“I feel a sort of spiritual connection with computer science, because it has so transformed my world view. Life, the universe, and everything make more sense in light of it. Probably every discipline thinks it has found the key to explaining reality, but I do feel that computer science touches on something fundamental about the universe.”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Your Laptop May Be Marginally Sentient
“What Turing’s arguments suggest is that the things that it should be possible to compute with neurons in a brain are exactly the same things that it should be possible to compute with, say, transistors inside a computer. That’s kind of a scary thought because it suggests that you and I are machines somehow. Or at least what we’re able to ever think is somehow the same set of things that a computer could think. And a lot of people find that a very threatening thought because it suggests that somehow maybe they’re not so worthwhile. If they’re “just a computer”. We’re used to computers, computers are dumb machines, we know that they’re not valuable in the sense that people are valuable. So somehow people find it very insulting, the notion that they are a machine. And yet Turing’s argument is that what you can compute doesn’t matter what you’re built out of. That’s the essence of it. And so it doesn’t really matter that we’re built of biological components. What we can compute is the same as what a transistor computer can compute.”
— Dr. Daniel Hillis, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (1992)
“I don’t think people were an important feature of [Alan Turing’s] life. I don’t know. There must have been some people that mattered a lot to him, certainly. But machines and ideas were his real love, I believe.”
— Dr. Shaun Wylie, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (1992)
“We have pinned down some of the general properties of the universe just as early navigators pinned down the general configuration of the continents and the size of the Earth. But that was not the end of exploration of the Earth. Likewise, we are at the beginning, rather than at the end of our exploration of the universe.”
— Sir Martin Rees, What We Still Don’t Know (Channel 4 series, 2004)
“If reconstructive uploading will eventually be possible, how can one ensure that it happens? There have been billions of humans in the history of the planet. It is not clear that our successors will want to reconstruct every person who ever lived, or even every person of whom there are records. So if one is interested in immortality, how can one maximize the chances of reconstruction? One might try keeping a bank account with compound interest to pay them for doing so, but it is hard to know whether our financial system will be relevant in the future, especially after an intelligence explosion.
My own strategy is to write about a future of artificial intelligence and about uploading. Perhaps this will encourage our successors to reconstruct me, if only to prove me wrong.”
— David Chalmers, Uploading: A Philosophical Analysis (in Russell Blackford’s & Damien Broderick’s “Intelligence Unbound: the Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds”, 2014, p. 116)
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
— Donald Knuth
“Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.”
— Edsger W. Djikstra
“I am not an original man: and I think less of my own thoughts every day.”
— Henry Sidgwick
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“This dynamic is completely counterintuitive without a deep understanding of the radical apocalyptic framework. In the case of apocalyptic terrorism, any attack on individuals or their group, including arrests, torture or mockery, only deepens their original convictions. In the case of true adherents of radical apocalypticism, such actions will never serve as a deterrent. This realization might well frustrate our country, policy makers and intelligence analysts to no end. Yet aggressive military action and anger that violently stems terrorism in the short-run often feeds the terrorist cycle in the long-run.”
— Frances Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism
“Effective Altruists, then, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the words of C. S. Lewis’s criticism of anti-monarchists, they are people who view stones in a line as better than those in an arch. Heir apparent to Bentham’s reductive credo, they aspire to prize apart the rib cage of eudaimonia to feast on its entrails of utility.
When I see them casually dismiss poetry, the opera, the Iliad, the School of Athens, as outrageous luxuries instead of funging them into varying increments of common utility, to be sacrificed if expedient to satisfy items lower on Maslow’s hierarchy, I feel like the character in Plato’s famous cave metaphor, returning to the prisoners still shackled in the wall, obsessed with the procession of the shadows. The human condition demands more of us all than to chase these simulacra of a moral life.”
— Gregory Lewis parodying critiques of effective altruism
“Pinning consciousness on “the brain’s biological causal powers” is just a restatement of the problem, like pinning why a sleeping pill works on its sedative virtue.”
— Scott Aaronson, Can Computers Become Conscious?
“[H]ere’s my personal favorite, as popularized by the philosopher Adam Elga: can you blackmail an AI by saying to it, “look, either you do as I say, or else I’m going to run a thousand copies of your code, and subject all of them to horrible tortures—and you should consider it overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be one of the copies”? (Of course, the AI will respond to such a threat however its code dictates it will. But that tautological answer doesn’t address the question: how should the AI respond?)”
