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1
 Envisioning Politics 2.0

How AIs, cyborgs, and transhumanism can enhance democracy and

improve society

By Transpolitica
http://transpolitica.org/

Editors:
David W. Wood
Alexander J. Karran

2
Dedicated to everyone seeking to transcend the Politics 1.0 mindset

Copyright © 2015 Transpolitica

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

3
 List of chapters
Introduction: Why Politics 2.0? – by David W Wood

1. Zoltan Istvan’s “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”: a libertarian philosophical basis for

“Transhumanist” politics – by Roland Benedikter, Katja Siepmann, and Annabella McIntosh

2. Four political futures: which will you choose? – by David W Wood

3. How do governments add value to society? – by Bruce Lloyd

4. The benefits of digital democracy – by Walter L.S. Burrough and Kay Firth-Butterfield

5. Cyborgization: a possible solution to errors in human decision making – by Dana Edwards and
Alexander J Karran

6. Of mind and money: post-scarcity economics and human nature – by Stuart Mason Dambrot

7. Voluntary basic incomes in a reputation economy – by Michael Hrenka

8. Specifications: an engineer’s approach to upgrading politics – by René Milan

9. Extended longevity: an argument for increased social commitment – by MH Wake

10. Longevity, artificial intelligence and existential risks: opportunities and dangers – by Didier
Coeurnelle

11. Prolegomena to any future transhumanist politics – by Steve Fuller

4
 Why Politics 2.0?
By David W Wood, Executive Director, Transpolitica

Introduction

The single most important task of the next ten years is to find better ways of cooperating. In an age
of unprecedented crowds – both online and offline – the global human community urgently needs
social mechanisms that will encourage the wisdom of crowds rather than the folly of crowds.

Our existing methods of mutual coordination seem to produce more strife than harmony these days.
We’re struggling to cope with ever larger tensions and disruptions on the shrinking world stage. The
nation state, the multinational business firm, the free market, the non-governmental organisation,
the various international bodies of global coordination set up after the Second World War – all find
themselves deeply challenged by the myriad fast-evolving overlapping waves of stress of the early
twenty-first century.

We’re facing tragedies of the commons writ larger than ever before. The actions that make good
sense to smaller groups often add up, perversely, to disastrous outcomes for the larger community.
But attempts to coordinate actions to avoid such tragedies are falling foul of numerous deep-seated
conflicts of interest. These conflicts are made more intractable by the sweeping pace of change and
by the burgeoning multiplicity of interconnections. For the way forward, we’re going to need more
than “politics as usual”. We’ll need to move beyond Politics 1.0.

Politics 1.0 has worked wonders over the centuries, enabling productive human cooperation on
impressive scales. We can look back in heartfelt admiration at the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the
separation of powers, declarations of rights, emancipation bills, market liberalisation, protection of
minority interests, new deals, introductions of welfare states, and the gradual (although fitful)
reduction of inter-state violence. In each case, the effort required people to set aside their narrow,
personal interests, for the sake of an encompassing higher vision. Politics 1.0 has taken us a long
way. But the multidimensional, intersecting nature of present-day issues and opportunities requires
a new calibre of politics. For reasons I’ll explain shortly, I call that “Politics 2.0”.

The chapters ahead provide visions of what Politics 2.0 might look like. They express the thoughts,
hopes, and fears from a diverse mix of futurists, political thinkers, academics, and think-tank
members. They continue the discussion started in “Anticipating Tomorrow’s Politics”1, the first
Transpolitica book. It’s by no means the end of the discussion, but there’s lots of food for thought.

The future, if we can grasp it

In principle, we ought to be able to look ahead to a rosy future. In principle, sustainable abundance
is just around the corner. Provided we collectively get our act together, we have within our grasp a
profound cornucopia of renewable energy, material goods, health, longevity, intelligence, creativity,
freedom, and positive experience – plenty for everyone. This sustainable abundance can be attained
within one human generation, by wisely accelerating the green technology revolution – including

1
http://transpolitica.org/publications/anticipating-tomorrows-politics/

5
stem cell therapies, 3D printing, prosthetics, robotics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering,
synthetic biology, neuro-enhancement, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing.

In principle, the rich fruits of technology – sustainable abundance – can be provided for all, not just
for those who manage to rise to the top of the present-day social struggle. In principle, a bold
reorganisation of society can take place in parallel with the green technology revolution – so that
everyone can freely access the education, healthcare, and everything else needed to flourish as a full
member of society.

But these steps will involve a measure of coordination that seems to lie outside our present
capability. What has brought us here, so far, isn’t going to get us there.

Politics opposing innovation

In principle, human innovation can create the solutions to provide a sustainable abundance for
everyone. These solutions will take advantage of new technology to create new products and
services – better food, better healthcare, better education, better sources of energy, better
transport, better care for the environment, better waste-management, better leisure, better
entertainment, and so on.

But new products often provoke disquiet. They don’t always work as expected. They can often have
nasty unintended side-effects. They may fail to live up to the promises made for them, sometimes
even ruining people’s lives or despoiling the environment. For these reasons, society needs to keep
its collective eye on new products. Even when new products function as intended, they typically
result in marketplace losers as well as winners. In other words, new products can threaten vested
interests. These vested interests, therefore, also keep a collective eye on new products. The two sets
of watchfulness – the legitimate concern for the well-being of users of the product, and the more
contentious concern for the well-being of competitors to the product – often overlap. Handling this
murky overlap, with discernment and objectivity, is a key task in society’s self-governance.

Society can, with justification, take two different stances towards a specific innovation:

 The innovation is desirable, and should therefore be supported, perhaps by pricing

subsidies, tax breaks, and provision of central funding
 The innovation (as it stands) has undesirable aspects, and should be restricted or penalised
until such time as it conforms to various standards.

Again, in each case, motivations to protect users of the innovation can overlap with motivations to
protect the well-being of competitors of the innovation.

Consider some examples from recent news stories:

 Unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”) represent many booming business opportunities, with
their capabilities for surveillance and transport. But in December last year, a drone almost
collided2 with a commercial airliner near Heathrow. There are clearly safety implications if
unregulated drones are able to fly without restriction. The same as there are rules to ensure

2
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/07/drone-near-miss-passenger-plane-heathrow

6
 motor vehicles are roadworthy, there’s a need for systems to prevent aberrant drones from
causing havoc

 Innovative car hire firm Uber is running into legal controversy all over the world3, as existing
taxi drivers highlight cases of potential concern. For example, in Dec 2014, the Seoul Central
District Prosecutors’ Office issued a legal indictment against Uber (and against CEO Travis
Kalanick) for violating a Korean law prohibiting individuals or firms without appropriate
licenses from providing or facilitating transportation services

 The Californian company 23andMe provide genetic testing services direct to the public,
taking advantage of breakthroughs in technologies for DNA sequencing and analysis.
However, the FDA have issued a warning letter to 23andMe, instructing the company to
“immediately discontinue marketing”4 selected products and services. The FDA is concerned
about “the potential health consequences that could result from false positive or false
negative assessments for high-risk indications such as these”. It asserts: “a false positive
could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening,
or other morbidity-inducing actions, while a false negative could result in a failure to
recognize an actual risk that may exist”

 Growth in the usage of innovative “legal high” drugs has resulted in more than a doubling of
the number of deaths5 from these drugs in the UK over the last four years. As a result, the
new UK government has tabled a blanket ban on the creation or distribution of “any
substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive
effect”, with a prison sentence of up to seven years6 for people who contravene the ban.
The legislation has generated lots of opposition, for its heavy-handedness, and also for its
potential to obstruct innovative neuro-enhancement products

 In response to popular concern about the negative visual appearance of wind turbines
“covering the beautiful countryside”7, the new UK government is axing financial subsidies
that were previously benefiting the wind energy industry

 As an example of where government subsidies remain in place, supporting an energy

industry, fossil fuels subsidies totalling $5.3 trillion will apply in 20158, according to a report
released by the IMF (International Monetary Firm). For comparison, this figure is greater
than the total annual health spending of all the world’s governments.

Other examples could be mentioned from the fields of banking, telecommunications, security,
defence, and agriculture. I summarise the issues as follows:

3
http://uber-troubles.silk.co/
4
http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2013/ucm376296.htm
5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-32919063
6
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32919712
7
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/11685082/Wind-farm-subsidies-axed-to-stop-
turbines-covering-beautiful-countryside.html
8
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-
subsidies-says-imf

7
  Subsidies and regulations, applicable to innovative products, are a core and necessary part
of how society governs itself
 It is frequently a hard task to determine which subsidies and regulations ought to apply –
and when previous subsidies and regulations ought to be changed
 Legislation is often out-dated, being more concerned with avoiding repetitions of past
problems, rather than enabling future development
 Regulatory bodies are often “captured” by vested interests who have a strong desire to
preserve the status quo
 Politicians are frequently deeply out-of-depth in their understanding of the relevant
technologies; like regulatory bodies, they can fall victim to over-influence from existing
industries rather than enabling the emergence of new industries
 The increased pace of change of technological innovation makes the above issues worse.

None of this is an argument to dismantle politics, regulations, or the system of subsidies. Instead, it’s
an argument to improve these systems. It’s an argument for Politics 2.0.

Rather than technological innovation simply being the recipient of influence (both good and bad)
from politics, the direction of cause-and-effect can be reversed. Technological innovation can
transform politics, the same as it is transforming so many other areas of life.

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

As a comparison, consider the transformation that took place9 in usage of the World Wide Web
between around 1996 (“Web 1.0”) and 2006 (“Web 2.0”).

This transformation wasn’t just in terms of numbers of users of web browsers – moving from around
45 million to over one billion users over that period of time. Nor was it just that the web grew in size
from around 250,000 sites to more than 80 million. Instead, it was a change in the character of the
web, from a “mostly read-only web” to a “wildly read-write web”. (This analysis is due to pioneering
Web 2.0 analyst Dion Hinchcliffe10.) The result is that the web increasingly displayed collective
intelligence. Users submitted their own content to sites such as Wikipedia, Amazon (book reviews),
EBay, Facebook, YouTube, and so on. In turn, systems of collective evaluation highlighted the
content that was worthy of greater attention.

In more details, the transformation between 1.0 and 2.0 can be described as follows:

 Instead of the distribution of static intelligence through the network to its edges, P2P (peer-
to-peer) connections enabled multiplication of intelligence within the network
 Instead of a library (the readable web), there was a conversation (the writable web)
 Instead of there being a small number of fixed authority figures (“oracles”), there were
dynamic user-reputation systems, which enabled new figures to emerge quickly, with strong
reputations as judged by the community as a whole
 The model of “publishing and retrieval” was replaced by “collaboration and interaction”

https://web.archive.org/web/20061006135057/http://web2.wsj2.com/all_we_got_was_web_10_when_tim_
bernerslee_actually_gave_us_w.htm
10
http://dionhinchcliffe.com/ – see also the previous reference

8
  Instead of innovation coming primarily from companies, it increasingly came from feedback
and suggestions from users.

As for the improvement of the web, so also for the improvement of politics.

I’ve left probably the most important aspect of this analysis to the last. That is the critical role of
technology in enabling this social transformation. Whereas Web 1.0 was enabled by the
technologies of HTTP (hypertext transport) and HTML (hypertext layout), Web 2.0 was enabled by
technologies known as AJAX11 – asynchronous JavaScript and XML. The details don’t matter, but
what does matter is that powerful hardware and software were able to work together in
combination to enable smoother user experience with “web applications” than had ever happened
before. (Google Maps was one of the trailblazing examples. It’s hard to appreciate it nowadays, but
the swift response to user interaction on the Google Maps webpage was a delightful surprise when
first experienced.)

Innovation improving politics

The chapters in this volume explore various ways in which new technology might, analogously,
enable improved politics:

 With relevant expert knowledge being quickly brought to questions of subsidies, regulations,
standards, and so on – rather than politicians being out of their depths
 With a real “wisdom of crowds” supporting the decisions made by elected leaders, rather
than leaders having to deal with the “folly of crowds” often displayed by present-day
democracies
 With automated fact-checking taking place in real-time, rather than mistakes and errant
claims being allowed to influence political discussion for too long
 With humans improving their own cognitive skills, as part of a process we can call
cyborgization
 With external artificial intelligence augmenting the decision-making capabilities of humans
 With a competitive community of online educators creating ever-better communications
systems that highlight more clearly the key decisions that need to be taken, shorn of their
surrounding distractions.

To an extent, all political parties pay lip service to the idea that decision-making processes can be
improved by wise adoption of smart new technology. However, it is the transhumanist contingent in
politics that puts most focus on this possibility. Transhumanists vividly perceive the possibility of
profound transformation. As stated in the Transhumanist FAQ12, quoting philosopher Max More13

Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the
human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather
a comparatively early phase…

11

https://web.archive.org/web/20080702075113/http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000385
.php
12
http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/#answer_19
13
https://web.archive.org/web/19980110162302/http://www.extropy.com/neologo.htm

9
 “Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration
of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by
means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.”

Pioneering Swedish transhumanist Anders Sandberg expressed it like this14 (emphasis added):

Transhumanism is the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, both
physically, mentally and socially using rational methods.

