It's the idea that humans can enhance our bodies with the use of technology, all in a bid to allow us to break free from our biological reality.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the roots of transhumanism, the quest for radical life extension, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the enhancement of human abilities.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Transhumanism.
[00:00:27] It’s the idea that humans can enhance our bodies with the use of technology, turning us from flesh and blood into flesh, blood and, well, anything from microchips to semiconductors, silicone to graphene, all in a bid to allow us to break free from our biological reality.
[00:00:46] OK then, Transhumanism and The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:00:54] When I was growing up, I had a great-uncle called Douglas, or Uncle Doug as we called him.
[00:01:01] He lived on a farm in the north of Scotland, and every time my cousins and I went to visit him, which we would do every summer, he had a special trick for us.
[00:01:13] He would let us kick one of his legs, and depending on which leg we kicked, he would either go “ow”, or there would be a hollow thud.
[00:01:23] See, one of his legs was plastic, it was amputated below the knee, he had a prosthetic leg.
[00:01:31] We knew that he had fought in the Second World War, so in our little boy's imagination, this was some kind of glorious battle wound.
[00:01:40] In fact, it was because he was a heavy smoker and this had caused a blood clot in his leg, but that’s beside the point.
[00:01:49] Now, this game had to stop after we got a bit older and one summer someone kicked the “real” leg a little bit too hard, but it was fun while it lasted.
[00:02:02] And clearly for Uncle Doug, this prosthetic leg was life changing.
[00:02:08] His life was extended, because the leg and the blood clot were removed, and the fact that he had a fake leg meant that he was able to continue to walk around without major difficulty.
[00:02:22] And Doug had an older brother too, Uncle Jock, who moved to the United States as a young man.
[00:02:29] Uncle Jock almost lived until his 100th birthday, and by the end of his life he had had so many different transplants and surgeries that his relatives would joke that he was 10% metal and a living example of the wonders of California hospitals.
[00:02:47] Now, the use of medical technology to resolve problems and prolong life, like in the case of these brothers, is something that is almost universally accepted, approved of and practised around the world.
[00:03:02] But what happens when people try to use technology not just to solve routine problems that arise, but to enhance and elevate the human condition, to blur the lines between human and superhuman?
[00:03:20] This is the subject of today’s episode, the philosophical, intellectual and scientific movement called Transhumanism.
[00:03:30] The movement can be traced back to the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, who first wrote about the concept in 1957.
[00:03:40] Now, Huxley had a fascinating life and distinguished career, but it was towards the end of both his career and his life that he proposed this revolutionary idea in an essay titled “New Bottles for New Wine”.
[00:03:58] I’ll actually read you out the last two paragraphs from the essay, as it’s here that he introduces the subject:
[00:04:06] “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 realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.
[00:04:35] “I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”
[00:04:55] End quote.
[00:04:57] Peking Man, if you were not aware, was the remains of a homo erectus discovered in a cave in China. And homo erectus was an ancestor to homo sapiens, you and me.
[00:05:11] In other words, mankind has a duty to evolve, to transcend human and biological limitations, and move into a different state.
[00:05:24] It might sound like something out of a science fiction novel, and if you were wondering whether Julian Huxley was any relation of the science fiction writer Aldous Huxley, yes he was his older brother.
[00:05:39] But Julian Huxley was deadly serious with this proposition; it was no joke.
[00:05:46] In this essay, however, it was merely a theory, a call to arms, and it wouldn’t be until several decades later that there was the first serious work towards achieving what Huxley had called for.
[00:06:01] But let’s step back for a moment and consider what transhumanism really means in practice, as it is understood today.
[00:06:10] At its core, transhumanism is about enhancing the human condition through technology.
[00:06:18] This could be anything from extending our lifespans and improving our physical abilities to enhancing our cognitive capacities.
[00:06:26] It's about pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.
[00:06:31] Now, you might be thinking, 'Hang on a minute, haven’t we always been doing this? Glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers, Uncle Doug’s prosthetic leg, and even the vaccines we take, aren’t these all ways of extending our lifespans and enhancing our human abilities?'
[00:06:48] Well, yes, you’re right, of course.
[00:06:51] What sets transhumanism apart, though, is the scale and the intention behind these enhancements. It’s not just about fixing something that’s broken or missing; it’s about pushing our bodies and minds beyond their natural limits.
[00:07:07] One of the most talked-about aspects of transhumanism is the use of technology to extend human life, potentially indefinitely.
[00:07:17] This idea, which is often referred to as radical life extension, challenges our very understanding of life and death.
[00:07:27] Some transhumanists believe that through a combination of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, possibly, AI, we could one day cure ageing like we would any disease.
[00:07:40] So, if all diseases are curable, and the ageing process is slowed, stopped, or even reversed, then as long as you don’t get hit by a bus, theoretically at least, you can live forever.
[00:07:55] But, as to the question of immortality, of beating death, even though humans are living for longer than ever before, we are still a long way off even "radical" life extension.