— Scott Aaronson, Can Computers Become Conscious?
“We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.”
— Alex Comfort
“An organism is an integrated collection of problem-solving devices – adaptations – that were shaped by natural selection over evolutionary time, to promote, in some specific way, the survival of the genes that directed their construction.”
— Donald Symons
“Aging and death may be the species’ way of eliminating those who are no longer genetically useful but still competing for limited resources with those whose job it now is to pass along the genes.”
— Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time
“Yet in all directions, the universe looks like a barren wasteland of dead matter mindlessly acting out a cosmic screenplay written by nature’s laws. This panoply can be beautiful, for sure, but it lacks any convincing signs that intelligent life is crying out for companionship in a universe bereft of intrinsic meaning. There are no ripples of leaked radiation splashing against the shores of Earth. The sky is quiet—not a whisper, much less a shriek. The conundrum is that this is exactly opposite of what we would expect, given what we know about the natural world. The universe should be teeming with life, according to some estimates using the Drake Equation; we should be able to point our telescopes at the midnight firmament and see, at least on occasion, a spaceship flying by.”
— Phil Torres, The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse
“The Fermi Paradox is an observation by the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first controlled atomic chain reaction under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, that if technological civilizations have even a slight probability of evolving, their presence should be visible throughout the universe. [T]he sky should be filled with the cosmic equivalent of roaring traffic and flashing neon signs. But instead we perceive a great silence.”
— Hans P. Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
— Richard Dawkins, We Are Going To Die: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
“[W]ith the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they share. Or as the Anglo-Indian biologist JBS Haldane put it: “Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.””
— Adam Rutherford, The Selfish Gene turns 40 (The Guardian, May 29, 2016)
“For myself, I find it just intuitive that the magnitude of importance of something should scale linearly with its probability. From this standpoint, expected-value maximization needs no further justification; the expected value just is how much I think the possible outcome matters.”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Maximize Expected Value?
“Of course, remember that there’s no such thing as objective probability: The “real” probability is 1 for however the multiverse is and 0 for everything else. Probabilities are tools that we use to express our own ignorance, and it’s convenient to think of them as though they represent “actual randomness” over different outcomes (even though there is no such thing as “actual randomness”).”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Maximize Expected Value?
“At times, as I watch [bonobos], I seem to be staring into my own distant past and seeing in front of me “quasi persons” – not people, but “near people.” The feeling is as though, in an eerie and inexplicable way, I am watching a species that is not the same as me yet is connected to me – is part of me. Even after many years of watching and studying bonobos, I still cannot help but sense that I am in the presence of the emergence of the human mind, the dawn of our peculiarly human perspective and feeling.”
— Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind
“Smallpox is “a judgment of God on the sins of the people,” and “to avert it is but to provoke him more”. Inoculation is “an croachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite.””
— unknown, said against Dr. Zabdiel Boylston (1721)
“You are objecting we humans feel something when we have a belief or a desire or a perception, and a mere inscription lacks the power to create such feelings.”
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, chapter “Natural Computation”
“[C]omputation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.”
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, chapter “Natural Computation”
“If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.”
— Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (2000), p. 446
“Medical expertise, not being a natural resource, does not fall under Nozick’s “Lockean proviso”. The following trialogue is then a realistic scenario within Nozick’s libertarian society. A police officer comes upon a couple struggling with each other, the man evidently trying to rape the woman.
Woman: Please, sir, please help me.
Officer (to man): Hey, you, let her go at once!
Man: Don’t get involved.
Officer: I must. You are violating this woman’s right not to be assaulted.
Man: No, I’m not. She is my slave. Here are the papers, signed by herself.
Woman: But I was coerced into signing. He said he would not treat my father if I refused to sign.
Officer: That’s not coercion but at most duress. He was at liberty not to treat your father or to ask compensation for treating him.
Woman: But my father is dead!
Man: The contract says only that I would try to save him, and I did.
Officer (to woman): I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot help you.
Man: But you can help me in forcing her to fulfill her contractual obligations. She has already scratched me. See if you can tie her hands.
(Officer ties Woman’s hands, she screams for help as she is being raped…)
Man (to Officer): I’m glad the police are protecting citizen’s rights. Isn’t she great? My sons will have lots of fun with her when I bring her home.”
— Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (1989)
“Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”
— Dr. Ralph Merkle
“Why shouldn’t I eat toothpaste? It’s a free world. Why shouldn’t I chew my toenails? i happen to have trodden in some honey. Why shouldn’t I prance across central park with delicate sideways leaps? I know what your answer will be: “it isn’t done”. But it’s no earthly use just saying it isn’t done. If there’s a reason why it isn’t done, give the reason – if there’s no reason, don’t attempt to stop me doing it. All other things being equal, the mere fact that something “isn’t done” is in itself an excellent reason for doing it.”
— Derek Parfit, The Eaton College Chronicle (Eton Microcosm, 1964, p. 101)
“Cloning technologies even offer a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat and other protein sources in a factory without animals by cloning animal muscle tissue. Benefits would include extremely low cost, avoidance of pesticides and hormones that occur in natural meat, greatly reduced environmental impact (compared to factory farming), improved nutritional profile, and no animal suffering. As with therapeutic cloning, we would not be creating the entire animal but rather directly producing the desired animal parts or flesh. Essentially, all of the meat – billions of pounds of it – would be derived from a single animal.
There are other benefits to this process besides ending hunger. By creating meat in this way, it becomes subject to the law of accelerating – exponential improvements in price-performance of information-based technologies over time – and will thus become extremely inexpensive. Even though hunger in the world today is certainly exacerbated by political issues and conflicts, meat could become so inexpensive that it would have a profound effect on the affordability of food.
The advent of animal-less meat will also eliminate animal suffering. The economics of factory farming place a very low priority on the comfort of animals, which are treated as cogs in a machine. The meat produced in this manner, although normal in all other respects, would not be part of an animal with a nervous system, which is generally regarded as a necessary element for suffering to occur, at least in a biological animal. We could use the same approach to produce such animal by-products as leather and fur. Other major advantages would be to eliminate the enormous ecological and environmental damage created by factory farming as well as the risk of prion-based diseases, such as mad-cow disease and its human counterpart, vCJD.”
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 224
“To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favours genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.”
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), p. 67
“In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn’t think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Krietna cilvēka griba ir virzīta uz patiesi labu mērķi, bet nekrietna – uz tādu, kāds pagadās.”
— Aristotelis
Miscellaneous:
“Tā nemaz pasaulē neiet, kā domā. Pavisam citādi. No tālienes viss izskatās diez kā, un, kad pieiet klāt, – pavisam citādi.”
— Anna Brigadere, Sprīdītis
“It’s more useful to ask when aid works, not whether.”
— Andy Sumner, The $138.5 Billion Question: When Does Foreign Aid Work?
“When I learned more about the disease from the doctors working actively on the disease I realized that I was lucky to be alive. They had rarely seen someone keep such high levels parasites in their blood and not die. It was a rude awakening to the reality of Malaria—it’s dangerous, and it can kill anyone. I felt very grateful and happy to have survived Malaria and to be able to share my story with others.
I was sick for about 2 months. My entire treatment costs were more than $200 US. The average person in Mali makes less than $1 a day. One million children in Africa die from the disease each year, due to the extreme poverty levels and not being able to afford proper diagnosis and treatment. Every 30 seconds a child dies of Malaria in Africa.”
— Coumba Makalou, What it feels like to have Malaria (2007)
“When I contracted malaria, an infectious tropical disease caused by parasites found in the female anopheles mosquitoes, I probably had the virus in my system for about 3 weeks before I realized I was sick. I just felt extreme fatigue, headaches, a complete loss of appetite, and fever. It just felt like the flu.
I realized I had contracted the disease, when the infection was already quite advanced in my blood and I suffered from a sudden attack in the middle of the night. I awoke to what felt like lightning going through my legs, and then spreading through my body and in my head. Probably the worst headache, body aches, and chills you could possibly imagine. It felt like I was being stung repeatedly by an electric shock gun and could barely control my movements. The pain was so intense; I actually believed I was dying, literally crying out in pain so bad that I was taken to a 24 hour clinic that night at 3am.”