I’ll end these introductory remarks by referring to an endorsement15 that was recently given by
Robert Kennedy III – the grandson of the Robert Kennedy16 who served as Attorney General in the
administration of JFK. The endorsement was in favour of Zoltan Istvan17, the candidate of the
Transhumanist Party for the US presidency in 2016. It reads in part:

Why are we shackled to a system of government designed before there were telephones? …
Zoltan Istvan is offering creative and innovative solutions to the urgent problems we face.
We can choose to live in a technological nightmare, or to harness the power of science for
the betterment of humanity.

As the energetic visible trailblazer for a new kind of politics, Istvan generates considerable feedback,
including both positive and negative. As you’ll see, some of the chapters in this book cover and
extend that feedback; other chapters explore different aspects of Politics 2.0.

The chapters ahead

Zoltan Istvan’s “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”: a libertarian philosophical basis for

“Transhumanist” politics

Roland Benedikter, Katja Siepmann, and Annabella McIntosh have collaborated to create a chapter
with the following introduction:

The current foundation phase of “Transhumanist” politics deserves a critical discussion of the
philosophical principles that implicitly underlie its new political organization. As part of the
effort towards a self-critical evaluation of political transhumanism, which is undoubtedly still
in a very early phase of development, this chapter discusses the philosophy drafted by the
founder of the “Transhumanist Party of the USA”, Zoltan Istvan, in his bestselling novel “The
Transhumanist Wager” (2013) dedicated to develop the vision of a better society. Istvan
called the philosophy underlying his meta-national, if not global, vision “Teleological
Egocentric Functionalism”.

We discuss the achievements, contradictions and dialectics of and within this philosophy; its
possible relation to realistic social policy programs; as well as the potential implications and

14
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Intro/definitions.html
15

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=444430459063839&set=a.161095190730702.1073741826.10000
4906654490
16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy
17
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/should-a-transhumanist-be_b_5949688.html

10
 consequences. The goal is to achieve a more considered overall discourse at the contested
new ideological interface between humanism and transhumanism which could define an
influential zeitgeist of our time.

Roland Benedikter is Research Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies18 of
the University of California at Santa Barbara, Senior Affiliate of the Edmund Pellegrino Center on
Clinical Bioethics of Georgetown University, Trustee of the Toynbee Prize Foundation Boston, Senior
Research Scholar of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington DC, and Full member of the Club
of Rome.

Katja Siepmann is a socio-political analyst, Senior Research Fellow of the Council on Hemispheric
Affairs19 Washington D.C., Member of the German Council on Foreign Relations, and Lecturer at the
Faculty of Interdisciplinary Cultural Sciences of the European University Frankfurt/Oder.

Annabella McIntosh is a freelance political writer based in Berlin, Germany.

Four political futures: which will you choose?

David Wood, Executive Director of Transpolitica, and chair of London Futurists20, introduces his
chapter as follows:

Forget left wing versus right wing. The political debate in the medium-term future (10-20
years) will be dominated, instead, by a new set of arguments. These arguments debate the
best set of responses to the challenges and opportunities posed by fast-changing technology.

In this essay, I’ll outline four positions: technosceptical, technoconservative,

technolibertarian, and technoprogressive. I’ll argue that the first two are non-starters, and I’ll
explain why I personally favour the technoprogressive stance over the technolibertarian one.

How do governments add value to society?

Bruce Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management, London South Bank University21. He
argues in his chapter that, in the wake of current discussions about the future of politics, there is a
fundamental question we all need to be asking. What are governments for? Alternatively expressed:
How do governments add value to society?

He claims it is difficult, if not impossible, to find one simple answer to this question. In practice,
there are two fundamentally different – potentially conflicting – pressures that need to be
reconciled. The first pressure is the re-distribution dimension. The second is the need to effectively
exploit potential and actual economies of scale.

There is also a third pressure, which needs to be integrated into policy initiatives: the need to
develop structures that are the most favourable to effective positive innovation.

18
http://www.orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu/people/roland-benedikter
19
http://www.coha.org/staff/senior-research-fellows/
20
http://londonfuturists.com/
21
http://bus.lsbu.ac.uk/cibs/members/lsbu-staff/lloyd

11
The chapter contends that, unless the interplay of these fundamental pressures is given greater
attention at all levels of government decision-making, we are unlikely to be able to make progress
on the other important challenges, mentioned elsewhere in this book, that we all face in the
decades ahead. This will result in our future being much more precarious than it needs to be.

The benefits of digital democracy

Walter L.S. Burrough and Kay Firth-Butterfield introduce their chapter as follows:

This Chapter discusses the way in which U.S. citizens could be encouraged to re-engage with
the electoral process and why such engagement will matter. In doing so consideration is
given to the way in which such engagement can be facilitated by the development of an AI
‘trusted agent’, and the way in which true democracy reveals the uniqueness of the human
characteristic to care about community.

The authors of this chapter note that the views they express in this chapter are their own and do not
represent the views of any organizations for which they work, consult or teach.

Walter Burrough is a PhD candidate at the Serious Games Institute22, University of Coventry. His
research builds upon his Masters degree in Education, his work as a science teacher with “at risk”
students in high needs schools, and his experience in database driven software development. He is
interested in how to best design personalised interventions that enhance individuals’ behaviours and
decision making using mobile technologies.

Kay Firth-Butterfield is the Chief Officer of the Ethics Advisory Panel of Lucid23. Lucid is bringing to
market Cyc which is, arguably, the world’s only strong artificial intelligence. Previously, she worked
as a barrister, mediator, arbitrator, business owner, professor and judge in the United Kingdom. In
the United States, she has taught at the undergraduate and law school levels and worked as a
professional lecturer. She is a humanitarian with a strong sense of social justice and has advanced
degrees in Law and International Relations.

Cyborgization: a possible solution to errors in human decision making

Dana Edwards and Alexander J Karran have collaborated to create a chapter with the following
abstract:

Accelerating social complexity in combination with outstanding problems like attention

scarcity and information asymmetry contribute to human error in decision making.
Democratic institutions and markets both operate under the assumption that human beings
are informed rational decision makers working with perfect information, situation awareness,
and unlimited neurological capacity. We argue that, although these assumptions are
incorrect, they could to a large extent be mediated by a process of cyborgization, up to and
including electing cyborgs into positions of authority.

Dana Edwards is a Transpolitica Consultant.

22
http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/
23
http://lucid.ai/

12
Alexander J Karran is a Transpolitica Consultant and co-editor of this volume. Alex also has the
distinction24 of being probably the first candidate for parliamentary election in Europe to stand
under an openly transhumanist party banner – in the constituency of Liverpool Walton during the UK
General Election of May 2015.

Of mind and money: post-scarcity economics and human nature

Stuart Mason Dambrot urges in his chapter for a “Revolution through evolution”. He summarises his
chapter as follows:

 In a medical model, our myriad problems can be seen as symptoms of a central underlying
condition, rather than cultural problems that can be addressed by social policies
 That causative condition is a direct and primary consequence of our hominid evolutionary
neurobiological heritage
 The path forward to an enlightened world is for each individual to physiologically evolve
beyond that heritage
 We can wait for thousands of generations (natural evolution is slow) or use the science and
technology our brain has manifested to achieve that step in a matter of decades
 The decision is ours to make.

Based in New York City, Stuart is an interdisciplinary synthesist, futurist and science communicator;
the founder of Critical Thought25; and creator and host of Critical Thought | TV26, an online
discussion channel featuring in-depth conversations with transformative individuals in the sciences,
arts and humanities.

Voluntary basic incomes in a reputation economy

The abstract for the chapter by Michael Hrenka is as follows:

Advanced reputation systems provide the basis for an emerging reputation economy, whose
functioning principles are explained in this chapter. In turn, a reputation economy provides
unprecedented possibilities and incentives for voluntary basic income systems. There are
multiple ways in which a mature reputation economy could make voluntary basic incomes
feasible, and these different routes are explored in detail. Voluntary basic incomes have the
clear advantage of not requiring large political interventions in order to operate successfully,
and thus could be implemented faster and easier. These voluntary basic incomes could play
an alternative or complementary role to a more conventional universal basic income.
However, supportive political actions should facilitate the development of a highly functional
reputation economy, in order to provide better conditions for the emergence of voluntary
basic incomes.

24
https://transhumanistparty.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-transhumanist-candidate/
25
http://criticalthought.com/
26
http://criticalthought.com/critical-thought-tv/

13
Michael lives in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and describes himself as “a philosopher
who studied mathematics and wants to upgrade the world”. He blogs at radivis.com27 and hosts the
Fractal Future Forum at forum.fractalfuture.net28.

Specifications: an engineer’s approach to upgrading politics

René Milan has been a psychedelic transhumanist for forty years and a member of WTA (now
Humanity+) for fifteen. He has worked as a clinical psychologist and transpersonal psychotherapist
for twenty five years and as a computer programmer and technical analyst for thirty. He currently
lives in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain.

In his chapter, René presents a draft of specifications for an upgrade to current politics with the aim
of providing an “improved user experience”. He attempts to identify the drivers and mechanics of
current politics, determine what effect they have on the people subjected to them (“users”) and
offer conclusions on how they could and should be improved for a Politics 2.0 release.

Extended longevity: an argument for increased social commitment

MH Wake, a social anthropologist and statistician, argues in her chapter that

 Recent improvements in life expectancy are the outcome of social forces – developments in
medicine and in social welfare – which were specific to the twentieth century
 There is a risk of increasingly fostering a mistaken focus on individual choices, as if these are
the main determinants of public health outcomes
 Continuing progress in life expectancy is by no means inevitable, without the adoption of
deliberate policies to promote longevity.

Longevity, artificial intelligence and existential risks: opportunities and dangers

Didier Coeurnelle is co-chair of Heales29 (Healthy Life Extension Society) and Spokesperson of the
AFT (Association Française Transhumaniste) - Technoprog30. He argues in his chapter that:

 Given the extraordinary difficulty of prolonging the maximal lifespan of human beings,
focusing as much Artificial General Intelligence as possible on longevity could be the most
useful goal of all at the beginning of the 21st century
 If successful, giving the opportunity to live longer lives could be among other things a very
important factor in decreasing the violent trends present in each and every of us
 Successful or unsuccessful, giving the absolute priority to artificial intelligence to protect and
to improve human beings will decrease the risk of artificial intelligence destroying or hurting
us.

27
http://radivis.com/
28
http://forum.fractalfuture.net/
29
http://www.heales.org/
30
http://transhumanistes.com/

14
Prolegomena to any future transhumanist politics

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick31. He
graduated from Columbia University in History & Sociology before gaining an M.Phil. from
Cambridge and PhD from Pittsburgh, both in the History and Philosophy of Science.

He raises in his chapter the provocative question: Can transhumanism avoid becoming the Marxism
of the 21st century? The chapter concludes by recommending that transhumanists should ally with a
proactionary ‘ecomodernism’, which specifically targets energy as a locus for innovation.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to:

 Alexander Karran, for his sterling work reviewing and suggesting improvements to the
chapters in this book
 The team of Transpolitica consultants who collectively reviewed many iterations of draft
chapters on our shared Slack installation
 All authors, for frequently processing change requests and answering queries in a prompt
and courteous manner.

The book cover is based on a design by Alberto Rizzoli32.

Towards the future

The analysis in Envisioning Politics 2.0 will be continued:

 Online, in response to chapters as they are made available on the Transpolitica website33
 In the book “Anticipating 2040: Roadmap to sustainable abundance” which is scheduled for
publication in early October 2015 (this book is being produced via Fast Future Publishing34).

31
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academicstaff/sfuller/
32
http://albertorizzoli.com/
33
http://transpolitica.org/publications/envisioning-politics-2-0/
34
http://fastfuturepublishing.com

15
 1. Zoltan Istvan’s “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”: A
Libertarian Philosophical Basis for “Transhumanist” Politics
A viable approach towards a sustainable political agenda?

By Roland Benedikter, Katja Siepmann, and Annabella McIntosh

Summary

The current foundation phase of “Transhumanist” politics deserves a critical discussion of the
philosophical principles that implicitly underlie its new political organization. As part of the effort
towards a self-critical evaluation of political transhumanism, which is undoubtedly still in a very early
phase of development, this chapter discusses the philosophy drafted by the founder of the
“Transhumanist Party of the USA”, Zoltan Istvan, in his bestselling novel “The Transhumanist Wager”
(2013) dedicated to develop the vision of a better society. Istvan called the philosophy underlying his
meta-national, if not global, vision “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”.

We discuss the achievements, contradictions and dialectics of and within this philosophy; its possible
relation to realistic social policy programs; as well as the potential implications and consequences.
The goal is to achieve a more considered overall discourse at the contested new ideological interface
between humanism and transhumanism which could define an influential zeitgeist of our time.

Introduction: The Framework

In recent years the importance of technology in daily life has been growing steadily. This trend is
reflected by the rise of technology and its applications to ever more crucial factors within the
economy, the health care sector, the military and political rhetoric. Among the systemic factors that
are shaping globalization from a medium- and long-term perspective, technology has indeed
become probably the most influential factor – to the point that critics speak of a “universalization”
of technology in our time that is replacing the former lead roles of politics and economics.