[00:08:07] One area of transhumanism that is closer to being achieved, though, and by some definitions is already here, is related to the enhancement of cognitive abilities, being able to access knowledge and information that you would never be able to process only with your biological, “birth” brain.
[00:08:29] Imagine being able to download skills directly into your brain, Matrix-style, or connecting your brain to a computer interface to access the internet just by thinking.
[00:08:41] These ideas might sound far-fetched, but there have been some important discoveries in this field, in the field of neurotechnology.
[00:08:52] You might have heard about an Elon Musk backed company called Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, essentially linking your brain directly up to a computer.
[00:09:06] And it works, or at least it is showing promising signs.
[00:09:12] There’s an amazing video from 2021 of a monkey controlling a video game using only his brain, showing that this technology has succeeded in recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain, essentially downloading thoughts and uploading them to a computer.
[00:09:35] Now, it is still very early days, but imagine a world where your brain had access to the internet, where instead of going to a computer and typing or saying what you wanted, you simply thought it and the information was immediately available in your brain.
[00:09:56] Again, this might sound creepy and your immediate reaction might be “ that sounds like a step too far”, but there are many cases in which this kind of cognitive enhancement is more in the category of adding a prosthetic leg to someone who lost theirs in a car accident than connecting the internet to a normal healthy human’s brain.
[00:10:20] Imagine someone suffering from motor neurone disease, whose body had deteriorated to such an extent that they were unable to communicate with normal speech.
[00:10:31] A real-world example would be Stephen Hawking, who lost all physical power and had to communicate by moving his eyes.
[00:10:41] But clearly, on a cognitive level, he was functioning perfectly, and made important scientific discoveries and wrote several influential books without the use of his body.
[00:10:54] Now imagine for a moment that the technology existed that connected his brain to a computer, so he was able to use a computer and communicate simply by thinking, rather than the laborious process of having to move his eye to look at letters and spell out a word.
[00:11:13] Or imagine that you could restore the memory of someone who had lost it after an accident, or during dementia.
[00:11:21] Ethically, it would be hard to argue that these were bad things, but they raise interesting questions about where we draw the line between restoring human qualities and abilities to someone who had lost them and enhancing the human condition for perfectly functioning humans.
[00:11:43] In other words, if we consider it not only morally and ethically acceptable, but also a medical obligation, to help treat someone who is sick, can we use the same technology to enhance someone’s physical condition if they are perfectly healthy?
[00:12:01] And this leads us on to some important ethical questions about what a world of “transhumans” might look like.
[00:12:10] It would, almost by definition, increase inequality in a way that humanity has never really had to contemplate before.
[00:12:19] Yes, at the moment there is great wealth inequality, inequality between rich and poor.
[00:12:27] And, clearly, someone living on a few dollars a day in a developing country does not have access to the same medical treatments as a chief executive in New York or Paris or London, so life expectancy is generally correlated with wealth; people in higher income countries live longer and healthier lives than people in lower income countries.
[00:12:51] But a rich person’s body is not so drastically different from a poor person’s body.
[00:12:58] Imagine a world where you could pay to “enhance” your body to such an extent that you became a superhuman, essentially creating two different classes of humanity.
[00:13:13] Of course, these kinds of treatments are likely to be very expensive, at least at the start, and they would further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, creating a world where the wealthy can afford to become 'superhuman' while everyone else is left behind.
[00:13:32] There are also concerns about identity – what does it mean to be human if we can radically alter our bodies and minds? If your mind is no longer only yours, but it’s augmented by all sorts of algorithms and sources of data, where do you draw the line between the human and the robot?
[00:13:56] Now, to take the other side of the argument for a minute, especially on the question of price and inequality, of course it would be expensive at the start and of course this could initially lead to the rich being able to afford these treatments that poorer people can not. But, some might say, isn’t this already the case, just to a slightly lesser degree? Isn’t this just a natural progression from being able to pay for better healthcare and to live longer?
[00:14:27] What’s more, the price of such technology always decreases over time, so it is these rich people that finance the research and development which then allows the technology to be mass produced and affordable for the less wealthy.
[00:14:44] Now, given the increased interest in transhumanism in the past 50 years or so, and the colossal shift that it would bring to humanity and life on Earth, it has provided inspiration for all manner of science fiction series.
[00:15:00] A particularly good TV series, in my opinion at least, is the British series Black Mirror.
[00:15:09] Each episode in the series is a standalone story, set in a different world. And these worlds usually have some dystopian technological element. In one, people rate each other after every social interaction using eye implants. In another, people have a chip behind their ear with which they can replay their memories. And in another, relationships are formed by an algorithm matching people with other people for a predetermined period of time.
[00:15:45] It's a great series, and one I’d definitely recommend you checking out. The first episodes came out in 2011, to which many critics sort of laughed and said “haha, that will never happen”, but just a decade later, it is looking much closer to reality.
[00:16:05] And on the subject of transhumanism in reality, transhumanism today, I want to finish by briefly telling you about a man who is trying his utmost to push the boundaries of the human body.
[00:16:20] His name is Bryan Johnson, and a recent Vice article about him called him “The Most Measured Man in Human History”.
