merely 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 also become godlike and enjoy effective remote control over their subordinates. Further, via biotechnological means, they will acquire eternal life on Earth, while the majority, formerly consoled by the fact that at least everybody dies, will now lose the great equalizer. As the supernatural is outmoded, or sacrificed on the altar of transhumanism, the majority will inevitably forfeit their belief in a spiritual afterlife. The theistic religions that originated in the Middle East will disappear, to be replaced by new cyber-based religions originating in Silicon Valley. Spirituality, that is, will be nothing but the expression of reverence for newly created silicon gods, whether they be game characters, game designers, or the elites themselves.

Harari’s pronouncements may amount to intentional hyperbole to make a point, but his statements are remarkable for the cynicism and disdain for humanity they betray. They are revelatory of the unmitigated gall of believers in the transhuman future. Coupled with the neo-Malthusian impulses of the elite, centered around the UN and the WEF, a picture emerges of an elite whose objective is to reduce the population of “useless eaters,” while keeping the remainder in their thrall.

[This piece is an excerpt from The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.]

 

Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes. He is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College.

 

Connect with Mises Institute

Contact Michael Rectenwald

Cover image credit: fszalai



Medical Dictatorship: Their Gender War

Medical Dictatorship: Their Gender War

by Jon Rappoport, No More Fake News
June 27, 2022

 

I have a two-sentence introduction before we get to the guts of this story:

Whenever a typical “liberal” college educated parent hears a doctor or medical bureaucrat utter a pronouncement, the parent, like a doomed trained monkey, AUTOMATICALLY replies, “Well, this evidence certainly has some merit…”

God help the child who has such a parent.

Gateway Pundit has the story. Here are quotes; then I’ll have comments.

“Joe Biden’s transgender Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Rachel (Richard) Levine spoke at a DNC pride month event on Friday.”

“On Friday, Dr. Levine said sex reassignment surgery (castration) and puberty blockers (chemical castration) for KIDS is ‘lifesaving, medically necessary, age appropriate, and a critical tool’.”

“Levine recently said that there is no debate about ‘gender-affirming’ care for kids.”

“’There is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care,’ Levine said.”

“According to the American College of Pediatricians, no single long-term study demonstrates the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for transgender-believing youth.”

“Puberty blockers may cause depression and other emotional disturbances related to suicide. The package insert for Lupron, the number one prescribed puberty blocker in America, lists ‘emotional instability’ as a side effect and warns prescribers to ‘Monitor for development or worsening of psychiatric symptoms during treatment’.”

OK. The big takeaway from these statements is: we’re supposed to believe we’re talking about a MEDICAL condition and MEDICAL TREATMENT.

Once that bell is rung, all bets are off. “Well, the doctor says Jimmy has gender dysphoria, a medical/psychiatric condition, and his desire to transition to a girl needs treatment. The treatment allows him to make the transition.”

As with other issues, the word from on high is, the science is settled.

Forget the fact that the American College of Pediatricians disagrees. Ultimately, what is and isn’t science is decided at a political level.

Forget the fact that gender dysphoria has no defining physical diagnostic test. No blood test, no urine test, no hair test, no genetic assay, no brain scan. Its existence as a condition is backed by zero evidence.

Forget the fact that the treatments are toxic and destructive.

The medical/political colossus has spoken. Doubters are now referred to “the science.”

This is how medical dictatorship operates. You might recall that’s how it operated with a little thing called COVID.

Dr. Rachel Levine is trying out for the role of Anthony Fauci.

Civilians everywhere want to argue against children undergoing transition to another gender, but the authorities want to head that off at the pass by claiming “it’s all medical and we have the knowledge and you don’t know anything. Case closed.”

If parents huddle in the dark, afraid of a scornful look from a doctor or a medical bureaucrat, the war is over. It’s lost. The war against children will be scorched earth and scorched lives.

I can hear that college educated parent I referred to saying, “Well, to be reasonable, there is some merit to the argument that certain young children have a need to transition, and we have to discern these cases carefully and consider the medical evidence…”

This is what all losers say just before the enemy pours tons of gasoline on the fire and the city burns down.