Indeed, the computer and internet have revolutionized society since the 1990’s; genetics, bio- and
neurotechnology have modified aspects of our image of the human being.35 Furthermore, new
technologies and its derivatives have also profoundly changed the ways we look at the desirable
future. To a certain extent, technology has not only changed the traditional - including ideological -
utopias, but has itself become the most important utopia, if not the embodiment of a utopian ideal
as such. Technology as ideology is in the process of displacing most other ideological approaches
both from the left and the right. This displacement has become possible given that technology -as
objective process- can claim to be a new “neutral” ground between traditional political factions and
their mostly “binary” inclinations that shaped the 19th and 20th centuries.36

35
R. Benedikter, J. Giordano and K. Fitzgerald: The Future of the (Self-)Image of the Human Being in the Age of
Transhumanism, Neurotechnology and Global Transition. In: Futures. The Journal for Policy, Planning and
Futures Studies. Volume 42: Special issue “Global Mindset Change” (ed. J. Gidley). Elsevier 2010, p. 1102-1109.
36
Cf. R. Benedikter, K. Siepmann and A. McIntosh: The Age of Transhumanist Politics Has Begun. Will it Change
Traditional Concepts of Left and Right? In: In: Leftist Review. Commentaries on Politics, Science, Philosophy
and Religion. Edited by Thomas Parslow. Portland, Oregon, 3 Parts, 06 March 2015ff., pp. 1-18,

16
I: The “Transhumanist” Movement And Its “Proto-Political” Character

As a consequence, a technology-inspired “transhumanist movement”37 has begun to arise out of (as

at yet mostly Western) civil societies to start to influence opinion-makers and governments, and is
increasingly imitated in its basic ideas by non-democratic governments in Asia and elsewhere. The
main “transhumanist” goal as far as it has been elaborated, is not only to further modernize
civilization, but to overcome the existing human condition, which it regards as in principle still
unsatisfactory, given its dependency on factors outside human influence.38

The literal meaning of “transhumanism” is, as the term suggests, to “go beyond the existing human
being”39 through as free and open as possible application of technology to all sectors of human
activity. But - more important - the meaning of “transhumanism” is also about merging technology
with human biology, in order to extend human lifespan dramatically and, if possible, to eventually
defeat death.

Zoltan Istvan, one of the most publicly present and well-known advocates of transhumanism, stated
clearly but controversially:

What are transhumanists to do in a world where science and technology are quickly
improving and will almost certainly overcome human mortality in the next 30 years? Will
there be a great civil rights debate and clash around the world? Or will the deathist culture
change, adapt, or even subside?

First, let's look at some hard facts. Most deaths in the world are caused by aging and disease.
Approximately 150,000 people die every day around the world, causing devastating loss to
loved ones and communities. Of course, it should not be overlooked that death also brings
massive disruption to family finances and national economies.

On the medical front, the good news is that gerontologists and other researchers have made
major gains recently in the fields of life extension, anti-aging research, and longevity science.
In 2010, some of the first studies of stopping and reversing aging in mice took place. They
were partially successful and proved that 21st Century science and medicine had the goods
to overcome most types of deaths from aging. Eventually, we'll also wipe out most diseases.
Through modern medicine, the 20th Century saw a massive decrease of deaths from polio,
measles, and typhoid, amongst others.

http://www.leftistreview.com/2015/03/06/the-age-of-transhumanist-politics-has-begun/rolandbenedikter/.
Reprint of the text in one part under the title: The Age of Transhumanist Politics Has Begun. Will It Change
Traditional Concepts of Left and Right? In: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, April 27, 2015,
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/benedikter20150427 and in: Telepolis. Journal of Media, Technology, Art
and Society. Edited by Dr. habil. Florian Rötzer. 19. Jahrgang, Heinz Heise Verlag Hannover 2015, 12.04.2015,
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/44/44626/1.html.
37
N. Bostrom: A History of Transhuman Thought. In: Journal of Evolution & Technology, Vol. 14, April 2005,
http://www.jetpress.org/volume14/bostrom.pdf. Cf. World Transhumanist Association:
http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/transhumanism.htm.
38
N. Bostrom: Transhumanist Values. In: Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005),
http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html.
39
J. Hewitt: An Interview with Zoltan Istvan, leader of the Transhumanist Party and 2016 presidential
contender. In: Extremetech, October 31, 2014, http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192385-an-interview-
with-zoltan-istvan-leader-of-the-transhumanist-party-and-2016-presidential-contender.

17
 On the heels of some of these longevity and medical triumphs, a number of major
commercial ventures have appeared recently, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into
the field of anti-aging and longevity research. Google's Calico, Human Longevity LLC, and
Insilico Medicine are just some of them.

Google Ventures' President Bill Maris, who helps direct investments into health and science
companies, recently made headlines by telling Bloomberg, “If you ask me today, is it possible
to live to be 500? The answer is yes.”40

As a consequence, Istvan outlines the resulting political and social attempts of transhumanists to
make the most out of this new potential by starting a broad public debate, including dialogue with
the traditionalist and religious stripes of the population:

Recently, a number of transhumanists, including myself who is an atheist, have attempted to

work more closely with governmental, religious, and social groups that have for centuries
endorsed the deathist culture. Transhumanists are trying to get those groups to realize we
are not necessarily wanting to live forever. Transhumanists simply want the choice and
creation over our own earthly demise, and we don't want to leave it to cancer, or an
automobile accident, or aging, or fate.

To change the deathist culture in America and abroad, it's important for people to
understand that lengthening lives and having the ability to overcome human mortality is not
something that has to be seen as clashing with religion. I've often told Christian friends, for
example, that living longer could be seen as a way for religious missionaries to spread their
message further - to save more people if that's how they want to view it.

Longer lifespans and more control over our biological selves will only make the world a
better place, with more permanent institutions, more time with our loved ones, and more
stable economies.

In the end, transhumanism is not really trying to overcome deathist culture, but get it to
understand that transhuman culture can also stand functionally next to it, helping the aims
of everyone involved. Together, we can find the middle ground, and give everyone the
choice to follow whatever path they want when it concerns dying or not dying in the 21st
Century.41

II: Another Transhumanist goal: Cognitive expansion

Another “transhumanist” goal is to expand and enhance human perception and cognitive potentials
through the systematic application and broadest possible employment of neurotechnology, Brain-
Computer Interfaces (BCI’s) and Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI’s). These technologies can provide
direct interfaces between the human brain, the spinal cord and various technological devices

40
Z. Istvan: Can Transhumanism Overcome A Widespread Deathist Culture? In: The Huffington Post, May 26,
2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/can-transhumanism-overcom_b_7433108.html.
41
Z. Istvan: Can Transhumanism Overcome A Widespread Deathist Culture?, loc cit.

18
through implants (and other interface technology), and such technologies have already reached a
noticeable level of maturity and applicability.42

Given their positive, if sometimes flamboyant basic drive, “transhumanists” are gaining relevance in
several sectors of society. This is particularly the case with regard to those sectors of innovation
which are involved in discussions about the possibility - and desirability – of future scenarios for
mankind under “super-technological” conditions. These sectors include the debates about a rising
“global imaginary”43; about what humans should become both body- and consciousness-wise44; and
about the ethics of technology application both in the broad vision and with regard to more specific
anthropological implications and consequences in particular.45

The most important point to consider here is that all these topics are in essence “contextual
political” dimensions and thus “proto-political” in themselves by definition. In other words: Although
mainly about imaginations as interconnected with technological advances, transhumanist ideas
about what the human being may (and should) become, bear (willingly or unwillingly) remarkable
political and social implications. These implications are presently implicit both in the topics
addressed and in their specific interpretation by transhumanist ideology, including the respective
public narratives. The politics inherent in transhumanism await being clarified, sooner or later, by
public debate and analysis in explicit ways. This analysis needs to rise above the critique of the
(unavoidable?) ethical limits of both traditional politics and transhumanism46, to highlight the socio-
political potentials of technology in a globalized, accelerating, transdisciplinary and “fluid” social,
cultural and institutional framework.

42
R. Benedikter and J. Giordano: Neurotechnology: New Frontiers for Policy. In: Journal of European
Government PEN: Pan European Networks. Section: Science and Technology. Issue 3 (June), Bruxelles,
Strassbourg and London 2012, pp. 204-207.
43
M. Steger: The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global
War on Terror, Oxford University Press 2008.
44
R. Benedikter and J. Giordano: The Outer and the Inner Transformation of the Global Social Sphere through
Technology: The State of Two Fields in Transition. In: New Global Studies. Edited by Saskia Sassen, Nayan
Chanda, Akira Iriye and Bruce Mazlish. De Gruyter and Berkeley Electronic Press, Berkeley and New York 2011,
Volume 5, Issue 1 (2011), pp. 1-17,
http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ngs.2011.5.2/ngs.2011.5.2.1129/ngs.2011.5.2.1129.xml.
45
R. Benedikter and J. Giordano: Neuroscience and Neurotechnology: Impacting Human Futures, Springer
Political Science, New York 2015 (forthcoming). Cf. J. Giordano and R. Benedikter: Integrative convergence in
Neuroscience/Neurotechnology. On the engagement of computational approaches in
neuroscience/neurotechnology and deterrence. Book chapter 3.2.1 in: H. Cabayan, W. Casebeer, D. DiEuliis, J.
Giordano and N. D. Wright (ed.s): U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff White Paper:
Leveraging Neuroscientific and Neutechnological (NeuroS&T) Developments with Focus on Influence and
Deterrence in a Networked World. A Strategic Multilayer (SMA) Publication. Washington DC: Pentagon Press
2014 (April), pp. 74-79; and J. Giordano and R. Benedikter: Toward a Systems Continuum: On the Use of
Neuroscience and Neurotechnology to Assess and Affect Aggression, Cognition and Behaviour. In: D. DiEuliis
and H. Cabayan (eds.): U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff White Paper: Topics in the
Neurobiology of Aggression: Implications for Deterrence. A Strategic Multilayer (SMA) Publication.
Washington DC: Pentagon Press 2013 (February), pp. 68-85.
46
N. Bostrom: Technological Revolutions: Ethics and Politics in the Dark. In: M. de Nigel et al (eds.): Nanoscale:
Issues and Perspectives for the Nano-Century, Wiley & Sons 2007, pp. 129-152,
http://www.nickbostrom.com/revolutions.pdf.

19
III: 2014: The Transformation of Transhumanism From “Worldview Movement” To
Applicable Political Force

The constellation of ideologies and activities that comprises the transhumanist movement reached a
somewhat new phase in 2014, with the outreach of transhumanist ideology from civil society to
politics. Although there have existed since the 1980s several very well organized transhumanist and,
more broadly speaking, “human enhancement” associations and groups able to attract synergies and
sympathies both on national and international levels, and although there have been many well-
known philanthropists providing funding over that time, 2014 brought something new, at least from
a formal viewpoint. The year saw the more or less simultaneous founding of transhumanist political
parties in several countries, including the U.S. and the UK, as well as an ongoing process in Germany
and Austria towards such initiatives, several of them loosely interconnected within the more general
project of a “Transhumanist Party Global”47. In the first half of 2015, all these new parties were
preparing for general and presidential elections such as those of May 2015 in the UK48 and those of
2016 in the USA, with the goal of gaining impact on big-picture policy decisions. All of them were
directly or indirectly (i.e. through the hoped-for influence upon other, more important political
parties and actors) aspiring to political power in order to maximize the impact of what is, compared
to the past, a radical technological agenda for Western societies.

Most important, the publicly well-known author, columnist, adventurer and transhumanist Zoltan
Istvan (born 1973)49, who might be viewed by now as a leading libertarian political figure of the
transhumanist movement, in November 2014 founded the “Transhumanist Party of the United
States of America”50 with the goal to run for U.S. presidency in 201651. Istvan elaborated - as one of
his main ideological bases - the philosophy of “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”52, a fictional
transhumanist system of ideas developed in his best-selling book “The Transhumanist Wager”
(2013)53.

This philosophy, although not the only one within the still very pluriform and diverse transhumanist
movement, is partly challenged by prominent leftist and progressive transhumanists. However, it
does appear to be the first clear condensation of existing transhumanist ideology that is, to a certain
extent (as will be discussed), likely to drive the transhumanist movement’s political engagement.
Because technology is declared in essence as “neutral” within transhumanism, the current
Transhumanist Party claims to have a structure and agenda beyond the traditional dialectics
between left and right. However, the same “classical” dichotomy between left and right, as exists in
other parties, seems to characterize its present state and constellation. This can be seen with

47
Transhumanist Party Global (TPG): http://transhumanistpartyglobal.org.
48
G. Volpicelli: Transhumanists Are Writing Their Own Manifesto For The UK General Election. In.
Motherboard Journal, January 14, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-transhumanist-manifesto-for-
the-uk-general-election.
49
Zoltan Istvan’s Homepage: http://www.transhumanistwager.com/.
50
Transhumanist Party USA: Putting Science, Health, and Technology at the Forefront of American Politics,
http://www.transhumanistparty.org/.
51
Z. Istvan: Should a Transhumanist Run for U.S. President? In: The Huffington Post, August 10, 2014,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/should-a-transhumanist-be_b_5949688.html.
52
Teleological Egocentric Functionalism (TEF): http://www.transhumanistwager.com/ThePhilosophy.html.
53
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, Futurity Imagine Media 2013, http://www.transhumanistwager.com/
and http://www.amazon.de/The-Transhumanist-Wager-Zoltan-Istvan/dp/0988616114.