[00:16:31] He made his money creating a payments company called Braintree, which was later sold to PayPal for $800 million dollars.
[00:16:40] He was born in 1977, so he is still quite young, but over the past few years he has made it his mission to do everything he possibly can to enhance his body, to stop the ageing process, and, just perhaps, live forever.
[00:17:01] This includes measuring everything on a daily basis, eating exactly 1,977 calories a day, the food he eats determined by what the measurements dictate.
[00:17:16] In other words, instead of thinking, oh, I’ll have a sandwich or pizza or even salad for lunch today, Bryan Johnson’s diet and meal plan is dictated by an algorithm that analyses the results of his body measurements and returns the exact food that he should consume.
[00:17:37] To quote Johnson, “ [the programme] runs my body for me, and it does a better job than I can”.
[00:17:45] The logic behind this is that we humans are not particularly good managers of our body, we’re not great custodians of our own bodies. We eat fatty foods, we drink fizzy drinks or alcohol, we smoke, we don’t exercise, we don’t get enough sleep.
[00:18:04] Johnson’s view is that he completely removes himself from the decision-making process about how to manage his body, instead following the instructions dictated by a computer programme.
[00:18:18] It might not sound like a particularly enjoyable life to you or me, but it does sound like it’s working. By all measurements, Johnson says that he is in perfect physical condition. Not only has he slowed the ageing process, but according to his core measurements, he is a few years younger than a person should be at his age.
[00:18:44] His objective is to stop ageing completely, to live forever.
[00:18:51] If you’re wondering how much this all of this costs, he says that he spends around $2 million a year for all of this.
[00:18:59] Now, you might hear this and think “this all sounds miserable - count me out if that’s what I need to do to live forever”.
[00:19:06] And reading the comments on his posts and YouTube videos, this does seem to be a common reaction when someone learns about him and the healthcare regime that he is on.
[00:19:19] But, to take Johnson’s side for a minute, is this just our natural reaction because we don’t know if what he is doing will work?
[00:19:28] If he drops dead tomorrow, or even at the age of 85, no doubt his critics will write that it was all for nothing, that he sacrificed his humanity for nothing.
[00:19:41] But if he lives to 100, 150, or is still alive in 250 years time, and is living proof that anyone could do this if they change their behaviour, how would that change our opinions?
[00:19:58] Now, Bryan Johnson is just one example of someone who is living and breathing transhumanism, and is prepared to put his money and his body on the line in the quest for superhumanity.
[00:20:11] But he gets us asking important questions about the ethics of transhumanism, the practicalities of what is involved, and how far we are prepared to go to conquer our physical beings.
[00:20:25] If you knew that you could take certain actions to fundamentally change your body and the nature of your life, and if cost was no object, would you take them?
[00:20:38] For all human existence, humans have been dealt the same pack of cards; we have experienced joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, strength and weakness, life and death, and we've been constrained by our human bodies.
[00:20:57] If, at some point in the future, this constraint no longer exists, one cannot but ask “what is left of humanity?”
[00:21:09] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Transhumanism & The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:21:16] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:23] If you could click your fingers and live forever, would you do it?
[00:21:26] And would you live a life like Bryan Johnson’s if you knew that you could live to 500 years old?
[00:21:34] And by the way, if you liked this episode, I think you’ll like the previous one which was on cryonics, the process of freezing people in order to bring them back from the dead when the technology exists.
[00:21:46] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:51] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Transhumanism.
[00:00:27] It’s the idea that humans can enhance our bodies with the use of technology, turning us from flesh and blood into flesh, blood and, well, anything from microchips to semiconductors, silicone to graphene, all in a bid to allow us to break free from our biological reality.
[00:00:46] OK then, Transhumanism and The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:00:54] When I was growing up, I had a great-uncle called Douglas, or Uncle Doug as we called him.
[00:01:01] He lived on a farm in the north of Scotland, and every time my cousins and I went to visit him, which we would do every summer, he had a special trick for us.
[00:01:13] He would let us kick one of his legs, and depending on which leg we kicked, he would either go “ow”, or there would be a hollow thud.
[00:01:23] See, one of his legs was plastic, it was amputated below the knee, he had a prosthetic leg.
[00:01:31] We knew that he had fought in the Second World War, so in our little boy's imagination, this was some kind of glorious battle wound.
[00:01:40] In fact, it was because he was a heavy smoker and this had caused a blood clot in his leg, but that’s beside the point.
[00:01:49] Now, this game had to stop after we got a bit older and one summer someone kicked the “real” leg a little bit too hard, but it was fun while it lasted.
[00:02:02] And clearly for Uncle Doug, this prosthetic leg was life changing.
[00:02:08] His life was extended, because the leg and the blood clot were removed, and the fact that he had a fake leg meant that he was able to continue to walk around without major difficulty.
[00:02:22] And Doug had an older brother too, Uncle Jock, who moved to the United States as a young man.
