“I am the guardian of the ice tombs, where rest the remains of those who have come to exchange their bodies for an artificial one. Here I too changed my body for a mechanical one and set out on a journey to other planets. But I began to miss my human body, I wanted to come and get it back. This is me as I was before… no artificial body can be more beautiful.” – taken from “Galaxy Express 999 – The Movie” directed by Rintarō – 1979.
The beautiful animated feature film “Galaxy Express 999 – The Movie” is set in a distant future where the wealthiest people can pay to give up their human nature to evolve into a mechanical artifact of technology capable of giving them power and immortality. In this distant era, the young Tetsuro will travel to reach a remote planet called Andromeda where he will have free access to a technology that will also allow him to obtain a mechanical body.
Tetsuro has already lived the darkest years of his life in poverty, suffering the humiliation of not having been able to protect his mother from the fury of the cruel Mechanical Duke, a man who by giving up his human body seems to have given up the humanity itself.
The figure of the guardian of the ice tombs and that of the Mechanical Duke are a warning not to overlook the possible consequences of the loss of a body: deprived of her own, the guardian will choose to remain forever next to her mortal remains from which she will no longer be able to separate ; while the Mechanical Duke, stripped of all empathy, will spend his time killing human beings, whom he considers inferior and not deserving of any compassion.
Raymond Kurzweil, computer scientist and AI expert, is one of the leading exponents of the transhumanist movement and his thinking is deeply influenced by the belief that artificial intelligences will soon reach technological singularity:
“Once we enter the Singularity we will cease to be helpless and primitive creatures, machines of flesh limited in thought and action by the body which constitutes our current substratum. The Singularity will allow us to overcome the limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our own destiny. Our mortality will be in our hands.” – Raymond Kurzweil
Kurzweil's transhumanism starts from the idea that the technologies implanted in man should not be seen as systems of manipulation and control, but as an opportunity to strengthen and improve the very structure of man. The human body represents a limit in evolution but this limit can finally be overcome through technology.
Numerous technical discoveries will soon be able to push man towards new stages in the evolution of the species, immortality itself can be achieved through the fusion of human and machine.
But are we sure that man can only benefit from this union?
In his essay "Life 3.0", Max Tegmark makes an interesting excursus on the concept of life by placing technology in a precise phase of its evolution, i.e. immediately after biological evolution (which he calls life 1.0) and cultural evolution ( which he calls life 2.0).
Technological evolution (that is, life 3.0) will allow man to reprogram both biological and cultural evolution, giving both a sudden acceleration exactly as hypothesized by transhumanists.
“Life 1.0 is unable to re-engineer either its hardware or its software. Life 2.0 is human and biological and can re-engineer much of its software (across culture), but not its hardware. Life 3.0, which does not yet exist on Earth even though it is almost there, is non-human and post-biological or technological and is capable of drastically re-engineering not only its software but also its hardware.” – Max Tegmark
The fact that Max Tegmark associates the concept of "hardware" with biological evolution and the concept of "software" of living species with cultural evolution, demonstrates how much his theories are conditioned by the idea that the animal world is comparable to the dualism of digital machines of the Von Neumann model, i.e. composed of a central processing unit (the mind) and hardware for interacting with the world (the body).
Primordial organisms such as bacteria, devoid of any organ even remotely comparable to a central nervous system, have for thousands of years the ability to interact with the surrounding world by identifying and pursuing the sugars they are greedy for, thanks to a body dynamic that operates in the total absence of a centralized information processing system. In a certain way, they represent a form of chemical-mechanical life as unaware as it is efficient.
Theo Jansen's extraordinary machines represent an interesting research study on life through mechanics. His "Strandbeesten" (or beach animals) are creatures able to move independently, pushed by the force of the wind.
These creatures "live" on the beaches and, to avoid ending up in the water, some of them have a sensor made with ropes and bottles that lets them know when they are too close to the sea and it is therefore appropriate to change direction.
“Since 1990 I have been involved in creating new forms of life. Instead of pollen and seeds, I used yellow plastic tubes as the raw material of this new nature. I make skeletons that can walk with the wind so they don't need to eat. Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly capable of surviving the elements such as storms and water, my goal is to release these animals in herds onto beaches so they can live out their lives." – Theo Jansen
Man-made and wind-powered, are Jansen's machines true representations of life or not? If we limit ourselves to observing these species from a holistic perspective, we can imagine that their existence somehow follows that of primordial creatures. And if anyone were to notice the absence of actions aimed at self-preservation that unites all living species, I would like to point out that Theo Jansen is constantly working on his creatures, creating ever more evolved species in their ability to move and survive.
If what nature has bestowed on man has taken thousands of years to achieve, are we really convinced that we can compress the next steps of our evolution into a few decades guided by a desire for self-determination which, deep down, seems like a delusion of omnipotence?
If transhumanism professes the overcoming of biological limits and the control of the evolution of our species, replacing the wise biological processes of natural selection with technology, it does so by proposing what appears to be only a "version control" of the body and its parts neglecting the role of humanity in the natural context.
Transhumanism neglects the fact that evolution is a complex system that does not pertain only to man, but to the entire ecosystem that has cradled him for hundreds of thousands of years.
If we observe the loss of ecosystem balance, it is easy to understand that a new “trans-human” stage based on the fusion of man with technology is not the answer to nature's problems; on the contrary, it itself would not be able to exist in the absence of the natural and energy resources that are indispensable to it.
Transhumanism seems to be an alternative to solving the problems that afflict the world, the self-centered and individualistic flight forward of the individual who, being equipped with the tools to do so, freely chooses to neglect the problems for which technology itself is responsible, in order to evolve himself into a new form of existence.
It does not matter from which perspective one wishes to observe the question: even from a materialistic point of view, nature can be considered an extremely advanced technological platform and man a direct emanation of its enormous and still indecipherable complexity. And labeling death as a limit of the human condition represents the will not to want to look at evolution from the right perspective.
We must accept that we are part of an ecosystem capable of restoring the well-being that we all need within the limits of our existence.
Article of Gianfranco Fedele
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