20
“progressivists” (or “collectivists”) in the U.S. sympathizing with a more “leftist” UK faction (which is
not least a product of the traditionally rather “leftist” UK healthcare system), and with the
“Technoprogressive Declaration”54 propagated as an alternative to the libertarian approaches of
Istvan and his followers within the overall transhumanist movement. As detailed and sharp-minded
as the “progressivists” contributions are, though, the libertarian “Transhumanist Wager” still
remains the defining work of the transhumanists’ political and social agenda in the view of large
parts of the broader public, because of Istvan’s outstanding public outreach.55

Therefore, at the start of an inquiry into the ideological bases of transhumanist politics, the question
must be posed to what extent “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, or TEF, might be able to
impact the future of transhumanism as a movement, and if and how it might become influential for
politics in the broader sense beyond the inner transhumanist debate. Although there might be
restricted implementation potentials for TEF in applied day-to-day politics, there will be most likely
many mutual influences between TEF and the “Transhumanist Party of the USA”’s practical political
aims.

IV: Pillars of Transhumanism

In order to analyze “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism” and its political potentials, it is first
necessary to take a closer view of transhumanism, as that forms the departing basis of TEF, and may
therefore indicate how TEF fits into the greater array of posthuman and transhuman philosophies of
the present.

The philosopher Max More (a telling pseudonym, as transhumanism is clearly about “maximizing
and more” in every sense!) often addresses issues of transhumanism in his speeches and papers. He
explains the basic transhumanist philosophical approach through its key theoretical and practical
elements. According to More, transhumanism is a mindset which strives to overcome the physical
and psychological barriers of being human, by rationally using technology and science to their fullest
and without inhibition. The most significant aims of transhumanism are a distinctive extension of
life, improved intelligence and the “optimization” of the human body. To ensure that this mindset
and its aims will be supported by current society, the transhumanist movement claims to be based in
both its ideology and its aspirations on rationality, including partly the tradition of rationalism.56

Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the
University of Oxford57 and of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology58,
includes in his definition of transhumanism “The study of the ramifications, promises and potential

54
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies (IEET): Technoprogressive Declaration – Transvision. In: IEET,
November 22, 2014, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/wood20150305.
55
For example V. Larson: Transhumanist novel by Zoltan Istvan sparks intense dialog among futurists. In:
Marinij.com, December 19, 2013, http://www.marinij.com/general-news/20131219/transhumanist-novel-by-
zoltan-istvan-sparks-intense-dialog-among-futurists. Cf. G. Prisco: The Transhumanist Wager. In: Ray Kurzweil
Homepage, May 15, 2013, http://www.kurzweilai.net/book-review-the-transhumanist-wager.
56
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transhumanismus e.V. (Hrsg.) (2005): Reader zum Transhumanismus. Würzburg:
http://www.detrans.de, p. 7.
57
Oxford Future of Humanity Institute: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/.
58
The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology:
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/future-tech.

21
dangers of the use of science, technology, creativity, and other means to overcome fundamental
human limitations.”59

In such a framework, most transhumanists (in the first instance independent of their political
inclination) explicitly promote a fundamental “enhancing transformation” of humans, in particular of
human bodies and human consciousness. This position can be clarified in three parts, firstly by
transhumanists being part of a long historical tradition consisting in the perpetual strivings of
humans to overcome their boundaries, which therefore can be understood as a primordial human
instinct, without which for example the history of medical advances would not have been possible,
achieved as it was through a centuries-long battle against theology.60 Secondly, transhumanists claim
that postmodern high-tech times (since the 1990s) make it possible to extend further beyond
previous human options than ever before, and to take the endeavor of human emancipation against
bodily and natural restrictions to a new level.61 Thirdly, transhumanists regard it as human destiny
and determination to take an active role in human-technology development, including the
development of the human body which was subject to nature until only recently, but which can now
in their view and to a formerly unthinkable extent be “transferred” to human responsibility.62

V: “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, or: The Philosophy of Becoming an

“Omnipotender”

On these bases, the book “The Transhumanist Wager” by Zoltan Istvan (2013) introduces a
transhumanist philosophy called “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, which is developed by the
fictional protagonist and transhumanist Jethro Knights (another potentially telling name, since
according to their mainstream discourse patterns, a number of transhumanists seem to conceive
themselves as “knights” in the present “battle” for a better future against those unwilling, or
incapable of recognizing the new technological opportunities – including a well-pondered self-irony
hinting to “Star Wars”). Jethro Knights begins to evolve the TEF philosophy after a near-death
experience, which brings him to the conviction that his aim in life must be to conquer death, and this
core tenet also applies to all transhumanists worldwide.63 While developing TEF, the key terms
“omnipotender” and “transhumanist wager” are introduced at an early stage in the novel and then
explained throughout the book’s story. According to the story, being the “omnipotender” means to
become “the elite transhuman champion [and] the ideal and zenith of life extension and human
enhancement populace.”64

Further, Jethro Knights as an individual is characterized as uncompromising, striving for the most
possible power and improvement. Thus, he will overcome biological limitations and find a lasting
form of life, and in the end immortality.65 The protagonist describes the significance of his
transformation of consciousness, from humanistic individual to radically egocentric, as “advancing
59
N. Bostrom: The Transhumanist FAQ 1.5 (2003). Word-Document from the internet:
transhumanism.org/resources/faq15.doc.
60
Cf. P. Unschuld: What is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing. University of California
Press 2009, http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520257665.
61
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transhumanismus e.V. (Hrsg.), loc cit., p. 7f.
62
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transhumanismus e.V. (Hrsg.), loc cit., p. 7f.
63
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 19.
64
Ibid., p. 33.
65
Ibid., p. 33.

22
my memories, my value system, my emotions, my creativity, my reasoning”66, and therefore as an
entire “enhancement of consciousness”. In this view, to transform an individual’s consciousness
does not only mean to question one’s experiences, knowledge and culture, but in doing so to think
and act as “reasonably” as possible. However, the exact meaning of the term “reasonable” is never
clarified in detail by Istvan, and never compared to competing usages of the term, historically or in
the present.67 When applied to individuals as “systems nested in collectives nested in societies”68, as
neuroethicists John Shook of the University at Buffalo and James Giordano of Georgetown
University(2014) define them, reasonable in this context could mean to examine, revise and in some
cases replace current values, norms, social and governmental structures in order to reach a
“transhuman” world that acknowledges the human in transition – a world in which everyone can
have at least the potential to become their own most efficient and enduring self, in ways that
comport with social citizenship at large and small scales. However, the question remains as to
whether the version of transhumanism implied by Shook and Giordano aligns with those espoused
by Bostrom and Istvan.

VI: “To love life means to become a Transhumanist”

Besides these obvious ambiguities, the “Transhumanist Wager” is clear in one point: The “wager” is
about the decision each individual must make whether or not to be part of the transformation into a
transhumanist world. In face of this decision, the “wager” implies the most primordial (and thus
maybe most important) statement of TEF:

If you love life, you will safeguard that life, and strive to extend and improve it for as long as
possible. Anything else you do while alive, any other opinion you have, any other choice you
make to not safeguard, extend, and improve that life, is a betrayal of that life. (It) is a
betrayal of the possible potential of your brain.69

In essence this subtly suggests that to love life means to become a transhumanist almost
automatically, and logically.

As a result, TEF - like transhumanism in general - considers the advancement of research and
technology to be its first priority, as this prioritization is most likely to realize the transhumanist
agenda through science. Science - and its outcome, technology - thus becomes the centerpiece of
virtually “everything”, with politics, economics, culture and religion taking second place, as servants
of the natural sciences. This in essence makes the humanities irrelevant, since they stem from
centuries ago and will therefore have to be rebuilt from the scratch for the new transhuman world
that arises.

Focusing on the individual this radically might lead to the conclusion that TEF does not pursue any
kind of personal relationship between transhumanists and ultimately “omnipotenders”. But on the
contrary, TEF asserts that while it is true that “a transhumanist has no immediate concern for

66
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 55.
67
Ibid., p. 280.
68
J. Shook and J. Giordano: A Principled and Cosmopolitan Neuroethics: Considerations for International
Relevance. In: Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2014, 9:1, http://www.peh-
med.com/content/9/1/1.
69
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 270.

23
others”70 she or he is nevertheless able to have intimate relationships with others, such as Jethro
Knights has with his wife, friends and co-workers. According to Istvan, the reason for this is that
while transforming into the omnipotender, the transhumanist individual is still dependent on the
knowledge of and inspiration by others; and as such can experience happiness through interacting
with others. Therefore, in the vision of TEF a transhumanist society encourages family cohesion as
long as it is reflected through reason and in harmony with transhumanist values.71 When this is not
the case, i.e. if one individual has lost its value to the other or is in any way in contradiction to
transhuman development, then this individual will lose everything and finally be forced out of
transhuman society.72

VII: How to Deal with Conflict If You Are an “Omnipotender”?

Taking these aspects together, it might seem surprising that while TEF supports upholding peace for
as long as possible, it legitimates the use of “whatever means necessary”73 - including violence -,
when it comes to conflict situations with anti-transhumanists. This is one of many parallels to other
philosophies of “selfishness”, such as “Objectivism” conceived by Russian-American writer and
philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982)74, which inspired the Reagan era of American politics and had
prominent followers such as Alan Greenspan (the former chief of the Federal Reserve) who was a
personal disciple of Rand in New York. “Objectivism” hails egoism as the true altruism since, as the
saying goes, “If everything cares about himself, everybody is taken care of”. Rand legitimizes
extreme violence of “first handers” (i.e. entrepreneurs) against “second handers” (i.e. employees),
including cold-blooded murder of the helpless, in her monumental novel “Atlas Shrugged”75. The
historic goal of Objectivism to achieve “true egoism” appears to align with TEF: that is, to define
“true egoism” as taking care about oneself and thus to create a world of “first handers” against a
society where altruism has falsified reason by producing “second handers”, who rise against those
who are the inventors of machines and progress.

Transhumanism as condensed in the novel “The Transhumanist Wager” is not far from such a vision,
particularly when it comes to interaction with opponents.76 However, TEF proposes any actions
taken are, as far as possible, characterized by the recognition of the potential value other individuals
have for themselves. When asked in this regard, the fictional protagonist and developer of TEF in
Istvan’s novel declares:

We want to teach the people of the outside world, not destroy them; we want to convince
them, not dictate them; we want them to join us, not fight us. They may not be essential, but
they may help make it possible for us when it is time to journey through what is essential.77

Is there not implicit in these sentences a differentiation between “first” and “second handers” (those
“not essential”)? Confronted with such ideals, it is unavoidable to ask questions concerning their

70
Ibid., p. 281.
71
Ibid., p. 281.
72
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 202.
73
Ibid., p. 53.
74
Ayn Rand: https://www.aynrand.org/.
75
A. Rand: Atlas Shrugged, New York 1957.
76
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 53.
77
Ibid., p. 230.

24
social and political implications and how those might be concretely put into reality. Some arising
questions could for example be, what negative effects might TEF as a mind-set have on the issue of
community, and how should a technocratic society of the future deal with these issues? How would
a majority of individuals be able to reach omnipotence without getting in conflict with each other,
and what consequences would arise from such conflict? Who would be able to participate in the
institutions of government and policy development and how would that differ from now? And
finally, how would transhumanism be supposed to prevent misuse of inventions and technologies?
These questions may be of particular concern for the concrete social and political possibilities of
“Teleological Egocentric Functionalism” for years to come.

VIII: Can TEF Be Put Into Political Reality?

Whilst the book “The Transhumanist Wager” ends by outlining a thoroughly positive outcome for
transhumanism and creates a clean and bright future scenario that seems a utopia, it is questionable
in what sense the transhumanist transformation would be likely to happen in reality. For instance,
massive social and political alterations such as a “world wide [sic] government”78 and a broadly
shared civilizational convention of a “one person universe, existence and culture”79, seem rather
unrealistic in the near future, since there are competing narratives that oppose this vision.
“Posthumanistic” philosophies are not necessarily egocentric and egoistic like TEF; and neither are
“postmodern” ones, not to speak of “third way” approaches or even the surviving leftist systems of
ideas – rather on the contrary.80

The author Zoltan Istvan himself states that with regard to his political campaign for U.S. presidency
in 2016 he distances himself from TEF and Jethro Knights’ envisioned “measures” to spread the
transhumanist mission in the world.81 He explains this with the need for a civil competition between
transhumanists and its governmental or religious opponents. Indeed, rather than through
mobilization on the streets, Istvan wants his party to focus on publicity-based measures to attract
attention, in order to make transhumanism popular foremost as a “soft power” and thus to prepare
the ground for a “transhumanist mindset” that in his hope will receive widespread voluntary support
at least in the technology-driven U.S. and in the most developed Western nations.82

This peaceful and nonaggressive approach can also be found within TEF, as seen when the fictional
protagonist declares in his speech to the world’s population that the transhuman nation “will strive
to settle all disputes, conflicts and problems without violence”.83 This at first gives a positive
impression of the actions of the new transhuman citizen and might even lead to further interest in
transhumanist psychology. But the statement in the book continues by stating that transhumanists

78
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 282.
79
Ibid., p. 201.
80
R. Benedikter: Third Way Movements. In: In: M. Juergensmeyer and H. K. Anheier (ed.): The SAGE
Encyclopaedia Of Global Studies. 4 Volumes, SAGE Publishers London and Thousand Oaks 2012, Volume 4, pp.
1647-1650.
81
D. Wood: Q&A with Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party candidate for the US President. In: Youtube, January
11, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk4olY4qIjg.
82
Ibid.
83
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, p. 282.