[00:02:29] Uncle Jock almost lived until his 100th birthday, and by the end of his life he had had so many different transplants and surgeries that his relatives would joke that he was 10% metal and a living example of the wonders of California hospitals.
[00:02:47] Now, the use of medical technology to resolve problems and prolong life, like in the case of these brothers, is something that is almost universally accepted, approved of and practised around the world.
[00:03:02] But what happens when people try to use technology not just to solve routine problems that arise, but to enhance and elevate the human condition, to blur the lines between human and superhuman?
[00:03:20] This is the subject of today’s episode, the philosophical, intellectual and scientific movement called Transhumanism.
[00:03:30] The movement can be traced back to the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, who first wrote about the concept in 1957.
[00:03:40] Now, Huxley had a fascinating life and distinguished career, but it was towards the end of both his career and his life that he proposed this revolutionary idea in an essay titled “New Bottles for New Wine”.
[00:03:58] I’ll actually read you out the last two paragraphs from the essay, as it’s here that he introduces the subject:
[00:04:06] “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 realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.
[00:04:35] “I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”
[00:04:55] End quote.
[00:04:57] Peking Man, if you were not aware, was the remains of a homo erectus discovered in a cave in China. And homo erectus was an ancestor to homo sapiens, you and me.
[00:05:11] In other words, mankind has a duty to evolve, to transcend human and biological limitations, and move into a different state.
[00:05:24] It might sound like something out of a science fiction novel, and if you were wondering whether Julian Huxley was any relation of the science fiction writer Aldous Huxley, yes he was his older brother.
[00:05:39] But Julian Huxley was deadly serious with this proposition; it was no joke.
[00:05:46] In this essay, however, it was merely a theory, a call to arms, and it wouldn’t be until several decades later that there was the first serious work towards achieving what Huxley had called for.
[00:06:01] But let’s step back for a moment and consider what transhumanism really means in practice, as it is understood today.
[00:06:10] At its core, transhumanism is about enhancing the human condition through technology.
[00:06:18] This could be anything from extending our lifespans and improving our physical abilities to enhancing our cognitive capacities.
[00:06:26] It's about pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.
[00:06:31] Now, you might be thinking, 'Hang on a minute, haven’t we always been doing this? Glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers, Uncle Doug’s prosthetic leg, and even the vaccines we take, aren’t these all ways of extending our lifespans and enhancing our human abilities?'
[00:06:48] Well, yes, you’re right, of course.
[00:06:51] What sets transhumanism apart, though, is the scale and the intention behind these enhancements. It’s not just about fixing something that’s broken or missing; it’s about pushing our bodies and minds beyond their natural limits.
[00:07:07] One of the most talked-about aspects of transhumanism is the use of technology to extend human life, potentially indefinitely.
[00:07:17] This idea, which is often referred to as radical life extension, challenges our very understanding of life and death.
[00:07:27] Some transhumanists believe that through a combination of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, possibly, AI, we could one day cure ageing like we would any disease.
[00:07:40] So, if all diseases are curable, and the ageing process is slowed, stopped, or even reversed, then as long as you don’t get hit by a bus, theoretically at least, you can live forever.
[00:07:55] But, as to the question of immortality, of beating death, even though humans are living for longer than ever before, we are still a long way off even "radical" life extension.
[00:08:07] One area of transhumanism that is closer to being achieved, though, and by some definitions is already here, is related to the enhancement of cognitive abilities, being able to access knowledge and information that you would never be able to process only with your biological, “birth” brain.
[00:08:29] Imagine being able to download skills directly into your brain, Matrix-style, or connecting your brain to a computer interface to access the internet just by thinking.
[00:08:41] These ideas might sound far-fetched, but there have been some important discoveries in this field, in the field of neurotechnology.
[00:08:52] You might have heard about an Elon Musk backed company called Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, essentially linking your brain directly up to a computer.
[00:09:06] And it works, or at least it is showing promising signs.
[00:09:12] There’s an amazing video from 2021 of a monkey controlling a video game using only his brain, showing that this technology has succeeded in recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain, essentially downloading thoughts and uploading them to a computer.
[00:09:35] Now, it is still very early days, but imagine a world where your brain had access to the internet, where instead of going to a computer and typing or saying what you wanted, you simply thought it and the information was immediately available in your brain.
[00:09:56] Again, this might sound creepy and your immediate reaction might be “ that sounds like a step too far”, but there are many cases in which this kind of cognitive enhancement is more in the category of adding a prosthetic leg to someone who lost theirs in a car accident than connecting the internet to a normal healthy human’s brain.
[00:10:20] Imagine someone suffering from motor neurone disease, whose body had deteriorated to such an extent that they were unable to communicate with normal speech.
[00:10:31] A real-world example would be Stephen Hawking, who lost all physical power and had to communicate by moving his eyes.
[00:10:41] But clearly, on a cognitive level, he was functioning perfectly, and made important scientific discoveries and wrote several influential books without the use of his body.
[00:10:54] Now imagine for a moment that the technology existed that connected his brain to a computer, so he was able to use a computer and communicate simply by thinking, rather than the laborious process of having to move his eye to look at letters and spell out a word.
