Human 2.0 : Ethics of Self-Directed Evolution

This entry was my term paper submission for a course on Moral Philosophy, written in April 2019.

In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari brings out the question of the human agenda.

For thousands of years the answer to this question remained unchanged. The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list.

But as Harari elaborates further on,

Yet at the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an amazing realisation. Most people rarely think about it, but in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war…. We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war — and we usually succeed in doing it.

Humanity has, in essence, reached the point where natural selection can no longer direct it since for all express purposes we have bypassed its operational mechanism.

A person born with a physical disability is no longer left to die by the rest of the tribe. Infant mortality rates have halved in the past quarter of a century. In essence, there are lesser and lesser genetic traits being eliminated by natural selection. Furthermore, most of all mutations occurring within the human genome are being absorbed as a result of an increasingly inclusive global community. Globalization has now managed to connect different gene pools from around the world which were until now separate. The chance of a child being born from a union of a Sub-Saharan man and an East Asian woman was next to none two thousand years ago, but that is not a case now.

Since the dawn of civilization, enhancement has been an implicit goal of the thinking man. As Albert Camus aptly put, “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.” The entirety of the human struggle is an effort to escape into a better tomorrow. But it is now midnight, and we must choose which tomorrow to wake up to. Harari believes that the implicit goal of humanity has been to live longer and achieve immortality, and that is the future we are reluctantly heading towards.

The recent CRISPR babies born as a result of a study by Chinese scientists is an obvious reality check for any sceptics of human enhancements. The study, which was conducted by Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, has met with outcry from the scientific community for a serious breach of ethical guidelines. Any further experiments will obviously be subjected to intense scrutiny by fellow scientists. But that does not negate the fact that the technology to actually create genetically enhanced humans now exist. Even though we may not completely understand the mechanics behind it, we know enough to potentially alter the gene pool. The twin baby girls (named Lulu and Nana) born as a result of the study were engineered to be immune to HIV. The latest research is indicating that the procedure may have inadvertently enhanced their cognition. We have literally managed to engineer a (slightly) smarter human being.

The character Ian Malcolm (played by actor Jeff Goldblum) in the film Jurassic Park tries to explain to his fellow companions the futility of trying to control nature, famously quoting “Life finds a way.” How much ever the ethical conservatives try to fight it, human enhancement is coming. Life will find a way; If not natural selection, then by intelligent design.

Genetic enhancement is not the only issue at stake here. Science fiction has broached the question of what makes us human on multiple occasions. In Isaac Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, the titular character is an android seeking recognition as a human. But how about the other way? At what point do we go over from cyborg to android? Or even from a human to a cyborg?

Imagine a modern septuagenarian man. He is deaf in one ear and uses a hearing aid. A pacemaker has been regulating his heartbeat for the past half-decade, while a metal and plastic artificial joint has been in the hip for the past six-months. Artificial lenses have been put in during cataract procedures, and a perfect smile is achieved using a full set of dentures. Would this man be considered a cyborg? Why not? The only reason we refuse to recognize these as cyborg-like implants is our familiarity with them. If instead of plain optical lenses we use ones packed with electronics that are capable of enhanced binocular and night vision along with a HUD, people would immediately associate it with cyborgism.

Post-Human narratives have permeated our culture for a long time, a famous example being Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. But all they usually do is try and present an ominous warning at best, or downright criticize the mere thought of trying to play God. Even Jurassic Park is guilty of this, focusing on the terrible T-Rex hunting down children instead of a potential goldmine of educational content for genetic research.

Perhaps the reason why many find the implications of the CRISPR experiments distasteful is due to parallels to the horrifying eugenics program undertaken by the Nazi regime. However, in this case, we are not killing away the undesired traits, but rather preventing them in the first place; No one wants to be born with a disability or a chronic disease, irrespective of the accepting and inclusive nature of the society they inhabit.

Then why is it that we are uncomfortable with the implications of what the future might mean for us as humans? Harari believes that it is a basal instinct trying to assert the fact that we are perfect as it is. Of course, we want to improve, but only in small amounts. A radical enhancement implies there is something wrong with us. Frankenstein’s creation, although engineered to be a beautiful man, is depicted as a monster who needed to be destroyed; for it implies that we are the best that is, and nothing was or will be better than us.

There are a plethora of ethical issues that revolve around the concept of human enhancement. The US National Science Foundation sponsored a report on this in 2009 called Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions and Answers which analyses the impact and implication this issue has on freedom, autonomy, fairness, equity, dignity, and law.

The report concludes with a call for a wider conversation on the topic of human enhancement, citing the historical lag that ethics has behind technological driven movements. It suggests planning ahead for future legislation and regulation while urging the reader to use their own moral compass to navigate this issue since human enhancement is a personal matter.

I disagree. Although human enhancement may seem to affect individuals, it is by no means a personal matter. It is an ethical issue that is applicable to Homo Sapiens as a species. In some respects, it is an extension of the issue of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that we as a species (the majority of it) agreed was fundamental to the inherent identity and dignity of humans worldwide.