25
“firmly believe in possessing the most powerful weapons, having an aggressive police force, and
using military might against enemies.”84

The first two points might remind readers all over the world of the arms race between the West and
Russia during the cold war. Striving for the most efficient weapons, and frightening the other
country with their possible use, created at the time a feeling within society of constant
endangerment rather than reassurance. In addition, a strong police force might further add to an
oppressive atmosphere, since it could give the individual the impression of constantly being
controlled for “wrong” behaviour. Although the punishments foreseen in this case by the
transhumanist’s police executives are mostly non-violent ones, they do interfere drastically with the
individuals’ possibilities of self-realization and egoism.

IX: How To Become A “Transhuman Citizen”?

By addressing someone as a full “Transhuman Citizen”, the fictional transhumanist leader Jethro
Knights means an individual who has become a citizen of “Transhumania”, his transhumanist nation.
This individual has broken with everything connected to her or his history, country of origin and
personal provenance; she or he will only care for someone or something outside of “Transhumania”,
when this is of value for the cause of the new “Transhuman Citizen”.85 If not so, she or he could be
exiled from “Transhumania” for ignorance86 and most likely never receive a second chance to
reintegrate into society, which would mean isolation not only from family and friends, but also from
the benefits society provides to the individual, such as security or rights and freedoms. As
“Transhumania” is supposed to be a worldwide nation, this would also mean that the exiled
individual could not be able to turn to any other country and become a citizen there. In reality this
would mean all established nations and their governments would have to be “integrated” or
replaced by one “transhuman” government.

This seems to be a very unlikely scenario for the foreseeable future, though, as it would cause more
conflicts than it could settle. Leading transhumanist thinkers such as Nick Bostrom have long
underscored that many crucial ethical questions concerning the human body or the further
development of the human brain, in relation to new technologies, will not be solved quickly; since in
the age of globalization they would require a global government which in their view is quite unlikely
to come into existence anytime soon.87

On the other hand, such a scenario could open the way for one forceful authority to bypass the
variety of existing ones – a not very reassuring vision, in a time when new extremist movements are
rising around the world. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that the program of the “American
Transhumanist Party”, does indeed include plans to build up an internationally connected and
unified transhuman political movement. This unification can be seen in the so-called “Transhumanist

84
Ibid., p. 282.
85
Ibid., p. 201.
86
Ibid., p. 282.
87
N. Bostrom: Technological Revolutions: Ethics and Politics in the Dark, loc cit.

26
Party Global”88, which Zoltan Istvan stated in an interview in early 201589 was formed to maximize
the international political influence of the movement.

X: The “Three Laws of Transhumanism” and Mainstream Politics In A Democracy

The motivation behind the transhumanist drive for increased political influence is similar to that in
Istvan’s book, and in the reality of his political initiative. Both are linked to the main goals of the
transhumanist movement: First, supporting life extension research with as much resources as
possible to give a majority of people the chance to benefit from the findings and applications of new
technologies, and eventually even overcome death.90 In order to do so, it is necessary, secondly, to
spread the transhuman mindset, and thirdly, to participate actively in the development of new
technologies, to be able to control them and to protect society from possible misuse of new
technologies as well as other dangers they may incur. As Istvan put it in his “three laws of
transhumanism”

1. A transhumanist must safeguard one’s own existence above all else.

2. A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible - so long

as one’s actions do not conflict with the First Law.

3. A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe - so long as one’s actions do not
conflict with the First and Second Laws…91

In response to these “laws” John Hewitt writes “If energetically adopted, these deceptively simple
maxims ultimately compel the individual to pursue a technologically enhanced and extended life.
(Transhumanists) have come to see the choice to accept or reject these principles as something far
more fundamental than the choice between liberal or conservative principles.”92

This assumption may be correct, as technology is indeed substituting traditional political

mechanisms by a new logic.

However, while transhumanists such as Zoltan Istvan want to push forward according to the “three
laws” both philosophically and politically, they appear unaware of any larger risks or even
contradictions in the joint endeavor. Researchers from scientific fields involved such as
neuroscientist and neuroethicist James Giordano of Georgetown University93 recognize the potential
benefits of technological evolution and policy focus, but nevertheless express concerns about the all
too direct political plans of the transhumanist political movement. Even though Giordano also sees
positive perspectives, he points out that there are many contradictions in programs such as those
espoused by Istvan, for instance between the push toward the development of radical technologies
and the safeguard of society’s safety when the innovations are not to be restricted by regulations.

88
Transhumanist Party Global: http://transhumanistpartyglobal.org/.
89
D. Wood: Q&A with Zoltan Istvan, loc cit
90
Ibid.
91
J. Hewitt, loc cit.
92
J. Hewitt, loc cit.
93
J. Giordano: The human prospect(s) of neuroscience and neurotechnology: Domains of influence and the
necessity – and questions – of neuroethics. In: Human Prospect 4(1): 1-18 (2014).

27
This indeed poses an important question that most likely will arise louder in the years to come: what
is the relationship between radical technology and safety under the condition of a potential
“Transhumania”? Presumably, the absence of a compelling solution for this issue will be a hindering
factor for the spread of the transhumanist mindset. Furthermore, adequate financing of
transhumanist technologies and research might also become an issue when, as conducted in the
fictive nation “Transhumania”, the government applies the lowest possible taxation rate on citizens’
income and as the price to pay for this discontinues the payment of retirement and public
pensions94, as well as ceasing all governmental welfare.95

This may be interpreted by some observers as an attempt of the new political aspiration of
transhumanism to get Republicans as well as rightist civil society movements such as the “Tea Party”
on board. Unfortunately, Zoltan Istvan has not made any clear statements yet to address the issue of
financing the transition from the present into a transhuman world. However, Istvan has stated that if
twenty percent of the defense budget were to be redirected into longevity science, that would
trigger in short order a great change for reaching the transhumanist core goal of defeating death.96

XI: Connecting Fiction, Philosophy and Politics

Taking all of the above into consideration, it is obvious that Zoltan Istvan lets his political agenda be
influenced by “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, but promotes these values in a more
moderate form, so to speak. By at first focusing his manifesto on just three aims and otherwise
concentrating his efforts on acquainting the public with transhumanism, he has been able to reach
out to a broader public and achieved at least an increasing discussion about transhumanism and its
political relevance. However, it is due to more than Istvan’s personal commitment that
transhumanism will likely become more prominent in international political and social debates, as
transhumanist parties are also in the process of being founded in Europe – with other continents
most probably following. Consequently, this could mean that when a committed figure such as
Zoltan Istvan manages to connect and unify transhumanist parties around the world through his
prominence and public presence, then the latter could influence conventional parties and gain
impact without growing a big membership first.

This influence, combined with the increasing role technology plays in globalized life, could push
forward a culture which, while not fully transhuman, will be in all practical sense a more
transhumanistic oriented society. If such a combined approach is successful then this transition will
be achieved smoothly and without being noticed by the public and conventional politicians. Despite
all its shortfalls, the developments around technological research and the transhumanist movement
constitute a realistic potential for transhumanist parties to gain relevance in the political sphere. The
ascent of transhumanism to a concrete social and political force at least in the US now seems based
on the philosophical fundament rooted in “Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”. The question, as
to the extent that TEF itself is inspired by other philosophies of “selfishness”, such as Ayn Rand’s
“Objectivism”, is a matter requiring further research into the direct and indirect relationships,
affinities and differences involved.

94
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager, loc cit., p. 282.
95
Ibid., p. 282.
96
D. Wood: Q&A with Zoltan Istvan, loc cit.

28
XII: Conclusion: Four questions for critical debate. First Question: To What Extent Is
U.S. Transhumanist Politics Driven By TEF?

To conclude this discussion on the philosophical basis of transhumanism, four crucial questions
remain to be answered. (However, given the current fluid nature of transhumanist politics, more
such questions are likely to arise.)

The first question concerns the extent to which the U.S. Transhumanist Party is actually driven by
the statements made concerning TEF and the Transhumanist Wager in Istvan's novel, given that
Istvan distances his own policies from those of fictional lead figure Jethro Knights as previously
described.

The answer to this first question is, at least for the immediate future, simple: We’ll have to wait and
see. There are different, partly opposed signals and indications with regard to the proximity or
distance between Istvan’s fiction and his envisaged political reality. Besides the goal of “putting
science, health and technology at the forefront of American politics”, we know very little about the
politics of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. There has been little discussion of the implications,
derivatives, consequences and side issues involved in this manifesto. The Party is still in an early
stage of development, with no sign of an encompassing, concrete political program, besides the
three goals formulated in Istvan’s manifesto article in the Huffington Post97, and a reference to the
“Transhumanist Declaration” 98. Neither of these sources provides a description of concrete policies,
as opposed to general claims concerning the improvement of our lives by the means of technology.

Moreover, there is the fiction-reality question, which is always difficult to answer. Without doubt,
there has been an influential hermeneutic circle between science fiction in particular, and practical
societal progress in Western civilization throughout the past one and a half centuries. This
synergistic feedback loop - of mutual inspiration and the building of stories and mythologies – can
stabilize a concrete technological social agenda in the face of disputes. This allows access to the
broadest possible number of people, giving the agenda an identity (possibly only transitorily) which
can expand and strengthen. Given the current trend in which the imaginary and reality are becoming
increasingly interwoven and mutually influential within a combined framework of a “society of
images and ideas”, it may become increasingly difficult to fully differentiate or even segregate the
fictional imaginary of a novel from its effects on reality – especially if it is in itself, a strongly
politically colored account like the Transhumanist Wager.

Indeed, on the one hand the Transhumanist Wager is a novel about a future society and not an
explicit political program. But on the other hand, this novel contains many explicit ideas about the
reorganization of society which are profoundly political. Furthermore, it has been written by the
subsequent founder of a political party and presidential contender, which makes it inevitable to
consider its implicit and explicit political contents as related to any subsequent practical political
efforts. In addition, the Transhumanist Wager contains many autobiographical parallels to Istvan’s
life; and even though Istvan publicly distances himself from some ideas of his book, they still remain
his proper thoughts, and thus potentially practical policies.

97
Z. Istvan: Should A Transhumanist Run For U.S. President?, loc cit.
98
Humanity+: The Transhumanist Declaration (1998/2009),
http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/.

29
XIII: Second Question: How Much Influence Can One Person And His Work Of
Fiction Have On A Political Movement?

A second question that is often posited is, how much influence can one person (Istvan) have on the
(necessarily) greater whole of a party and political movement, and what are his real intentions,
within the broadening network of his sponsors and collaborators?

Generally speaking, a political network becomes more complex the more it advances over time and
the more successful it becomes. In the present stage, the U.S. Transhumanist Party appears to be
largely a one-man-show, but this may change once the party gets going and expands its outreach
activities. If the party is to avoid becoming a kind of subtle dictatorship (and we don’t see any signals
for this at the moment), the issue of competing wings will become more accentuated, and the
interior ideological debate may sharpen, as it is natural with any developing democratic party (and
visible even in non-democratic parties). Comparing Istvan’s public statements, columns and the
ideas formulated in the Transhumanist Wager, a picture of the presidential candidate’s political
agenda becomes apparent that shows it to be rather unfinished, and in any case unconventional. In
this agenda fiction, philosophy and politics appear mixed up, and Istvan’s ideas in some points
appear inconsistent as a result. Depending on the occasion, Istvan still seems to decide case by case,
whether a statement of him should be interpreted as a “fictional idea” of him as an artist, or as a
“serious idea” of him as a political contender. In his recent columns on Motherboard, it seems as if
he advocates for the same radical technologies described in his novel to be put into practice, but
personally envisages a different transhumanist philosophy and social policy than in his fictional book.

There are many examples of this dichotomy. In the fictional world of the novel the main goal is to
become the “Omnipotender”, and radical egocentrism is presented as a moral value. In a recent
column in the online technology and science magazine Motherboard with the title: “Do We Have
Free Will Because God Killed Itself?” Istvan in turn argues:

The problem with being god – a truly omnipotent being – is that of free will. [...] Being all-
powerful is a very strange, ironic dead end. The only thing omnipotence can truly equal is a
total mechanistic void. Achieving omnipotence is literally the act of suicide, in terms of
forever self-eliminating one’s consciousness. This is because a conscious intelligence, as
reason dictates, is based on the ability to discern values—values, for example, to know
whether as an all-powerful being, one can create something so heavy that one can’t lift it.
Values require choice. But omnipotence means that all choices have already been made, and
nothing can ever change, because all variables are already accounted for and no randomness
or anomalies exist.99

In another article on Motherboard, Istvan writes about the future of politics and the role Artifical
Intelligence (AI) should play in it:

Should we let AI run the government once it's smarter than us? Take that one step further—
should we let that AI be the President—maybe even giving it a robot form for aesthetics or

99
Z. Istvan: Do We Have Free Will Because God Killed Itself? In: Motherboard, May 4, 2015,
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/do-we-have-free-will-because-god-killed-herself.