— Coumba Makalou, What it feels like to have Malaria (2007)
“I’ve read, and typed, and read again these numbers, and they are so stark to me that they can easily float away into the atmosphere of statistics, escaping true empathy. Understanding one nation’s experience feels more visceral: Every day, more than 500 people die from malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the majority of these deaths are children under the age of five. AMF offers a shattering metaphor: Imagine a fully booked 747 airplane and infants strapped into seats A through K of every row of the economy section; their feet cannot reach the floor. Every day, this plane disappears into the Congo River, killing every soul on board. That is malaria – in one country. By GiveWell’s calculations it would cost $1.7 million to save the airplane.”
— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
“Pasaulē notiek ļoti daudz kas nepatīkams un nevēlams (gan cilvēku rīcības, gan nekontrolētu procesu rezultātā). [G]aišo nākotni neviens nepienesīs uz paplātes, pie tās pienākšanas ir smagi jāstrādā jau šobrīd. Nākotne, protams, pienāks arī bez mūsu pūlēm, tikai tādā ceļā tā, visticamāk, nebūs līdzīga jelkurai no tām, ko mēs varētu vēlēties piedzīvot. Beigu galā, visa transhumānisma būtība ir nevis sapņošanā par utopiju, bet konkrētos mēģinājumos uzlabot mūs pašus un pasauli ap mums.”
— Arets Paeglis (Latvijas Transhumānistu asociācija)
“Beigu galā, visa transhumānisma būtība ir nevis sapņošanā par utopiju, bet konkrētos mēģinājumos uzlabot mūs pašus un pasauli ap mums.”
— Arets Paeglis (Latvijas Transhumānistu asociācija)
“[W]e compare ourselves to the universe and realize we are microscopic. Then we make a crucial but serious mistake: we assume being microscopic means we are insignificant. But if our significance is not affected by whether we are standing in a small or a big room, why should we think the same about a big or a small universe?”
— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)
“It is not uncommon to envision one’s life as a book, and then assume it must have a beginning, a middle and an end. This is reasonable since we tend to construct our identities as narratives: we often tell stories about who we are, what we have done, and where we are going, so thinking of a life this way comes naturally to us. But a book can be a short pamphlet, a thick epic, or maybe a never-ending fantasy series… which one would we want to be like?”
— Anders Sandberg, Desperately seeking eternity (2016)
“ALTRUIZINE. A metapsychotropic transmitting agent effective for all sentient homoproteinates. The drug duplicates into others, within a radius of fifty yards, whatever sensations, emotions, and mental states one may experience… According to its discoverer, ALTRUIZINE will ensure the untrammeled reign of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Compassion in any society, since the neighbors of a happy man must share his happiness, and the happier he, the happier perforce they, so it is entirely in their own interest that they wish him nothing but the best. Should he suffer any hurt, they will rush so help at once, so as to spare themselves the pain induced by his. Neither walls, fences, hedges, nor any other obstacle will weaken the altruizing influence… We assume no responsibility for results at variance with the discoverer’s claims.”
— Stanislaw Lem, Altruizine; or, a True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermitic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness and What Came of It (1976)
“The [current] system [of licensing medicines] was created to deal with traditional medicine which aims to prevent, detect, cure, or mitigate diseases. In this framework, there is no room for enhancing medicine. For example, drug companies could find it difficult to get regulatory approval for a pharmaceutical whose sole use is to improve cognitive functioning in the healthy population. To date, every pharmaceutical on the market that offers some potential cognitive enhancement effect was developed to treat some specific disease condition (such as ADHD, narcolepsy and Alzheimer’s disease). The enhancing effects of these drugs in healthy subjects is a serendipitous unintended effect. As a result, pharmaceutical companies, instead of aiming directly at enhancements for healthy people, must work indirectly by demonstrating that their drugs are effective in treating some recognised disease. One perverse effect of this incentive structure is the medicalization and “pathologization” of conditions that were previously regarded as part of the normal human spectrum. If a significant fraction of the population could obtain certain benefits from drugs that improve concentration, for example, it is currently necessary to categorize this segment of people as having some disease in order for the drug to be approved and prescribed to those who could benefit from it. It is not enough that people would like to be able to concentrate better when they work; they must be stamped as suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a condition now estimated to affect between 3 and 5 percent of school-age children (a higher proportion among boys) in the US. This medicalization of arguably normal human characteristics not only stigmatizes enhancers, it also limits access to enhancing treatments; unless people are diagnosed with a condition whose treatment requires a certain enhancing drug, those who wish to use the drug for its enhancing effects are reliant on finding a sympathetic physical willing to prescribe it (or finding other means of procurement). This creates inequities in access, since those with high social capital and the relevant information are more likely to gain access to enhancement than others.”