[00:11:13] Or imagine that you could restore the memory of someone who had lost it after an accident, or during dementia.
[00:11:21] Ethically, it would be hard to argue that these were bad things, but they raise interesting questions about where we draw the line between restoring human qualities and abilities to someone who had lost them and enhancing the human condition for perfectly functioning humans.
[00:11:43] In other words, if we consider it not only morally and ethically acceptable, but also a medical obligation, to help treat someone who is sick, can we use the same technology to enhance someone’s physical condition if they are perfectly healthy?
[00:12:01] And this leads us on to some important ethical questions about what a world of “transhumans” might look like.
[00:12:10] It would, almost by definition, increase inequality in a way that humanity has never really had to contemplate before.
[00:12:19] Yes, at the moment there is great wealth inequality, inequality between rich and poor.
[00:12:27] And, clearly, someone living on a few dollars a day in a developing country does not have access to the same medical treatments as a chief executive in New York or Paris or London, so life expectancy is generally correlated with wealth; people in higher income countries live longer and healthier lives than people in lower income countries.
[00:12:51] But a rich person’s body is not so drastically different from a poor person’s body.
[00:12:58] Imagine a world where you could pay to “enhance” your body to such an extent that you became a superhuman, essentially creating two different classes of humanity.
[00:13:13] Of course, these kinds of treatments are likely to be very expensive, at least at the start, and they would further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, creating a world where the wealthy can afford to become 'superhuman' while everyone else is left behind.
[00:13:32] There are also concerns about identity – what does it mean to be human if we can radically alter our bodies and minds? If your mind is no longer only yours, but it’s augmented by all sorts of algorithms and sources of data, where do you draw the line between the human and the robot?
[00:13:56] Now, to take the other side of the argument for a minute, especially on the question of price and inequality, of course it would be expensive at the start and of course this could initially lead to the rich being able to afford these treatments that poorer people can not. But, some might say, isn’t this already the case, just to a slightly lesser degree? Isn’t this just a natural progression from being able to pay for better healthcare and to live longer?
[00:14:27] What’s more, the price of such technology always decreases over time, so it is these rich people that finance the research and development which then allows the technology to be mass produced and affordable for the less wealthy.
[00:14:44] Now, given the increased interest in transhumanism in the past 50 years or so, and the colossal shift that it would bring to humanity and life on Earth, it has provided inspiration for all manner of science fiction series.
[00:15:00] A particularly good TV series, in my opinion at least, is the British series Black Mirror.
[00:15:09] Each episode in the series is a standalone story, set in a different world. And these worlds usually have some dystopian technological element. In one, people rate each other after every social interaction using eye implants. In another, people have a chip behind their ear with which they can replay their memories. And in another, relationships are formed by an algorithm matching people with other people for a predetermined period of time.
[00:15:45] It's a great series, and one I’d definitely recommend you checking out. The first episodes came out in 2011, to which many critics sort of laughed and said “haha, that will never happen”, but just a decade later, it is looking much closer to reality.
[00:16:05] And on the subject of transhumanism in reality, transhumanism today, I want to finish by briefly telling you about a man who is trying his utmost to push the boundaries of the human body.
[00:16:20] His name is Bryan Johnson, and a recent Vice article about him called him “The Most Measured Man in Human History”.
[00:16:31] He made his money creating a payments company called Braintree, which was later sold to PayPal for $800 million dollars.
[00:16:40] He was born in 1977, so he is still quite young, but over the past few years he has made it his mission to do everything he possibly can to enhance his body, to stop the ageing process, and, just perhaps, live forever.
[00:17:01] This includes measuring everything on a daily basis, eating exactly 1,977 calories a day, the food he eats determined by what the measurements dictate.
[00:17:16] In other words, instead of thinking, oh, I’ll have a sandwich or pizza or even salad for lunch today, Bryan Johnson’s diet and meal plan is dictated by an algorithm that analyses the results of his body measurements and returns the exact food that he should consume.
[00:17:37] To quote Johnson, “ [the programme] runs my body for me, and it does a better job than I can”.
[00:17:45] The logic behind this is that we humans are not particularly good managers of our body, we’re not great custodians of our own bodies. We eat fatty foods, we drink fizzy drinks or alcohol, we smoke, we don’t exercise, we don’t get enough sleep.
[00:18:04] Johnson’s view is that he completely removes himself from the decision-making process about how to manage his body, instead following the instructions dictated by a computer programme.
[00:18:18] It might not sound like a particularly enjoyable life to you or me, but it does sound like it’s working. By all measurements, Johnson says that he is in perfect physical condition. Not only has he slowed the ageing process, but according to his core measurements, he is a few years younger than a person should be at his age.
[00:18:44] His objective is to stop ageing completely, to live forever.
[00:18:51] If you’re wondering how much this all of this costs, he says that he spends around $2 million a year for all of this.
[00:18:59] Now, you might hear this and think “this all sounds miserable - count me out if that’s what I need to do to live forever”.