30
 familiarity's sake? [...] We would have government and a leader who really is after the
world's best interests, free from the hazards of corporate lobbyists and selfishness. As a
futurist and a politician, a central aim of mine is to do the most good for the greatest amount
of people.100

Here Istvan clearly distances himself from the ideal of selfishness and egocentrism – thus leaving the
libertarian approach apparently in favor of a move toward the center, or even toward the “leftist”,
or to put it in more appropriate terms, participatory wing of the Transhumanist movement as for
example represented in the “Technoprogressive Declaration” of November 2014 signed by many
transhumanist associations and organizations101.

Something similar appears to be the case with regard to social politics in the stricter sense. In his
novel Istvan abolishes most forms of social security (retirements, public pensions, governmental
welfare etc.) But to the surprise of many readers of the Transhumanist Wager, Istvan in his political
columns advocates not only for free education, but also for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), i.e. for
one of the allegedly most “socialist” ideas of the post-Cold-War era:

To begin with, there's no point in pretending society can avoid a future Universal Basic
Income -one that meets basic living standards- of some sort in America and around the
world, if robots or software take most of the jobs. Income redistribution via taxes, increased
welfare, or a mass guaranteed basic income plan will occur in some form, or there will be
mass revolutions that could end in a dystopian civilization - leading essentially to what
experts call a societal collapse. [...] The elite may not want to part with some of their money
(I myself support many libertarian ideas) via wealth redistribution, but I think they probably
want to avoid an ugly dystopian world even more - especially one where they would be
despised rulers.102

And again:

I specifically advocate for free education at all levels, including higher education. In fact, I
support increased education levels, too, including some forms of mandatory preschool and
4-year college for everyone.103

It remains to be seen if there will be some ties with transhumanist higher education initiatives, such
as the “Singularity University”104 founded in 2008 by leading transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil to
prepare for the upcoming age of AI and to “educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply
exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges”.105 The dispute here seems to be
predetermined: The Singularity University is about leaders, as is the way of “most” transhumanist

100
Z. Istvan: The Transhumanist Party’s Presidential Candidate on the Future of Politics. In: Motherboard,
January 22, 2015, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-transhumanist-partys-presidential-candidate-
explains-the-future-of-politics.
101
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies (IEET): Technoprogressive Declaration – Transvision, loc cit.
102
Z. Istvan: The New American Dream? Let the Robots Take Our Jobs. In: Motherboard, February 13, 2015,
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-new-american-dream-let-the-robots-take-our-jobs.
103
Ibid.
104
Singularity University: http://singularityu.org/.
105
Ibid.

31
initiatives so far. Istvan seems to favor a socially broader educational agenda, beyond hierarchies
and classes, which contrasts starkly with the present day American educational system that, under
George W. Bush and Barack Obama, focused more on business needs than ever before. Therefore,
Istvan’s agenda may sound revolutionary to many.

Here we will discuss an area of conflict that will represent one of the major challenges for the
relationship between Teleological Egocentric Functionalism and the applied political pragmatism of
the transhumanist movement in the years ahead. The crucial issue that will define public discussion,
not only within the framework of the U.S. presidential campaign 2015-16, but worldwide (and one
currently dominating the international debate since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital
in the Twenty-First Century in 2014106) is equality versus inequality – in crucial areas such as fairness,
participation, inclusion and access to technologies. Yet the ethical dimension (i.e. inequality, and
how to avoid it) of the transition into a transhumanist society is barely addressed in the
Transhumanist Wager. Rather, it is presented as an individual choice to be solved by everybody for
him- or herself. However, in reality the choice is highly dependent on socio-economic factors, as
Istvan rightly points out in his political statements:

The controversy with this technology is two-fold. Will conservative or religious people let us
remake the human being into a more functional version of itself? And will all people be able
to afford it? Editing a genome isn't going to be cheap, at first. Neither will driverless cars.
Furthermore, I surmise the Ivy League undergrad education download is also going to be
costly (although, it’ll probably still be much cheaper than a physical education). So, is all this
transhumanist child rearing tech fair to those who can't afford it?

The short answer is: Of course, not. But neither are the costs of AIDS treatments in the world
today. Hundreds of thousands still die because they can't afford the proper technology and
medicine. And it's a fact that wealthier people live far longer, fuller lives than poor people—
about 25 percent more on average. So what can we do to even the playing field?

To begin with, let's not stop the technology. Instead, let's work on stopping the inequality
and create programs that entitle all children to better health and child rearing innovation. As
a society, let's come up with ways that make it so all peoples can benefit from the
transhumanist tech that is changing our world and changing the way our children will be
raised.107

XIV: Third Question: What Is Better Suited To Meet The Needs Of Politics In A
Pluralistic Society: TEF or TF?

A third crucial question to be discussed with regard to the interface between TEF and concrete
transhumanist political programs is: To what extent is the "Egocentrism" of TEF necessary? Might a
better basis for international transhumanist politics be a Teleological Functionalism (TF) rather than
a Teleological “Egocentric” Functionalism (TEF)?

106
T. Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press 2014.
107
Z. Istvan: The Technology Transhumanists Want in Their Kids. In: Motherboard, May 18, 2015,
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-technology-transhumanists-want-in-their-kids-chips.

32
This question once again points to the fundamental logical (not necessarily ethical) contradiction
within Istvan’s interpretation of the potential political agenda of transhumanism as a consequence
of TEF. Varying Istvan’s own question, “should a transhumanist run for president?”108, we could pose
the principal question: Should an egocentric become president – a job to represent and act in the
interest of a nation?

Society is without doubt rapidly changing, and with it the basic expectations directed towards
leaders with regard to their identity and ideological stature. “Egocentrism” may be viewed rather
critically by larger parts of the public as a poor attribute for a political leader and a socio-political
movement to hold, since politics by traditional definition in the West, is about the representation of
the interests of others, and their thoughtful and pondered consideration versus specific “ego”
concerns. For sure, most people consciously or unconsciously in “postmodern” globalized societies
(necessarily) act egocentrically. However, in the mind of many average voters (and not to forget
many leading Western intellectuals) there remains a difference between psychological/automatic
egocentrism and moral/rational egocentrism. As Harvard scholars Nicolas Epley and Eugene M.
Caruso explain this difference:

People see the world through their own eyes, experience it through their own senses, and
have… access to the others’ cognitive and emotional states. This means that one’s own
perspective on the world is directly experienced, whereas others’ perspectives must be
inferred. Because experience is more efficient than inference, people automatically interpret
objects and events egocentrically and only subsequently correct or adjust that interpretation
when necessary.109

In essence, the problem with moral egocentrism seems to be that in the “postmodern” (or
contradictorily materialistic and idealistic) era people in general “regard their own thoughts and
needs as most important and willfully fail to account for the needs and intentions of others in
making their decisions”.110

Moreover, there are more strictly philosophical and logical implications with regard to the relation
between ideas and concrete political potentials. The issue of “egocentrism” is not necessarily
implicit in establishing transhumanist thought, and it is not necessary to promote human
enhancement or transhumanism. On the contrary, many motives, including the opposite value of
selfishness - altruism - could be used to legitimize many transhumanist technologies, for example
extended life spans and improved physical and cognitive abilities, as a means to care longer and
better for others. Thus, a logical conclusion could be to detach the “Egocentric” suffix of
“Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, leaving “Teleological Functionalism” aimed at practically
improving the lives of the greatest amount of people possible in an open society, focused on
evolving, rather than on structuring and consolidating what it has. Nevertheless, it is not clear what
“Teleological Functionalism” may mean without “Egocentrism”. Could it become a “Teleological

108
Z. Istvan: Should A Transhumanist Run for U.S. President?, loc cit.
109
N. Epley, E. M. Caruso: Egocentric Ethics. In: Social Justice Research, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2004, p. 171-187,
here: p. 174, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eugene.caruso/docs/ego_ethics.pdf.
110
M. Ylvisaker, M. Hibbard and T. Feeney: Cognitive Egocentrism Theory of Mind. In: LearNet, The Brain Injury
Association of New York State, New York 2006,
http://www.projectlearnet.org/tutorials/cognitive_egocentrism_theory_of_mind.html.

33
Social Functionalism”? And if so, in which direction would that concretely aim, and what would it
mean in practice?

XV: Fourth Question: How Does TEF Fit Into The Greater Array Of “Social Futurist”
Visions Of The Present?

While the discussion so far and the conclusions reached highlight further issues to be addressed, the
fourth and final question to be asked here is: To what extent might a “Teleological Functionalism”
(with or without “Egocentric”) fit with the "social futurist" moral vision promoted by “alternative”
thinkers such as Amon Twyman of the UK Transhumanist Party111?

If the central meme of transhumanism is that it is ethical and desirable to improve the human
condition through technology, the central meme of social futurism is that it is ethical and desirable
to improve society through technology.112 The flip side of this second meme seems to be the
principle of ‘Nobody Deserted’. Indeed, Twyman has written this up in Principle 3 of the program of
the UK Transhumanist Party (TP):

We advocate these freedoms in the context of strong social support for society’s weakest
members, and base policy on the principle ‘Nobody Deserted’. All citizens shall have a right
to sustenance, clothing, shelter, energy, healthcare, transport, education, and access to
information resources. TP also advocates that all citizens must be able to contribute to
society, in their own fashion, without blemish to their dignity or sense of self worth.113

If the different positions within the transhumanist movement are to be integrated, the question
here is how selfishness and egocentrism on the one hand and the principle of “Nobody Deserted” on
the other hand, can coexist, or be brought together in applied policy. If technological progress
requires a certain level of solidarity and thus necessary care for others, as for example, due to the
disappearance of jobs as Istvan pointed out in his plea for a universal basic income, selfishness and
egocentrism must be logically submitted to and integrated into a greater picture in order to avoid
new revolutions and class fights.

Nevertheless, the principle of egocentrism and selfishness in itself requires to not be subordinated
to any other principle, and that absolutism lies in the basic meaning and content of the term
“egocentrism” itself. The result is a similar contradiction in ideology to the one Istvan himself
pointed out with regard to the issue of “omnipotence”: Once “egocentrism” is fully established
according to the logical meaning of the term, it starts to socially implode. That once again shows the
inconsistency of some basic pillars of current “transhumanist” political core terms.

XVI: Outlook

Summing up?

111
M. A. Twyman: The Moral Philosophy of Transhumanism, February 28, 2015,
https://wavism.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/the-moral-philosophy-of-transhumanism/.
112
transhumanpraxis: Social Futurism: Positive Social Change Through Technology, May 10, 2012,
https://wavism.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/cmzs-central-meme-of-zero-state/.
113
A. Twyman: Transhumanist Party Membership Open. In: Transhumanist Party UK, March 24, 2015,
http://www.transhumanistparty.org.uk/transhumanist_party_membership_open.

34
“Teleological Egocentric Functionalism”, levitating as it still seems between fiction and reality,
remains in many ways an unfinished and contradictory basis for transhumanist politics. While TEF is
an inspiring attempt to integrate transhumanist thought into politics and presents without doubt
many interesting approaches and some surprisingly novel views on traditional standpoints, the fact
is that there remain many inconsistencies within its underlying structure, logic and argument; and
the same can be said of its inventor and his practical political statements regarding many issues of
social practice, in particular with regard to social politics.

What does this mean?

For now, the outlook is wide open. If Istvan’s promise: “If you want to live forever, vote for me”
wants to be taken seriously, he will have to realize some of his visions within the circumstances of
the environment he is in – for example free education or universal basic income. However, this will
be a huge challenge, since the U.S. hardly seems prepared to move in such a direction, even should
Istvan be voted in as president, or as is currently in vogue, the “new social agenda” that all
presidential candidates for 2016 are putting on the table to gain the votes of an unsettled middle
class, which sees the “American dream” threatened by structural and systemic inequality that is
getting out of hand.

Finally, if transhumanist politics wants to stabilize a broad and sustainable agenda in the center of
society (as Istvan seems to aspire to), the further development of transhumanism as a political force
will have to address the existing contradictions in some of its underlying philosophical terms and
beliefs. And it would be well advised to address these with the help from and discussion with other
approaches, for example including the experience and the views of more “humanistic” ones.

Lots of questions remain to answer; and lots of fascinating debates lie ahead.

Selected Bibliography

Benedikter, Roland, Siepmann, Katja, and McIntosh, Annabella (2015): The Age of Transhumanist
Politics Has Begun. Will It Change Traditional Concepts of Left and Right? Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In:
The Leftist Review. Commentaries on Politics, Science, Philosophy and Religion, March-April 2015,
http://www.leftistreview.com/2015/03/06/the-age-of-transhumanist-politics-has-
begun/rolandbenedikter/. Reprint in: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), April 27,
2015, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/benedikter20150427.

Bostrom, Nick (2003): The Transhumanist FAQ 1.5. In: Transhumanism.org,

http//:transhumanism.org/resources/faq15.doc. Access: 31.03.2015.

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transhumanismus e.V. (Hrsg.) (2005): Reader zum Transhumanismus.
Würzburg: http://www.detrans.de.

Eternal Life Fan (2014): Zoltan Istvan’s political campaign – The Transhumanist Party. Video
sequence from PowerfulJRE(2014): Joe Rogan Experience #584 – Zoltan Istvan. In: Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EVavmBwUVY. Access: 31.03.2015.

