Mankind frozen out
TO BE A MACHINE: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers And The Futurists Solving The Modest Problem Of Death HHHH by Mark O’Connell Granta, £12.99
HOW do you feel about having your head lopped off when you die? Then frozen until, with luck, a cure is found for whatever killed you? With even more luck, science may have come up with a way to rebuild the rest of your body to go with your head or, if not, the contents of your brain might be downloaded into some sort of humanoid like RoboCop.
The other possibility of course is that we are thinking of the wrong film and the humanoid robot is Terminator, not RoboCop. When robots are clever enough to design themselves and think for themselves, they may decide that we humans, puny in both body and mind, are a waste of resources better used on silicone supermen.
Mark O’Connell explores these scenarios in his highly accessible guide to “transhumanism”. There are about 10,000 members of the frozen head brigade, suspended in tanks of liquid nitrogen, awaiting their resuscitation. For some of them, transhumanism offers the prospect of living for ever. Others are less worried by their own deaths than by the threat of the extinction of the human race at the hands of Terminators with no John Connor to save them.
At the heart of it all is the singularity, a term that has been given various definitions, all concerned with the moment (which seems to some to be all too close) when computers become cleverer than people. The neurons in our brains fire at a rate of 200 times a second while transistors are tens of millions of times as fast. Signals travel through our nervous system at 200mph while computers buzz along at close to the speed of light.
Computers can beat us at chess and have begun to write novels and musicals (not very good ones admittedly but give them time).
In this trip through the world of transhumanism, O’Connell introduces us to the people who think a machine takeover will happen and welcome it with open arms (if they haven’t paid to have their heads cut off and bodies thrown away).
With its offer of life after death, transhumanism has become a cyber-religion but whether its adherents are visionaries or loonies is left to the reader to decide. Their argument is simple: thanks to science in general and medicine in particular, our life expectancy is increasing at a rate of about two years every decade.
When the annual increase exceeds one year, we will have reached “longevity escape velocity” and can reasonably expect to live for ever.
But are we really as close as these people imagine? Computers may beat us at chess but they take no pleasure in doing so and do not even know they are playing chess. A true brain needs consciousness and we don’t understand how that functions at all. When we do, perhaps, the frozen heads may be defrosted.
We may be approaching the most crucial point in human history and O’Connell mixes profundity with entertainment in a readable style.
It should be mandatory reading for anyone thinking of having their head cut off and brain frozen.