[00:19:06] And reading the comments on his posts and YouTube videos, this does seem to be a common reaction when someone learns about him and the healthcare regime that he is on.
[00:19:19] But, to take Johnson’s side for a minute, is this just our natural reaction because we don’t know if what he is doing will work?
[00:19:28] If he drops dead tomorrow, or even at the age of 85, no doubt his critics will write that it was all for nothing, that he sacrificed his humanity for nothing.
[00:19:41] But if he lives to 100, 150, or is still alive in 250 years time, and is living proof that anyone could do this if they change their behaviour, how would that change our opinions?
[00:19:58] Now, Bryan Johnson is just one example of someone who is living and breathing transhumanism, and is prepared to put his money and his body on the line in the quest for superhumanity.
[00:20:11] But he gets us asking important questions about the ethics of transhumanism, the practicalities of what is involved, and how far we are prepared to go to conquer our physical beings.
[00:20:25] If you knew that you could take certain actions to fundamentally change your body and the nature of your life, and if cost was no object, would you take them?
[00:20:38] For all human existence, humans have been dealt the same pack of cards; we have experienced joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, strength and weakness, life and death, and we've been constrained by our human bodies.
[00:20:57] If, at some point in the future, this constraint no longer exists, one cannot but ask “what is left of humanity?”
[00:21:09] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Transhumanism & The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:21:16] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:23] If you could click your fingers and live forever, would you do it?
[00:21:26] And would you live a life like Bryan Johnson’s if you knew that you could live to 500 years old?
[00:21:34] And by the way, if you liked this episode, I think you’ll like the previous one which was on cryonics, the process of freezing people in order to bring them back from the dead when the technology exists.
[00:21:46] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:51] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something called Transhumanism.
[00:00:27] It’s the idea that humans can enhance our bodies with the use of technology, turning us from flesh and blood into flesh, blood and, well, anything from microchips to semiconductors, silicone to graphene, all in a bid to allow us to break free from our biological reality.
[00:00:46] OK then, Transhumanism and The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:00:54] When I was growing up, I had a great-uncle called Douglas, or Uncle Doug as we called him.
[00:01:01] He lived on a farm in the north of Scotland, and every time my cousins and I went to visit him, which we would do every summer, he had a special trick for us.
[00:01:13] He would let us kick one of his legs, and depending on which leg we kicked, he would either go “ow”, or there would be a hollow thud.
[00:01:23] See, one of his legs was plastic, it was amputated below the knee, he had a prosthetic leg.
[00:01:31] We knew that he had fought in the Second World War, so in our little boy's imagination, this was some kind of glorious battle wound.
[00:01:40] In fact, it was because he was a heavy smoker and this had caused a blood clot in his leg, but that’s beside the point.
[00:01:49] Now, this game had to stop after we got a bit older and one summer someone kicked the “real” leg a little bit too hard, but it was fun while it lasted.
[00:02:02] And clearly for Uncle Doug, this prosthetic leg was life changing.
[00:02:08] His life was extended, because the leg and the blood clot were removed, and the fact that he had a fake leg meant that he was able to continue to walk around without major difficulty.
[00:02:22] And Doug had an older brother too, Uncle Jock, who moved to the United States as a young man.
[00:02:29] Uncle Jock almost lived until his 100th birthday, and by the end of his life he had had so many different transplants and surgeries that his relatives would joke that he was 10% metal and a living example of the wonders of California hospitals.
[00:02:47] Now, the use of medical technology to resolve problems and prolong life, like in the case of these brothers, is something that is almost universally accepted, approved of and practised around the world.
[00:03:02] But what happens when people try to use technology not just to solve routine problems that arise, but to enhance and elevate the human condition, to blur the lines between human and superhuman?
[00:03:20] This is the subject of today’s episode, the philosophical, intellectual and scientific movement called Transhumanism.
[00:03:30] The movement can be traced back to the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley, who first wrote about the concept in 1957.
[00:03:40] Now, Huxley had a fascinating life and distinguished career, but it was towards the end of both his career and his life that he proposed this revolutionary idea in an essay titled “New Bottles for New Wine”.
[00:03:58] I’ll actually read you out the last two paragraphs from the essay, as it’s here that he introduces the subject:
[00:04:06] “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 realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.
[00:04:35] “I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”
[00:04:55] End quote.
[00:04:57] Peking Man, if you were not aware, was the remains of a homo erectus discovered in a cave in China. And homo erectus was an ancestor to homo sapiens, you and me.
[00:05:11] In other words, mankind has a duty to evolve, to transcend human and biological limitations, and move into a different state.
[00:05:24] It might sound like something out of a science fiction novel, and if you were wondering whether Julian Huxley was any relation of the science fiction writer Aldous Huxley, yes he was his older brother.
[00:05:39] But Julian Huxley was deadly serious with this proposition; it was no joke.
[00:05:46] In this essay, however, it was merely a theory, a call to arms, and it wouldn’t be until several decades later that there was the first serious work towards achieving what Huxley had called for.