— Nick Bostrom, Rebecca Roache, Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement (New Waves in Applied Ethics, New York, 2007)
“[T]he death of Homo sapiens is an evil (beyond the death of the human individuals) only for a limited value system. What is humanly important is the fact that we think and feel, not the particular bodily form which clothes the human personality.”
— Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (1995), p. 218
“People say, ”I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” or ”I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body,” but I say ”I’m trapped in a body.””
— Genesis P. Orridge
“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
— Anthony Kennedy
“What evolution had done, design could do better. There would always be a chance to take what you needed, take what was good, then cut yourself free and move on.”
— Greg Egan, Teranesia (1995), p. 179
“[W]e, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years
to fit this place, we know it failed.
For we can reshape,
reach an arm through the bars
and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out.
And while whales feeding on mackerel
are confined to the sea,
we climb the waves,
look down from the clouds.”
— Marvin Levine, Look Down from Clouds: New Poems (1997)
“Your mind is software. Program it.
Your body is a shell. Change it.
Death is a disease. Cure it.
Extinction is approaching. Fight it.”
— Eclipse Phase
“But neither is it possible to accept the alternative claim that individuals will or should be disgusted with transhumanist technological options, and not enhance. One cannot help but note the high demand, among those with high disposable incomes, for plastic surgery, botox treatments, and the like-enhancement technologies that, at some risk, offer better looks but not increased life span, better health, or even, necessarily, enhanced quality of life. And those enhancements are merely cosmetic. The doping arms race between high-performance athletes seeking a competitive edge demonstrates the zeal with which enhancement options are adopted when they offer the potential for improved performance (and glory, and endorsements). Some people may think enhancement is against “human nature,” or immoral, or a violation of religious or natural law, but if real enhancement is within reach, even if legally or medically risky, the data all seem to indicate high demand. If enhancement is to be stopped, it will have to be stopped by society’s actively preventing people from doing what they seem to want to do. The argument against enhancement on these grounds, therefore, does not seem to be an appeal to the public, which appears fairly immune to such sentiments, but to the State, in that it asks for and justifies an authoritarian mandate for reasons that are essentially ideological, even theological.”
— Braden R. Allenby, Daniel Sarewitz, The technohuman condition
“Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Yet, nobody wants to stop the progress of transport technologies. Once, successfully, scientists create transhumans with enormous physical and mental powers, accidents and mistakes won’t stop the progress of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies.”
“With adequate safeguards and cautious preparation, genetic engineering could be used to relieve suffering and increase happiness by quantum leaps. Our short-term prospect here would be the eradication of many genetic handicaps. The medium-term prospect could be the reduction of the proportion of the neurotic and depressed personality. The longer-term prospect might be the dramatic enhancement of our capacity for enjoyment. All these have to be done with extreme caution. The reason we should be very cautious is not so much to avoid sacrificing our current welfare (which is relative small in comparison to that in the future with brain stimulation and genetic engineering) but to avoid destroying our future.”
— Yew-Kwang Ng, Siang Ng, The Road to Happiness
“The critical question for utilitarians is not ‘Is this natural or is this appropriate for humans?’ but rather ‘Will this make people’s lives go better?’ [O]bjectors to utilitarianism often refer scathingly to the ‘utilitarian calculus’. However utilitarians are in one sense humane: they care ultimate about people’s well-being and not about feelings, or intuitions or attachment to symbols. Utilitarianism is a theory that shows concern for people through concern for their well-being.”
— Julian Savulescu, Bioethics: Utilitarianism (Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, 2006)
“[W]ent to a meeting on genetic enhancement in New York City, and a few of us were for it. The rest were appalled. To just a defensive reaction of people on the top – they’re afraid someone else might be on the top. But what if you were dumb? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a child who would let you get out of the slums? If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we’d probably have fewer wars.”
— James Watson
“[sic] Imagine a tool was invented to help a researcher to improve by just 1%. The gain would hardly be noticeable in a single individual. But if the 10 million scientists in the world all benefited from the tool the inventor would increase the rate of scientific progress by roughly the same amount as adding 100,000 new scientists. Each year the invention would amount to an indirect contribution equal to 100,000 times what the average scientist contributes.”