35
Istvan, Zoltan (2014): The Transhumanist Wager, Futurity Imagine Media 2013,
http://www.transhumanistwager.com/ and http://www.amazon.de/The-Transhumanist-Wager-
Zoltan-Istvan/dp/0988616114.

Wood, David (2015): Q&A with Zoltan Istvan, Transhumanist Party candidate for the US President.
Youtubevideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk4olY4qIjg. Access: 31.03.2015, 13:52.

The authors

Roland Benedikter, Dr. Dr. Dr., is Research Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global and International
Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Senior Affiliate of the Edmund Pellegrino
Center on Clinical Bioethics of Georgetown University, Trustee of the Toynbee Prize Foundation
Boston, Senior Research Scholar of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington DC and Full
member of the Club of Rome. Previously, he was a Research Affiliate 2009-13 at the Europe Center
of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and a Full Academic
Fellow 2008-12 of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Washington DC. He has written for
Foreign Affairs, Harvard International Review and Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, and
is author of books about global strategic issues (among them most recently two on Xi Jinping’s China
in 2014), co-author of two Pentagon and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff White Papers on the Ethics of
Neurowarfare (2013 and 2014, together with James Giordano) and of Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker’s
Report to the Club of Rome 2003. Contact: rolandbenedikter@yahoo.de.

Katja Siepmann, MA, is a socio-political analyst, Senior Research Fellow of the Council on
Hemispheric Affairs Washington D.C., Member of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Lecturer
at the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Cultural Sciences of the European University Frankfurt/Oder and
has written for Foreign Affairs, Harvard International Review and Challenge: The Magazine of
Economic Affairs.

Annabella McIntosh is a freelance political writer based in Berlin, Germany.

36
 2. Four political futures: which will you choose?
By David W. Wood, Executive Director, Transpolitica

Forget left wing versus right wing. The political debate in the medium-term future (10-20 years) will
be dominated, instead, by a new set of arguments. These arguments debate the best set of
responses to the challenges and opportunities posed by fast-changing technology.

In this essay, I’ll outline four positions: technosceptical, technoconservative, technolibertarian, and
technoprogressive. I’ll argue that the first two are non-starters, and I’ll explain why I personally
favour the technoprogressive stance over the technolibertarian one.

Accelerating technology

The defining characteristic of the next 10-20 years is the potential ongoing acceleration of
technology. Technological development has the potential to progress even more quickly – and to
have even larger effects on huge areas of life – than has been the case in the last remarkable 10-20
years.

I share the view expressed by renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, in the book “Infinite in all
directions”114 from his 1985 Gifford lectures:

Technology is… the mother of civilizations, of arts, and of sciences

Technology has given rise to enormous progress in civilization, arts and sciences over recent
centuries. New technology is poised to have even bigger impacts on civilization in the next 10-20
years.

MIT professor Andrew McAfee takes up the same theme, in an article published in October last
year115: (emphases added)

114
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Infinite-All-Directions-Freeman-Dyson/dp/0060915692/
115
http://blogs.ft.com/andrew-mcafee/2014/10/16/were-living-through-a-new-industrial-revolution/

37
 History teaches us that nothing changes the world like technology

McAfee spells out a “before” and “after” analysis. Here’s the “before”:

For thousands of years, until the middle of the 18th century, there were only glacial rates of
population growth, economic expansion, and social development.

And the “after”:

Then an industrial revolution happened, centred around James Watt’s improved steam
engine, and humanity’s trajectory bent sharply and permanently upward.

One further quote from McAfee’s article rams home the conclusion:

Great wars and empires, despots and democrats, the insights of science and the revelations
of religion – none of them transformed lives and civilizations as much as a few practical
inventions.

In principle, many of the grave challenges facing society over the next 10-20 years could be solved by
“a few practical inventions”:

 Students complain, with some justification, about the costs of attending university. But
technology can enable better MOOCs – Massive Online Open Courses – that can deliver high
quality lectures, removing significant parts of the ongoing costs of running universities; free
access to such courses can do a lot to help everyone re-skill, as new occupational challenges
arise
 With one million people losing their lives to traffic accidents worldwide every year, mainly
caused by human driver error116, we should welcome the accelerated introduction of self-
driving cars
 Medical costs could be reduced by greater application of the principles of preventive
maintenance (“a stitch in time saves nine”), particularly through rejuvenation
biotechnology117 and healthier diets
 A sustained green tech new deal should push society away from dependency on fuels that
emit dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases, resulting in lifestyles that are positive for the
environment as well as positive for humanity
 The growing costs of governmental bureaucracy itself could be reduced by whole-heartedly
embracing improved information technology and lean automation.

Society has already seen remarkable changes in the last 10-20 years as a result of rapid progress in
fields such as electronics, computers, digitisation, and automation. In each case, the description
“revolution” is appropriate. But even these revolutions pale in significance to the changes that will,
potentially, arise in the next 10-20 years from extraordinary developments in healthcare, brain
sciences, atomically precise manufacturing, 3D printing, distributed production of renewable energy,
artificial intelligence (AI), and improved knowledge management.

116
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/8702111/How-do-accidents-happen.html
117
http://www.sens.org/outreach/rejuvenation-biotechnology-conference-2015

38
Benefits to individuals but threats to society

The potential outputs from accelerating technology can usefully be split into two categories.

The first of these categories is “enhancing humans”. New technologies can provide individual
humans with:

 Extra intelligence
 Extra health
 Extra longevity
 Extra material goods
 Extra experiences
 Extra opportunities.

The second category is “disturbing humanity”. This looks, instead, at the drawbacks from new
technologies:

39
  More power placed into the hands of terrorists, criminals, fanatics, and other ne’er-do-wells,
to inflict chaos and damage on the rest of us
 More power placed into the hands of governments, and the hands of corporations, to
monitor us, and keep track of our every action
 Risks from over-consumption and from the waste products of our lifestyles – including risks
to planetary climate stability from excess emissions of greenhouse gases
 Risks of technological unemployment, as growing numbers of people find themselves
displaced from the job market by increasingly capable automation (robots, software, and AI)
 So-called “existential risks”, from unintended side-effects of experiments with disease
strains, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, or artificial general intelligence.

The content of both categories are extremely weighty. How should politicians react?

The technosceptical response

One response is to deny that technology will have anything like the magnitude of impact that I have
just described. This technosceptical response accepts that there has been rapid change over the last
10-20 years, but also observes the following:

 There have been other times of rapid change in the past – as when electrification was
introduced, or when railways quickly criss-crossed the world; there is nothing fundamentally
different about the present age
 Past inventions such as the washing machine arguably improved lives (especially women’s
lives) at least as much as modern inventions such as smartphones
 Although there have been many changes in ICT (information and communications
technology) in the last 10-20 years, other areas of technology have slowed down in their
progress; for example, commercial jet airliners don’t fly any faster than in the past (indeed
they fly a lot slower than Concorde)
 Past expectations of remarkable progress in fields such as flying cars, and manned colonies
on Mars, have failed to be fulfilled
 It may well be that the majority of the “low hanging fruit” of technological development has
been picked, leaving much slower progress ahead.

Kevin Kelly, the co-founder and former executive editor of Wired, had this to say about progress, in
an interview in March 2014118:

If we were sent back with a time machine, even 20 years, and reported to people what we
have right now and describe what we were going to get in this device in our pocket—we’d
have this free encyclopaedia, and we’d have street maps to most of the cities of the world,
and we’d have box scores in real time and stock quotes and weather reports, PDFs for every
manual in the world—we’d make this very, very, very long list of things that we would say we
would have and we get on this device in our pocket, and then we would tell them that most
of this content was free. You would simply be declared insane. They would say there is no

118
http://edge.org/conversation/the-technium

40
 economic model to make this. What is the economics of this? It doesn't make any sense, and
it seems far-fetched and nearly impossible.

In other words, the last twenty years have, indeed, been remarkable – with progress that would
appear “insane” to people from the beginning of that time period. But Kelly then mentions a view
that is sceptical about future progress:

There’s a sense that all the big things have happened.

So many big things have happened in the last twenty years. Is there anything left to accomplish? Can
science and technology really keep up the same frenetic pace?

Kelly’s answer: We’re by no means at the end of the set of major technological changes. We’re not
even at the beginning of these changes:

We’re just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes.

And for a comparison of what will happen next, to what has happened in the recent past, Kelly
predicts that

The next twenty years are going to make this last twenty years just pale.

I share that assessment. I base my views upon the positive feedback cycles which are in place:

 Technology magnifies our knowledge and intelligence, which in turn magnifies our
technology
 Technology improves everyone’s ability to access cutting-edge information, via free online
encyclopaedias, massive open online courses, and open source software
 Critically, this information is available to vast numbers of bright students, entrepreneurs,
hackers, and activists, throughout the emerging world as well as in countries with longer-
established modern economies
 Technology improves the ability for smart networking of prospective partners – people in
one corner of cyberspace can easily improve and extend ideas that arose elsewhere
 The set of pre-existing component solutions keeps accumulating through its own positive
feedback cycles, serving as the basis for yet another round of technological breakthrough.

What’s more, insight, tools, and techniques from one technology area can quickly transfer (often in
innovative ways) into new technology areas. This kind of crossover features in what is called “NBIC
convergence”:

41
  The ‘I’ of NBIC is for Information and Communications Technology. It means our ability to
store, transmit, and calculate bits of information. It means the transformation of music and
videos and newspapers and maps into digital form, which huge impacts for industry.
 The ‘N’ of NBIC is for Nanotechnology. It means our ability to manipulate matter at the
atomic level. Nano is one thousand times smaller than Micro, which in turn is one thousand
times smaller than Milli. Nanotech enables better and better 3D printing, which is poised to
disrupt many industries. It also enables new kinds of material that can be super-light and
super-strong, and super-flexible, such as graphene and nanotubes. These new materials will
also allow the creation of human-like robots.
 The ‘B’ in NBIC is for Biotechnology. It means our ability to create, not just new kinds of
material, but new kinds of life. It means our ability to reprogram, not just the silicon inside
transistors, but the long chains of carbon-based DNA inside our cells. We’ll be applying
software techniques to re-engineer genes. We’ll be able, if we wish, not just to create so-
called “designer babies”, but also “re-designed adults”. With nano-sized computers,
sometimes called nanobots, doctors will be able to target very precisely any ailing parts of
our body, including cancerous cells, or tangles in the brain, and fix them. And, if we want,
we’ll be able to remain perpetually youthful, with nano cosmetic surgery, both outside and
inside the body.
 And the ‘C’ in NBIC is for Cognotechnology. It means our ability to understand and improve
the basis of cognition – thought and feeling. With very powerful scanners we can understand
more precisely what’s going on inside our brains. And we can engineer new moods, new
creativity, and (if we wish) new states of ecstasy and bliss.

The real significance of NBIC isn’t just in the four individual areas. It’s in the crossovers between the
four fields:

 Nano-sensors allow closer study than ever before of what is happening in the brain
 Insight on how the brain performs its near-miracles of cognition will feed back into new
algorithms used in next generation AI
 Improved AI allows systems such as IBM Watson to study vast amounts of medical literature,
and then make new suggestions about treating various diseases, etc.

42
For these reasons, I discount the technosceptical answer. It’s very unlikely that technological
progress will run out of steam. However, I am sympathetic in two aspects to the technosceptical
position.

First, I don’t see the detailed outcome of technological development as in any way inevitable. The
progress that will be made will depend, critically, upon public mood, political intervention, the
legislative framework, and so on. It will also depend on the actions of individuals, which can be
magnified (via the butterfly effect) to have huge impacts. Specifically, all these factors can alter the
timing of various anticipated product breakthroughs.

Second, I do see one way in which the engines of technological progress will become unstuck. That is
if society enters a new dark age, via some kind of collapse. This could happen as a result of the
influences I listed earlier as “technology disturbing humanity, threatening society”. If technologists
ignore these threats, they could well regret what happens next. Plans for improved personal
intelligence, health, longevity, etc, could suddenly be undercut by sweeping societal or climatic
changes.

That leads me to the second of the four responses that I wish to discuss.

The technoconservative response

Whereas technosceptics say, in effect, “there’s no need to get worked up about the impact of
technological change, since that change is going to slow down of its own accord”,
technoconservatives say “we need to slow that change down, since otherwise bad things are going
to happen – very bad things”.

Technoconservatives take seriously the linkage between ongoing technological change and the
threats to society and humanity that I listed earlier. Unless that engine of change is brought under
serious control, they say, technology is going to inflict terrible damage on the planet.

For example, many metrics for the health of the environment are near danger points, as a result of
human lifestyles that are fuelled by conspicuous consumption. There are major shortages of fresh
water. Species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate. Some of the accidents that are
waiting to happen would make the Fukushima disaster site look like a mild hiccup in comparison. We
may be close to a tipping point in global climate, which would trigger the wrong kind of positive
feedback cycle (a cycle of increasing warmth). We may also be close to outbreaks of unstoppable
pathogens, spread too quickly around the world by criss-crossing jet travellers rushing from one
experience to another.

43
Technoconservatives want to cry out, “Enough!” They want to find ways to apply the brake on our
technological steamroller – or (to change the metaphor) to rip out the power cable that keeps the
engine of technological progress humming. Where technologists keep putting more opportunities
into people’s hands – opportunities to remake what it means to be human – technoconservatives
argue for a period of prolonged reflection. “Let’s not play God”, some of them might say. “Let’s be
very careful not to let the genie out of the bottle.”