This may seem to be an overstatement, but it is really not. Unless we actively decide on what direction to pursue, the future fate of humanity is akin to a firework rocket standing in an unbalanced soda bottle. When the fuse burns out, there is no telling where we will end up.

A possible future would be where you could literally pick and choose characteristics and qualities for your child before conception, much like a video game. The available features increase with your budget. The rich won’t just be richer, they’ll be genetically healthier.

In today’s world, certain professions and careers require certain characteristics. Almost all sports are a prime example of this. Sure, you can be a great swimmer. But there is a certain amount of genetic lottery responsible for you to be an Olympic swimmer. What happens when you can literally engineer a child with all the correct characteristics enhancing its ability to swim? Do the Olympics even make sense then?

Or perhaps in an authoritarian society, the poor would be incentivized with genes that allow them to work twice as hard. A subspecies of humans engineered to be better soldiers, designed to have more endurance and feel less empathy?

Human enhancement has a tremendous amount of potential in improving the future of the human race, and I wholeheartedly support all the advancements and research in the field. A future where we might successfully eradicate the vast number of diseases and ailments which humanity suffers from is something that should be pursued. The CRISPR study for immunizing against HIV is a step in the right direction. The problem lies with regulating the technology so that it cannot be used as a tool for exploitation.

Neuralink is a neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk currently working on developing implantable brain-computer interfaces. If they manage to build it, we will truly be on the threshold of becoming true cyborgs. A scenario where the brain could control robotic arms (think Doctor Octavius from Spider-Man) would allow us to become more like the various gods from Hindu mythology. Or perhaps we will be able to upgrade to the internet allowing us to actually achieve a hive brain.

My concern in this scenario is not the obvious identity shift that we would be subject to, but rather the question of influence. How do we regulate the spread and fair use of this technology which allows actual superhuman to exist? How do you regulate the spread of data?

Other than a free-for-all-lets-see-what-happens scenario, a good alternative would be to have centralized bodies made of scientists and ethicists in individual countries responsible for the global project as a whole. The International Space Station and CERN are examples of such coordinated efforts. Granted, the goals they have been pursuing are more detached as compared to human enhancement, but the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is an excellent example to emulate. In essence, it guarantees that any future exploration and colonization that we may do in space will be in the name of the species as a whole.

In the final novel of the Foundation series by Asimov, Foundation and Earth, the protagonist Golan Trevize travels across the galaxy searching for the correct course that humanity should choose to evolve further. The various planets he visits have been isolated for centuries, each developing and progressing on a unique pathway, providing him with different solutions to the same problem. Asimov had a fantastic knack for predicting the moral problems that could arise in the future; in the case of artificial intelligence, we still haven’t found a better example to program in than his Three Laws of Robotics. And science fiction aside, the exact question that we are discussing now is the one faced by Trevize; how to decide the future of the human species.

Today the answers that we get to choose from are varied, complex, and incomplete in their solutions. Project Gilgamesh, founded in 2014, is an initiative to achieve immortality through radical enhancement and cryogenics. The Human Brain Project, founded in 2005, hopes to recreate the complete human brain using electronic circuitry emulating the actual neural pathways. Neuralink would allow us seamlessly interface our brains with computers and the internet, while CRISPR can be potentially used to tailor human beings to specifications.

I have mentioned the solutions above in the increasing order of their ethical impacts. Perhaps the answer we seek is not one thing, but rather a combination of all of them. The next step would be to work on what we want to become as a species. Something akin to an upgraded version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which would chart out the future humanity desires to pursue, at least for the next fifty years or so. It is of importance that we choose a direction to work towards and do so wisely. If we are to harness the mechanism of intelligent design, we need to use our intelligence.

In the final chapter of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari elaborates about the implications of not choosing wisely.

This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people…. And yet the great debates of history are important because at least the first generation of these gods [enhanced humans] would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions.

If the directions are not charted out, the process of choosing between the alternatives would be susceptible to lobbying and propaganda. The Anti-Vaccine movement in the US, which calls on unscientific evidence linking vaccines to autism, is a fine example of this. Measles, which had been eliminated in the US since 2000, was brought back by a vacationing teenager who was unvaccinated.

A disease outbreak is something humans have been successfully dealing with for the past century, and the bad guys are the germs. Who decides the bad guys while choosing the path to our future?

The best solution that humanity has come up with is to appoint its wisest in a committee, which then discusses and settles on conditions acceptable to most, if not all. And that is what must be done. In trying to chart out a path to The Man of Tomorrow, we will have to evaluate the ethics and beliefs of today that we want to carry on. Along with figuring out the answer to what we want to become, we may end up attempting to figure out what we want to want.

The rapid progress of technology is ensuring that we are moving from a nation-community to a species-community. Our friends and idols are spread all across the globe, intermixing their cultural and ethical identities. It is time we put more emphasis on the ethics of the species as a whole, and thus direct the path of our evolution.