— Nick Bostrom
“The world contains approximately 4.2 billion people over the age of twenty. Even a small enhancement of cognitive capacity in these individuals would probably have an impact on the world economy rivaling that of the internet.”
— Noah Shachtman, Army Seeks Fountain of Youth in Body’s Powerhouses (Wired, 2008)
“[T]hink about someone from 300 years ago, who was a subsistence farmer, who had been told that the Industrial Revolution is coming. There will soon be an industrial economy. It will grow large and fast, relative to historical timescales. And soon it will dominate the world economy. [I]t will dominate nations, most people will live in an industrial economy, most wealth will be there, most political power will be there.
Now, if you, as a subsistence farmer, heard about this coming [and] if you identified with being a farmer so essentially that you said “This is terrible! People like me are going to be pushed to the side and [will] no longer be in power. Those industrialists will run things!”, you could be discouraged by hearing about the Industrial Revolution coming.
On the other hand, you might have done what many or even most people did and said to yourself: “My children or grandchildren… they could become industrialists! That’s a possibility for them, and I could be proud of that. I could be happy with my children being successful being industrialists. I might want them to move to cities and acquire new kinds of job skills, and work in factories or office buildings. And they would be somewhat alienated from me, they would not be living on the farm here and [be] available for dinner every evening[.] But I could be proud of and happy for my children becoming industrialists.”
But we have that choice too here, obviously, the parallel is. If you see yourself as essentially human and your children as essentially human, and emulations as an Other that are not just the sort of thing that you can be, then you see creatures like you being displaced by an Other. But if you could see emulations as your descendants, they come from humans, that’s their origin, they will certainly feel very akin humans [because], in a sense, that’s where they came from.”
— Robin Hanson, Robin Hanson on The Age of Em (Future of Life Institute podcast)
“If we decide on a positive programme to change our nature, this will be a central moment in our history, and the transformation might be beneficial to a degree we can now scarcely imagine.”
— Jonathan Glover, What Sort of People Should There Be? (1984)
“The worst terrorist that humankind faces is nature. [T]he bottom line is that I think research on what nature is trying to do to kill us is worth the risk of possible bioterrorism.”
— Arthur Caplan, Block Biotech Progress or Embrace It? Bioethicists Debate What’s to Come (Reason, May 22, 2015)
“We know that Homo sapiens is not the final word in primate evolution, but few have yet grasped that we are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination.”
— Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (2002), p. 1
“[T]o whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes, we no longer will be. Instead our genes will increasingly be at the mercy of our brains.”
— Ronald Bailey, Block Biotech Progress or Embrace It? Bioethicists Debate What’s to Come (Reason, May 22, 2015)
“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. [S]oon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.”
— Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), pp. 302-303
“The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.”
— Sir Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century — On Earth and Beyond (2003), p. 183
““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 Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”
— Julian Huxley, Transhumanism (1957)
“There should be no boundary to human endeavor.”
— Stephen Hawking
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
— Daniel Gilbert, The Psychology of Your Future Self
“Nature, even human nature, will cease more and more to be an absolute datum: more and more, it will become what scientific manipulation has made it.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell (1961), p. 371
“Human nature as we currently know it is not an eternally fixed constant, but, I believe, an early draft of a work-in-progress.”
— Nick Bostrom
“If you follow trends in psychology, you know that Freud is out and Darwin is in. The basic idea of “evolutionary psych” is that our brains are exquisitely designed to help us cope with our environment -but unfortunately, the environment they are designed for is the one we evolved and lived in for the past two million years, no the alleged civilization we created just a couple of centuries ago. We are, all of us, hunter-gatherers lost in the big city. And therein, say the theorists, lie the roots of many of our bad habits. Our craving for sweets evolved in a world without ice cream; our interest in gossip evolved in a world without tabloids; our emotional response to music evolved in a world without Celine Dion. And we have investment instincts designed for hunting mammoths, not capital gains.”
— Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling (2003), p. 31
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Free Man’s Worship (1903)
““Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can entertain.”
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), Chapter 14: The Many Roots of Our Suffering, pp. 241-242
“Our knowledge of human biology – in particular of genetics and neurobiology – is beginning to enable us to directly affect the biological or physiological basis of human motivation, either through drugs, or through genetic selection or engineering, or by using external devices that affect the brain or the learning process. We could use these techniques to overcome the moral and psychological shortcomings that imperil the human species. We are at the early stages of such research, but there are few cogent philosophical or moral objections to the use of a specifically biomedical moral enhancement – moral bioenhancement. In fact, the risks we face are so serious that it is imperative we explore every possibility of developing moral bioenhancement technologies – not to replace traditional moral education, but to complement it.”