 

Connect with Jon Rappoport

cover image modified from creative commons work of A1Cafel / Wikimedia Commons



Monkeyhumarobots…

Monkeyhumarobots…

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star
April 23, 2021

 

I know the title of today’s blog sounds far-fetched; what, exactly, is a “monkeyhumarobot”?  In a nutshell, its a chimerical creation conjured by mixing a monkey, a human, and a robot. If that sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it is now, unfortunately, the latest creation of scientism and materialism run amok, according to this article shared by V.T.:

Scientists Are Mixing Human Body Parts With Robots And Monkeys. We Don’t Want To See What’s Next

Mr. Joe Allen, author of this article, states the case:

It’s been a big month for sci-fi primates. On Apr. 8, Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink announced they created a cyborg monkey who can play MindPong using a brain chip. The following week, scientists at the Salk Institute in California revealed they successfully grew human-macaque embryos in test tubes. These hybrid babies were aborted at 20 days.

The ethical implications of such experiments are now debated with a resigned shrug. There’s a sense of inevitability to it all. Powerful humans will indulge in any behavior that’s both pleasurable and possible. What could be more pleasurable than playing God?

The practical question isn’t how to stop them, but how to survive in their technocratic age. Where do we draw such boundaries? Do we reflexively reject technology’s terms and conditions? Or, when it’s our turn to get chipped, do we take the plunge?

Ultimately, these are religious questions. Many traditional cultures view living beings as sacred. Each creature is endowed with a spark of consciousness and is therefore deserving of dignity, even those we kill and eat. From this standpoint, tinkering with the fundamental make-up of any living being is a form of blasphemy, especially in the case of humans.

Add to this mix one of Mr. Musk’s “neuralink chips”:

Musk’s wired-up primate is being celebrated as a major breakthrough in cyborg technology. The overall system is fairly simple. Neuralink scientists trained a nine-year-old macaque, Pager, to play Pong and other puzzles on a computer screen using a joystick. Every time the monkey made a correct move, a metal tube squirted banana smoothie into his mouth.

All the while, Pager’s brain was being scanned by two Neuralink chips jabbed into his skull. More than 2,000 wires fanned out into his gray matter, monitoring his motor cortex as he wiggled the joystick and sucked down the banana smoothie. Once the monkey’s neural activity had been correlated with his actions onscreen, the researchers unplugged the joystick.

The cursor kept moving. The monkey was playing a video game with nothing but his brain waves. Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like the cursor moved more smoothly when the Neuralink chip was being employed.

According to Musk’s declared ambitions, this breakthrough is just a stepping stone to inputting Neuralink chips into human skulls, thereby merging our cognition with artificial intelligence.

Mr. Allen also cautions about these developments, and I share his concerns:

Today, your kid needs braces to feel good about her smile. Tomorrow, she’ll need a Neuralink chip to keep up in school. Given the laws of supply-and-demand, the price of fresh fetal tissue could be the crypto bubble of tomorrow. Indeed, that trend appears to be well underway.

Again, the question for regular people isn’t how to stop this technocratic revolution from taking place. Barring some circuit-frying electromagnetic pulse, that ship’s already sailed. The question is how to stay human in this emerging world.

At what point are you just being stubborn? On the other hand, at what point have you sold your soul?

I strongly suspect, however, that what we’re watching is a rather different agenda than simply “bare materialism” and “scientism” run amok. Mr. Allen makes a very interesting observation in this regard:

On Apr. 15, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and his joint American-Chinese team at the Salk Institute announced the successful fertilization of human-macaque chimeras, a term derived from Greek mythology. In Homer’s “Iliad,” the chimera had a lion’s head, a serpent’s tail, and a goat’s body, and it breathed fire. (Boldface emphasis added)

In my book Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men I reviewed the strange case of German archaeologist Robert Koldewey (1855-1925), credited with the discovery and recovery of Babylon’s Ishtar gate, on which there was a relief of a strange creature called a sirrush, a bizarre chimerical creature with a serpent’s tail, with feline front paws, bird-like talons on the rear legs, and the head of what looks like both a lizard and a unicorn. The problem for Koldewey was that the sirrush appeared in consistent form throughout Babylonian art, whereas other chimerical creatures varied over time. Adding to his difficulty was that the chimerical whatever-it-was also appeared in contexts with other animals that really existed.  Koldewey was forced to the conclusion the strange creature might really have existed. World War One was raging at the time, so Koldewey risked publishing his findings and conclusions in 1918. No one really noticed. The strangeness of Koldewey’s sirrush is, to a certain extent though certainly not completely, mirrored by Homer’s chimera.