[00:06:01] But let’s step back for a moment and consider what transhumanism really means in practice, as it is understood today.
[00:06:10] At its core, transhumanism is about enhancing the human condition through technology.
[00:06:18] This could be anything from extending our lifespans and improving our physical abilities to enhancing our cognitive capacities.
[00:06:26] It's about pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human.
[00:06:31] Now, you might be thinking, 'Hang on a minute, haven’t we always been doing this? Glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers, Uncle Doug’s prosthetic leg, and even the vaccines we take, aren’t these all ways of extending our lifespans and enhancing our human abilities?'
[00:06:48] Well, yes, you’re right, of course.
[00:06:51] What sets transhumanism apart, though, is the scale and the intention behind these enhancements. It’s not just about fixing something that’s broken or missing; it’s about pushing our bodies and minds beyond their natural limits.
[00:07:07] One of the most talked-about aspects of transhumanism is the use of technology to extend human life, potentially indefinitely.
[00:07:17] This idea, which is often referred to as radical life extension, challenges our very understanding of life and death.
[00:07:27] Some transhumanists believe that through a combination of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, possibly, AI, we could one day cure ageing like we would any disease.
[00:07:40] So, if all diseases are curable, and the ageing process is slowed, stopped, or even reversed, then as long as you don’t get hit by a bus, theoretically at least, you can live forever.
[00:07:55] But, as to the question of immortality, of beating death, even though humans are living for longer than ever before, we are still a long way off even "radical" life extension.
[00:08:07] One area of transhumanism that is closer to being achieved, though, and by some definitions is already here, is related to the enhancement of cognitive abilities, being able to access knowledge and information that you would never be able to process only with your biological, “birth” brain.
[00:08:29] Imagine being able to download skills directly into your brain, Matrix-style, or connecting your brain to a computer interface to access the internet just by thinking.
[00:08:41] These ideas might sound far-fetched, but there have been some important discoveries in this field, in the field of neurotechnology.
[00:08:52] You might have heard about an Elon Musk backed company called Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces, essentially linking your brain directly up to a computer.
[00:09:06] And it works, or at least it is showing promising signs.
[00:09:12] There’s an amazing video from 2021 of a monkey controlling a video game using only his brain, showing that this technology has succeeded in recording and decoding electrical signals from the brain, essentially downloading thoughts and uploading them to a computer.
[00:09:35] Now, it is still very early days, but imagine a world where your brain had access to the internet, where instead of going to a computer and typing or saying what you wanted, you simply thought it and the information was immediately available in your brain.
[00:09:56] Again, this might sound creepy and your immediate reaction might be “ that sounds like a step too far”, but there are many cases in which this kind of cognitive enhancement is more in the category of adding a prosthetic leg to someone who lost theirs in a car accident than connecting the internet to a normal healthy human’s brain.
[00:10:20] Imagine someone suffering from motor neurone disease, whose body had deteriorated to such an extent that they were unable to communicate with normal speech.
[00:10:31] A real-world example would be Stephen Hawking, who lost all physical power and had to communicate by moving his eyes.
[00:10:41] But clearly, on a cognitive level, he was functioning perfectly, and made important scientific discoveries and wrote several influential books without the use of his body.
[00:10:54] Now imagine for a moment that the technology existed that connected his brain to a computer, so he was able to use a computer and communicate simply by thinking, rather than the laborious process of having to move his eye to look at letters and spell out a word.
[00:11:13] Or imagine that you could restore the memory of someone who had lost it after an accident, or during dementia.
[00:11:21] Ethically, it would be hard to argue that these were bad things, but they raise interesting questions about where we draw the line between restoring human qualities and abilities to someone who had lost them and enhancing the human condition for perfectly functioning humans.
[00:11:43] In other words, if we consider it not only morally and ethically acceptable, but also a medical obligation, to help treat someone who is sick, can we use the same technology to enhance someone’s physical condition if they are perfectly healthy?
[00:12:01] And this leads us on to some important ethical questions about what a world of “transhumans” might look like.
[00:12:10] It would, almost by definition, increase inequality in a way that humanity has never really had to contemplate before.
[00:12:19] Yes, at the moment there is great wealth inequality, inequality between rich and poor.
[00:12:27] And, clearly, someone living on a few dollars a day in a developing country does not have access to the same medical treatments as a chief executive in New York or Paris or London, so life expectancy is generally correlated with wealth; people in higher income countries live longer and healthier lives than people in lower income countries.
[00:12:51] But a rich person’s body is not so drastically different from a poor person’s body.
[00:12:58] Imagine a world where you could pay to “enhance” your body to such an extent that you became a superhuman, essentially creating two different classes of humanity.
[00:13:13] Of course, these kinds of treatments are likely to be very expensive, at least at the start, and they would further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, creating a world where the wealthy can afford to become 'superhuman' while everyone else is left behind.
[00:13:32] There are also concerns about identity – what does it mean to be human if we can radically alter our bodies and minds? If your mind is no longer only yours, but it’s augmented by all sorts of algorithms and sources of data, where do you draw the line between the human and the robot?