— Julian Savulescu, Ingmar Persson (2012)
“[I]t is unlikely, given our current level of moral competence, that we will be able to solve the problem [of climate change or existential risk]. Hence we need to improve our moral competence. More precisely, we need to change in the direction away from our tendency to do what is egoistically prudentially good and towards what is morally good, in the sense that each person does what is best for everyone on the whole. To some extent we have done so by education, and while progress has not been zero it is still insufficient.”
— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Our planet and its biosphere”, p. 34
“The world has an abundance of serious ethical problems, causing human and animal suffering, and delays or risks to our future. Wild animals suffer gruesome fates, farmed animals are tortured, humans endure diseases, war, poverty, torture, slavery… These problems could be called villains to be defeated.
The biggest villain is a sort of all powerful meta-villain, called insufficient intelligence to solve our problems instantly. Imagine that an advanced extraterrestrial group of cyborgs, having evolved for millions of years with superintelligence, reached Earth and contacted our world leaders in order to help us solve our problems. Does anybody honestly think that they would follow the same inefficient strategies that we do to solve our problems, such as distributing nets to prevent malaria in Africa, or encouraging people to donate to it?
Their solutions would be much faster, they might rapidly develop a gene therapy suited to our needs, that would spread in a highly contagious virus or some other method of delivery and turn us into more evolved and ethically efficient beings. They might develop cultured animal products such as meat, eggs, milk, and leather that would cost very cheap and instantly substitute abusive animal farming. Their solutions would be extremely different and more efficient.
Why are we not as efficient as these aliens? The only thing preventing us from being like them is not being intelligent enough. Therefore, intelligence enhancement or defeating the villain of insufficient intelligence is very important, perhaps the most important thing of all. It is the chief of all the other villains.”
— Jonatas Müller
“[T]he primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way.”
— Steven Pinker, The moral imperative for bioethics (The Boston Globe, August 1, 2015)
“As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it will become purely an issue of post-human decision whether negative modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever.”
— David Pearce, Heaven
“Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture (“what it feels like”) of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness.”
— David Pearce, Feeling Groovy, Forever (December 16, 2003)
“[R]eason can master our genes.”
— Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981), p. 131
“[N]o one has the guts to say it, [but] if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we? [E]volution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity [to it]? I’d like to know where that idea comes from, because it’s utter silliness.”
— James Watson, The Road Ahead (2000)
“It is an interesting question, incidentally, why pain has to be so damned painful. Why not equip the brain with the equivalent of a little red flag, painlessly raised to warn, “Don’t do that again”?”
— Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins on vivisection: “But can they suffer?”
“[H]uman nature as encoded in our DNA isn’t immutable. Mankind’s barbaric track-record to date is an unreliable guide to the future. If Homo sapiens’ nastier alleles and their more sinister combinations can be silenced or edited out of the genome, and new improved code-sequences inserted instead, then the pessimists will be confounded. A major discontinuity in the development of life lies ahead. Providentially, we’ve learned that the DNA-driven world isn’t written in God-given proprietary code it would be hubris to tamper with, but in bug-ridden open source amenable to improvement.”
— David Pearce, Utopian Pharmacology
“As it happens, some kinds of genetic enhancement are already here. Anyone who has been turned down for a date has been a victim of the human drive to exert control over half the genes of one’s future children.”
— Steven Pinker, The Designer Baby Myth (The Guardian, June 5, 2003)
“If we have the power to intervene in the nature of our offspring – rather than consigning them to the natural lottery – then we should.”
— Julian Savulescu, Genetically engineering ‘ethical’ babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor (The Telegraph, August 12, 2012)
“We are all stupid. We don’t think very well. We can’t remember more than about 7 numbers in a row before our brain gives up, we have very bad short-term memories, we can’t think of long chains of reasoning without forgetting where we started. These are all design defects, as far as I’m concerned. So, is that an enhancement to improve that or is that repairing a defect? It doesn’t really matter. We should be using technology to make ourselves better.”