So what has all this to do with a potential “deeper agenda” behind the modern efforts? Don’t get me wrong here: for most scientists involved in this activity, I suspect the motivation for doing so is simple plain materialism, and the motivation to do so “simply because we can.” But I also strongly suspect that for a narrow few, there are occulted agendas. As I put it in the preface to my book Grid of the Gods, “Modern science is but a technique of the imagination to bring into reality the operations of the magical intellect and the mythologies of the ancients, with consistent and predictable regularity. This implies, therefore, that the magical intellect encountered so often in ancient texts, myths, and monuments is, in fact, the product of a decayed science, but a science nonetheless.”

The question is, if that be the case, why would that narrower group want to do so? Or to put that differently, what’s the motivation and the real agenda?

I have my thoughts on that score, but this is a case of “you tell me.”

See you on the flip side…

 

Connect with Joseph P. Farrell

cover image credit: azwer/pixabay

 



Microsoft Awarded Reanimation Patent

Microsoft Awarded Reanimation Patent

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star
January 25, 2021

 

The Orwellian march of technocracy continues, according to this story spotted and shared by W.G. And it’s in the “whopper doozie” category:

https://www.newswars.com/microsoft-granted-patent-to-reanimate-dead-people-as-3d-chatbots/

The technology envisioned is straight out of transhumanist Ray Kurzweil’s The Singuilarity:

Microsoft has been granted a patent for technology that would “reanimate” the dead by re-creating them via social media posts, videos and private messages that could even be downloaded into a 3D lifelike model of the deceased.

Not creepy at all.

“The tech giant has raised the possibility of creating an AI-based chatbot that would be built upon the profile of a person, which includes their “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages,” among other types of personal information,” reports IGN. “It’s understood that the chatbot would then be able to simulate human conversation through voice commands and/or text chats.”

The patent explains that the chatbot could be a historical figure, a celebrity, a friend or relative or even a copy of “the user creating/training the chat bot

While the technology is, as the article states, “creepy,” there’s something much creepier lurking in the nooks and crannies. Consider simply the “socio-epistemological” effects. If such technology, along with holograms, artificial intelligence, and robotics were to become widespread, the result is that one might never know if the person one sees on the news or hears on the radio, for example, is indeed the real person, and the remarks really representative of the person himself. We have already seen stories on the internet about a recent appearance of Pope Francis at the Vatican “balcony” having been a hologram. Whether or not the story was real or not is not in view here. The fact that the technology exists and that so many people were willing to believe that his appearance might have been a hologram is the point. Consider, for example, the following video:



So in a world of holograms, “re-animated” people on social media, robots, and so on, the individual is left in the state of “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” Reality and truth become subject to technological manipulation.

So here’s my high octane speculation: what will happen in such a world? Two things stand out among many many possibilities. The first is a bifurcation of society. Increasingly, in a situation of socio-epistemological breakdown, a certain segment of humanity (probably a small one) will opt for reality, truth, and normalcy, and this segment will manifest itself by local relationships, trust, and “analogue” technologies (such as books, or owning a stereo and CDs, television and DVDs, and so on).  In other words, such technologies as it possesses and relies upon will not easily be subject to external manipulation.  To a certain extent, people who know me well know of my disdain for ebooks, or downloading films online to watch. Conversely, I suspect the vast majority of people will prefer the “virtual” reality, so long as it is thrilling, entertaining, and so on. The second thing that I strongly suspect will happen is that the latter group, as it pulls away from the first, will reach an inflection point where it is no longer identifiably human, or “normal”, and by that I mean no longer able to show or feel genuine empathy, compassion, or concern. It may end up being even less human than the “reanimated” personalities that populate its virtual existence.  And its ability to know, reason, or deal with reality will be subject to an almost total epistemological collapse. “Body doubles” will so proliferate that ordinary society breaks down utterly.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve already made my decision as to which group I want to be in.

See you on the flip side…

 

cover image credit KELLEPICS, pixabay

 



I Can’t Believe It’s Not Human!

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Human!

by James Corbett, The Corbett Report
January 17, 2021

 



Available at The Corbett Report channels: Lbry, BitChute, YouTube.

From the 4th Annual Fake News Awards, a commercial touting Elon Musk’s latest venture: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Human!

WATCH THE FAKE NEWS AWARDS: https://www.corbettreport.com/fakenews4/