ABSTRACT
Transhumanism, the research program devoted to increasing our physical and mental abilities and lengthening our lifespan, casts light on the term ‘responsible innovation’. The goals of the transhumanists strike some as ludicrous, but the space between transhumanist pipedreams and the sober plans of the research community are essentially the same. This implies that talk of ‘responsible innovation’ is a cheat, for there is nothing responsible, or ethical, about a research culture whose goals are implicitly infinite.
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Social commentary takes many guises. Frank Capra’s screwball comedy You Can’t Take It with You (1938) pits two families and two worldviews against one another, one work-based and hard-charging, the other home-based and artistic. Banker Anthony P. Kirby returns from Washington after having been granted a munitions monopoly by the government. He has also bought up the 12-block radius surrounding his last competitor in order to put him out of business. There’s just one property outstanding. Kirby’s real estate broker offers a massive sum for the place, but the homeowner, Grandpa Vanderhof, resists.
The Vanderhofs offer us an image of a community where people engage in play rather than pursue profit. As in all of Capra’s films, values of kindness triumph over productivity. At the movie’s end the Vanderhofs have won the Kirbys over: harmonica now in hand, Kirby plays a duet with Vanderhof as both families celebrate. It’s the triumph of one Marx over another – Harpo over Karl – where life focuses more on play than productivity.
Capra’s work is a historical footnote today. But the dynamic of You Can’t Take It with You is playing itself out among the Kirbys of our own era, those twenty-first-century captains of the current technological revolution who are based in Silicon Valley rather than Manhattan. Their goals, however, are more audacious than Kirby could have imagined, for they seek to remake the self as well as the wider world in the pursuit of infinite impact.
They have a name for these ambitions: transhumanism, the research program devoted to increasing our physical and mental abilities and lengthening our lifespan, even to the point of infinity. Of course, these goals, and especially immortality, have been ardently desired for as long as humans have understood that they are destined to die. But science and technology are now venturing into territory previously reserved for myth and religion: scientists and engineers are turning toward a technical program of directed evolution that Steve Fuller (2011) has called Humanity 2.0.
The goals of the transhumanists strike some as ludicrous. Bill Maris of Google Ventures has invested $2 billion in the life sciences in 2015, with the goal of living to 500: is this madness, or merely a scam? But this reaction takes transhumanism literally rather than seriously. Of course, transhumanism is a literal research project, with huge sums behind it both public and private. But the seriousness of transhumanism, yes or no, threatens to distract us from a larger point. Transhumanism may be a pipedream, but the clarity of its agenda has made explicit the implicit goals already driving science. Look at the research goals of public science agencies like the US National Institutes of Health (funded at ∼$34 billion/year), the US National Science Foundation (∼$7 billion/year), the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 (∼$8 billion/year) and European Research Council (∼$2 billion/year). All of them, a la Bush (Vannevar, that is), treat science as an infinite frontier. American, Western, nay world society has embraced the ideology of infinite innovation. And whether these agencies and the scientific and political communities they support grasp the point or not, innovation endlessly pursued is de facto the transhumanist project.
It seems, then, that the space between transhumanist pipedreams and the sober plans of the research community is not as wide as one might think: it shrinks to a distinction without a difference – or perhaps better said, the only differences come down to those of self-awareness, candor, and timeline. But if the transhumanist impulse lies at the root of the modern scientific project, this implies that we need to adjust our thinking on responsible innovation. What could ‘responsible’ mean for a project whose goal is infinite power? Can infinite power – or more modestly, significantly enhanced powers of human strength, intelligence, or longevity – ever be responsible? If the transhumanist project is nothing other than our current cultural research program made manifest, what does that say about the project of ‘responsible research and innovation’?
It raises the prospect that we have been fooling ourselves. In Technopoly (1992), Neil Postman discusses how our culture has evolved into a technocracy. By ‘rule by technique’ he means the way in which our innovations have come to dominate culture: ‘Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture’ – a culture of infinite innovation. Politicians have taken up the cry, humanity measured as inadequate for not keeping up with technology. Thus Newt Gingrich: ‘we need to move at the pace of technology, not the pace of bureaucracy’.Footnote1 Technological innovation eats away at every tradition, but no one blinks an eye when one of the leading corporations of our time unblushingly declares that its goal is to ‘move fast and break things’.
Responsible innovation, then, has become a cheat. To paraphrase Jonathon Moreno, talk of responsible innovation allows researchers to give science a green light disguised as a flashing yellow. There is a danger in making this point, for it threatens to place one outside of the Overton window of what counts as acceptable conversation. On the other hand, timidity serves us poorly, and we owe it to the citizenry that funds us to consider the possibility that the phrase ‘responsible innovation’ has become an oxymoron.
Let the point be put one final way. Researchers in responsible research and innovation should take seriously the concerns of Nietzsche. Nietzsche had something of a love affair with infinity, too, calling for the Ubermensch and the reevaluation of all values. But he was also acutely aware of the dangers of sailing beyond the horizon. The point makes up the subject matter of his most famous aphorism, Section 125 of the Gay Science, the parable of the Madman. Written in 1882, Nietzsche’s Madman is responding to the growing power of the Enlightenment’s mechanistic philosophy that had recently culminated in Darwin. The Madman notes that we have killed god – for what is a god if not the idea of natural law and natural limit? His Madman, however, is concerned that the greatness of this deed was too great for us:
How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? … is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us?
Humans need support, orientation, and solidarity. Indefinite scientific and technological advance threatens to place us in continually strange surroundings. Nietzsche’s Madman was concerned that infinite possibility could become infinite nothingness: ‘Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?’ Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor raised the same point: the freedom of infinite possibility is terrifying, and we need hedges to hem us in. The freedom that science and technology ushers into our lives may end up being more terrifying than liberating, grimpactful rather than positively impactful.
Notes on contributor
Robert Frodeman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas. His work ranges across environmental philosophy, the philosophy of science and technology policy, and the philosophy of interdisciplinarity. Frodeman is the author and/or editor of nine books, most recently Sustainable Knowledge: a theory of interdisciplinarity (Palgrave McMillan, 2013); and Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of twenty-first Century Philosophy (Roman and Littlefield), published in 2016.
Notes
1. Newt Gingrich, in ‘Trump has long vowed to slash government. Now the knives are finally coming out.’ Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, February 26, 2018.