— Max More, Technocalyps (2006)
“[W]here genetic selection aims to bring out a trait that clearly benefits an individual and society, we should allow parents the choice. To do otherwise is to consign those who come after us to the ball and chain of our squeamishness and irrationality.”
— Julian Savulescu, Genetically engineering ‘ethical’ babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor (The Telegraph, August 12, 2012)
“If I am going to die, there’s no need to ‘make peace’ with myself, no reason to ‘compose myself’ for death. The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I faced every other moment of my life. The one and only thing that could make this time matter would be finding a way to survive.”
— Greg Egan, The Walk (1995), p. 220
“Some people believe in an afterlife. I do not; what I say will be based on the assumption that death is nothing, and final. I believe there is little to be said for it: it is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent an even greater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.”
— Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), p. 224
“I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever by induction on the positive integers.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“I think immortality is a perfectly reasonable goal, and it’s hard to think of a more important one. I have hundreds of years of work to do right now, and I’m sure that if I got the chance to do that, I’d have thousand of years of work to do after that. So it’s very frustrating to have done as much as I’ve had and have this foolish reason to stop. [The foolish reason being] that I have evolved from creatures that don’t live long enough. [S]ome tortoises live longer than people. Why should we be satisfied with what we’ve got?”
“It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune. First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage. Then I call out and examine my pride, my independent, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.”
— Geoffrey A. Landis, The Long Chase (2002)
“All behavior patterns can in principle be altered by environmental intervention. The fact that currently we can alter some patterns and not others is a problem of knowledge and technology.”
— David Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (2003), p. 17
“If aging is just damage, and the body is just a complex machine, it stands to reason that we can apply the same principles to alleviating the damage of aging as we do to alleviating the damage to machines.”
— Aubrey de Grey, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (2007), p. 22
“We don’t have ways to control aging, which is the major cause of death, and we don’t have ways to control mood, which is the major cause of suffering. After we solve those, the biggest problems are and will be those related to global [cooperation].”
— Nick Bostrom, Panel discussion “Global coordination” (Effective Altruism Global 2015: Oxford University)
“[W]e might be about to enter a new Romantic age, driven by biology and computing, in which a new generation of artists would “write genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses”.”
— Freeman Dyson, Freeman Dyson explores the farthest limits of human imagination (The Guardian, 2009)
“No matter what happens, to move forward in the transhumanist age, we need to let go of our egos and our shallow sense of identity; in short, we need to get over ourselves. The permanence of our species lies in our ability to reason, think, and remember who we are and where we’ve been. The rest is just an impermanent shell that changes—and it has already been changing for tens of millions of years in the form of sentient evolution.”
— Zoltan Istvan, Why I Advocate for Becoming a Machine (Vice, August 10, 2015)
“Biology is simply not the best system out there for our species’ evolution. It’s frail, terminal, and needs to be upgraded.”
— Zoltan Istvan, Why I Advocate for Becoming a Machine (Vice, August 10, 2015)
“When we individually replace or augment a human body part—such as giving someone an artificial hip—most people don’t see that as becoming a cyborg. Additionally, it really doesn’t matter if the part replaced or improved is a heart with a robotic pump, or a knee with a titanium joint, or a penis with a built-in balloon for help stiffening—all technologies which already exist. We usually think of such transformation as needed medical treatment, or even elective vanity surgery in some cases.”
— Zoltan Istvan, Why I Advocate for Becoming a Machine (Vice, August 10, 2015)
“The degree to which human enhancements constitute a distinctive cluster of phenomena for which it would be appropriate to have a (multidisciplinary) academic subfield is debatable, however. One common argumentative strategy, used predominantly to buttress pro-enhancement positions, is to highlight the continuities between new controversial enhancement methods and old accepted ways of enhancing human capacities. How is taking modafinil fundamentally different from imbibing a good cup of tea? How is either morally different from getting a full night’s sleep? Are not shoes a kind of foot enhancement, clothes an enhancement of our skin? A notepad, similarly, can be viewed as a memory enhancement — it being far from obvious how the fact that a phone number is stored in our pocket instead of our brain is supposed to matter once we abstract from contingent factors such as cost and convenience. In one sense, all technology can be viewed as an enhancement of our native human capacities, enabling us to achieve certain effects that would otherwise require more effort or be altogether beyond our power.”
— Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu, Human Enhancement (2009)