[00:13:56] Now, to take the other side of the argument for a minute, especially on the question of price and inequality, of course it would be expensive at the start and of course this could initially lead to the rich being able to afford these treatments that poorer people can not. But, some might say, isn’t this already the case, just to a slightly lesser degree? Isn’t this just a natural progression from being able to pay for better healthcare and to live longer?
[00:14:27] What’s more, the price of such technology always decreases over time, so it is these rich people that finance the research and development which then allows the technology to be mass produced and affordable for the less wealthy.
[00:14:44] Now, given the increased interest in transhumanism in the past 50 years or so, and the colossal shift that it would bring to humanity and life on Earth, it has provided inspiration for all manner of science fiction series.
[00:15:00] A particularly good TV series, in my opinion at least, is the British series Black Mirror.
[00:15:09] Each episode in the series is a standalone story, set in a different world. And these worlds usually have some dystopian technological element. In one, people rate each other after every social interaction using eye implants. In another, people have a chip behind their ear with which they can replay their memories. And in another, relationships are formed by an algorithm matching people with other people for a predetermined period of time.
[00:15:45] It's a great series, and one I’d definitely recommend you checking out. The first episodes came out in 2011, to which many critics sort of laughed and said “haha, that will never happen”, but just a decade later, it is looking much closer to reality.
[00:16:05] And on the subject of transhumanism in reality, transhumanism today, I want to finish by briefly telling you about a man who is trying his utmost to push the boundaries of the human body.
[00:16:20] His name is Bryan Johnson, and a recent Vice article about him called him “The Most Measured Man in Human History”.
[00:16:31] He made his money creating a payments company called Braintree, which was later sold to PayPal for $800 million dollars.
[00:16:40] He was born in 1977, so he is still quite young, but over the past few years he has made it his mission to do everything he possibly can to enhance his body, to stop the ageing process, and, just perhaps, live forever.
[00:17:01] This includes measuring everything on a daily basis, eating exactly 1,977 calories a day, the food he eats determined by what the measurements dictate.
[00:17:16] In other words, instead of thinking, oh, I’ll have a sandwich or pizza or even salad for lunch today, Bryan Johnson’s diet and meal plan is dictated by an algorithm that analyses the results of his body measurements and returns the exact food that he should consume.
[00:17:37] To quote Johnson, “ [the programme] runs my body for me, and it does a better job than I can”.
[00:17:45] The logic behind this is that we humans are not particularly good managers of our body, we’re not great custodians of our own bodies. We eat fatty foods, we drink fizzy drinks or alcohol, we smoke, we don’t exercise, we don’t get enough sleep.
[00:18:04] Johnson’s view is that he completely removes himself from the decision-making process about how to manage his body, instead following the instructions dictated by a computer programme.
[00:18:18] It might not sound like a particularly enjoyable life to you or me, but it does sound like it’s working. By all measurements, Johnson says that he is in perfect physical condition. Not only has he slowed the ageing process, but according to his core measurements, he is a few years younger than a person should be at his age.
[00:18:44] His objective is to stop ageing completely, to live forever.
[00:18:51] If you’re wondering how much this all of this costs, he says that he spends around $2 million a year for all of this.
[00:18:59] Now, you might hear this and think “this all sounds miserable - count me out if that’s what I need to do to live forever”.
[00:19:06] And reading the comments on his posts and YouTube videos, this does seem to be a common reaction when someone learns about him and the healthcare regime that he is on.
[00:19:19] But, to take Johnson’s side for a minute, is this just our natural reaction because we don’t know if what he is doing will work?
[00:19:28] If he drops dead tomorrow, or even at the age of 85, no doubt his critics will write that it was all for nothing, that he sacrificed his humanity for nothing.
[00:19:41] But if he lives to 100, 150, or is still alive in 250 years time, and is living proof that anyone could do this if they change their behaviour, how would that change our opinions?
[00:19:58] Now, Bryan Johnson is just one example of someone who is living and breathing transhumanism, and is prepared to put his money and his body on the line in the quest for superhumanity.
[00:20:11] But he gets us asking important questions about the ethics of transhumanism, the practicalities of what is involved, and how far we are prepared to go to conquer our physical beings.
[00:20:25] If you knew that you could take certain actions to fundamentally change your body and the nature of your life, and if cost was no object, would you take them?
[00:20:38] For all human existence, humans have been dealt the same pack of cards; we have experienced joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, strength and weakness, life and death, and we've been constrained by our human bodies.
[00:20:57] If, at some point in the future, this constraint no longer exists, one cannot but ask “what is left of humanity?”
[00:21:09] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Transhumanism & The Rise of The Superhumans.
[00:21:16] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:21:23] If you could click your fingers and live forever, would you do it?
[00:21:26] And would you live a life like Bryan Johnson’s if you knew that you could live to 500 years old?
[00:21:34] And by the way, if you liked this episode, I think you’ll like the previous one which was on cryonics, the process of freezing people in order to bring them back from the dead when the technology exists.
[00:21:46] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:51] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