They’ll argue that technology risks leading people astray. Instead of us applying straightforward,
ordinary, common-sense solutions to social problems, we’re being beguiled by faux techno-
solutions. Instead of authentic, person-to-person relations, we’re spending too much time in front of
computer screens, talking to virtual others, neglecting our real-world neighbours. Instead of
discovering joy in what’s natural, we’re losing our true nature in quests for technotopia. These
quests, argue the technoconservatives, aren’t just misguided. They’re deeply dangerous. We might
gain a whole universe of electronic and chemical satiation, but we’ll lose our souls in the process.
And not only our souls, but also our lives, if some of the existential risks come to fruition.

But whenever a technoconservative says that technology has already developed enough, and there’s
no need for it to continue any further, I’ll point out the vicious impediments that still blight people’s
lives the world over – disease, squalor, poverty, ignorance, oppression, aging. It’s true; some of
these obstacles could be tackled by non-technological means, such as by politics or social change.
But the solutions to other issues lie within the grasp of further scientific and technological progress.
Think of the terrible pain still inflicted by numerous diseases, both in young people and in the
elderly. Think of the heartache caused by neurodegeneration and dementia. Rejuvenation
biotechnology has the latent ability to make all these miseries as much a thing of the past as deaths
from tuberculosis, smallpox, typhoid, or the bubonic plague. Anyone who wants to block this
progress by proclaiming “Enough” has a great deal of explaining to do.

In any case, is the technoconservative programme feasible? Could the rate of pace of technological
change really be significantly slowed down?

Any such action is going to require large-scale globally coordinated agreements. It’s not sufficient for
any one company to agree to avoid particular lines of product development. It’s not sufficient for
any one country to ban particular fields of technological research. Everyone would need to be
brought to the same conclusion, the world over. And everyone would need to be confident that
everyone else is going to honour agreements to abstain from various developments.

44
The problem is, however, that the technology engine is delivering huge numbers of good outputs, in
parallel with its bad outputs. And too many people (especially powerful people) are benefiting – or
perceive themselves to be benefiting – from these outputs.

Compare the technoconservative thought with the idea that we could switch off the Internet. That
would have the outcome of stopping various undesirable activities that currently take place via the
Internet – abusive trolling, child pornography, distribution of dangerously substandard counterfeit
goods, incitement by fanatical terrorists for impressionable youngsters to join their cause, and so on.
But any such mass switch off would also stop all of the other systems which coexist on the Internet
with the abovementioned nefarious examples, using the same communications protocols. Systems
for commerce, finance, newsflow, entertainment, travel booking, healthcare, social networking, and
so on, would all crash to a halt. For good or for ill, we’ve become deeply dependent on these
systems. We’re very unlikely to agree to do without them.

Separate from the question of the desirability of shutting down the entire Internet is the question of
the feasibility of doing so. After all, the Internet was designed with robustness in mind, including
multiple redundancies. Supposedly, it will survive the outbreak of a (minor) nuclear war.

These same two objections – regarding desirability, and regarding feasibility – undermine any
thought that the entirety of technological progress could be stopped. The technoconservative
approach is too blunt, and is bound to fail.

But while we cannot imagine voluntarily dismantling that great engine of progress, what we can –
and should – imagine is to guide that engine more powerfully. Instead of seeking to stop it, we can
seek to shape it. That’s the approach favoured by technoprogressives. We’ll come to that shortly.

The technolibertarian response

The technolibertarian view is a near direct opposite of the technoconservative one. Whereas the
technoconservatives say “stop – this is going too fast”, technolibertarians say “go faster”.

It’s not that technolibertarians are blind to the threats which cause so much concern to the
technoconservatives. On the whole, they’re well aware of these threats. However, they believe that
technology, given a free hand, will solve these problems. Technoconservatives, in this analysis, are
becoming unnecessarily anxious.

For example, excess greenhouse gases may well be sucked out of the atmosphere by clever carbon
capture systems, perhaps involving specially engineered bio-organisms. In any case, green energy
sources – potentially including solar, geothermal, biofuels, and nuclear – will soon become cheaper
than (and therefore fully preferable to) carbon-based fuels. As for problems with weaponry falling
into the wrong hands, suitable defence technology could be created. Declines in biodiversity could
be countered by Jurassic Park style technology for species resurrection. Ample fresh water can be
generated by desalination processes from sea water, with the energy to achieve this transformation
being obtained from the sun. And so on.

45
This viewpoint has considerable support throughout parts of Silicon Valley, and also finds strong
representation in the faculty of Singularity University. Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity
University, offers this advice, in a 2014 Forbes article entitled “Turning Big Problems Into Big
Business Opportunities”119:

Want to become a billionaire? Then help a billion people.

The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.

That’s the premise for companies launching out of Singularity University (SU).

Allow me to explain.

In 2008, Ray Kurzweil and I co-founded SU to enable brilliant graduate students to work on
solving humanity’s grand challenges using exponential technologies.

This week we graduated our sixth Graduate Studies Program (GSP) class.

During the GSP, we ask our students to build a company that positively impacts the lives of 1
billion people within 10 years.

Tellingly, Diamandis’ latest book120 has the title “Bold”. It’s not called “Go slow”. Nor “Be careful”.

To my mind, there’s a lot to admire in these sentiments. I share the view that technology can
provide tools that can allow the solution of the social problems described.

Where things become more contentious, however, is in the attitude of technolibertarians towards
the role of government. The main request of technolibertarians to politicians is “hands off”. They
want government to provide a free rein to smart scientists, hard-working technologists, and
innovative entrepreneurs – a free rein to pursue their ideas for new products. It is these forces, they
say, which will produce the solutions to society’s current problems.

Technolibertarians echo the sentiment of Ronald Reagan121 that the nine most terrifying words in
the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Governments suffer, in
this view, from a number of deep-rooted problems:

119
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdiamandis/2014/08/25/how-to-become-a-billionaire/
120
http://www.diamandis.com/bold/
121
http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan-quotes-detail.aspx?tx=2079

46
  Politicians seek to build empires
 Politicians have little understanding of the latest technologies
 Politicians generally impose outdated regulations – which are concerned with yesterday’s
problems rather than with tomorrow’s opportunities
 Regulators are liable to “capture” – an over-influence from vested interests
 Politicians have no ability to pick winners
 Political spending builds a momentum of its own, behind “white elephant” projects.

The technolibertarian recipe to solve social problems, therefore, is technology plus innovation plus
free markets, minus intrusive regulations, and minus government interference. The role of
government should be minimised – perhaps even privatised.

The technolibertarian spectrum

So far, I’ve given a charitable account of the motivation of technolibertarians. They’re aware of
major risks to social well-being, I’ve said. And they want to apply technology to fix these problems.

There’s also a less charitable account, which I’ll mention, since it probably does describe a subset of
technolibertarians. That subset has a somewhat different motivation. They don’t particularly care for
the well-being of all humanity; rather, they focus on their own well-being. In some cases, they’re
prepared to risk the destruction of large swathes of humanity – perhaps even the entirety of
humanity. They embrace that risk, because they believe the only way for technological progress to
proceed as quickly as possible is to play fast and loose with these risks. For them, the upside of
technology achieving its potential is more important than the risk of major collateral damage. They
want the possibility of the upside of exponential technology, for themselves, much more than they
worry about any downsides of using that technology. In parallel, they’re motivated to find evidence
that various existential risks are much less serious than commonly supposed.

Accordingly, there’s a spectrum within the technolibertarian camp of people who hold different
motivations to different extents. It may be significant that the full title of the abovementioned
recent book by Peter Diamandis122 – “Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World” –
puts “create wealth” ahead of “impact the world”, as if the latter is a kind of afterthought. The
personal success of “going big” has an even higher priority.

122
http://www.diamandis.com/bold/

47
A good indication of the range of technolibertarian stances is found in the introductory text of the
well-run “Technolibertarians” group on Facebook123. It starts as follows:

Technolibertarians is a group of individuals committed to:

 The idea of fostering private governments (often referred to Anarcho-Capitalism), or

much smaller forms of the present forms of governments (often referred to as Classical
Liberalism and/or Minarchism), both of which support greatly increased amounts of
individual freedom in the personal and economic spheres both in and out of the worlds
of the Internet;

 Support for increasing the speed of the development of life extending and human-
improving technologies, known as Transhumanism (H+), and the same as it regards
creation of Strong Artificial Intelligence (also known as Artificial General Intelligence),
until the point of reaching the Technological Singularity.

The Technological Singularity is the name given to the envisaged future point when artificial
intelligence (AI) is more intelligent, in all relevant dimensions, than humans. The resulting AI is
expected to be capable of solving all remaining human problems at that time, for example finding
cures to any diseases that remain unsolved. Technolibertarians tend to take it for granted that such
an AI will comply with human desires to find such cures, rather than adopting a different worldview
in which slow-witted small-minded divisive humankind is seen as an irrelevance or a pest. That’s in
line with the general technolibertarian tendency to minimise the potential downsides of fast-
changing technology.

The group’s intro continues as follows:

Specifically, we wish to ensure that as technologies in these fields enhance and increase the
rate of human evolution without being instruments of oppression, but rather, instruments of

123
https://www.facebook.com/groups/technolibertarians/

48
 freedom for the individual to pursue his or her dreams in whichever manner the best deem
fit, and, that these common goals can best be achieved by keeping markets and individuals
as unencumbered by governments as possible, for as long as possible, until the Technological
Singularity is reached.

The final paragraph of the intro has one point worth noting. That section lists the set of topics which
the group asks to be excluded from its discussions:

NOTE: Proponents of things like anti-GMO/anti-vaccine luddism, chemtrailers, 9/11 truthers,

Zeitgeist/Venus Project, and Raelianism, Climate alarmism, and other pseudoscientific beliefs
are unwelcome to promote their unscientific irrational moonbattery in this group. Avoid
logical fallacies, stick to facts.

The inclusion of “Climate alarmism” in this list of “pseudoscientific beliefs” and “unscientific
moonbattery” is a reminder of the technolibertarian opposition to any focus on the potential
drawbacks of misuse of technology. In that view, there’s no need to stir up any alarm about the
potential for rapid climate change. Instead, provided politicians and regulators are kept out of the
way, technologists and entrepreneurs will ensure that the climate remains hospitable.

The technoprogressive response

Technoprogressives share with technolibertarians the core proposition sometimes called “the
central meme of transhumanism”124 – that it is that it is ethical and desirable to improve the human
condition through technology. Both positions see very important positive roles for science and
technology, and also for the productive energies that can be unleashed by entrepreneurs, start-ups,
and other business groupings. The difference between the positions is in the question of whether
political and legislative intervention can have positive outcomes. Both groups are aware that, in
practice, political and legislative intervention is often cumbersome, self-serving, misguided, and
unnecessarily hinders the speedy development of innovative products. The groups differ in whether
it’s worth seeking better politics and better legislation.

The central meme of social futurism125 (which is a kind of synonym for the technoprogressive
standpoint) states, analogously to the central meme of transhumanism, that it is ethical and
desirable to improve society through technology. Technology isn’t just restricted to improving the
human body and mind – doing better than Darwinian natural selection. It’s capable of improving
human politics and human economics – doing better than the invisible hand of free markets.
(Though, in both cases, modifications need to be approached with care.)

Some phrases from the Technoprogressive Declaration126 – created in November 2014 – highlight
the distinctive position taken by technoprogressives:

The world is unacceptably unequal and dangerous. Emerging technologies could make things
dramatically better or worse. Unfortunately too few people yet understand the dimensions
of both the threats and rewards that humanity faces. It is time for technoprogressives,

124
https://wavism.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/cmzs-central-meme-of-zero-state/
125
https://wavism.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/cmzs-central-meme-of-zero-state/
126
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/tpdec2014

49
 transhumanists and futurists to step up our political engagement and attempt to influence
the course of events.

Our core commitment is that both technological progress and democracy are required for
the ongoing emancipation of humanity from its constraints…

We must intervene to insist that technologies are well-regulated and made universally
accessible in strong and just societies. Technology could exacerbate inequality and
catastrophic risks in the coming decades, or especially if democratized and well-regulated,
ensure longer, healthy and more enabled lives for growing numbers of people, and a
stronger and more secure civilization…

As artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies increasingly destroy more jobs than
they create, and senior citizens live longer, we must join in calling for a radical reform of the
economic system. All persons should be liberated from the necessity of the toil of work.
Every human being should be guaranteed an income, healthcare, and life-long access to
education.

Evidently, this Declaration aims at liberation – similar to the technolibertarian stance. But the
methods in the Declaration listed include

 Radical reform of the economic system

 Smart regulation of new technologies
 The democratisation of access to new technologies
 Stepping up political engagement.

Another distinctive aspect of the Technoprogressive Declaration is in its recurring references to

inequality. Indeed, the very first phrase is “The world is unacceptably unequal”. The picture
accompanying the Declaration on the IEET website carries the word “egalitarianism” – the principle
that all people deserve equal rights and opportunities.

To sharpen our understanding of the differences between technolibertarians and

technoprogressives, let’s look more closely at this question of inequality – a topic which is strikingly
missing from the introductory definition on the Facebook “Technolibertarians” group.

50
Growing inequality

Publications127 over the last few years by researchers such as Thomas Piketty128 and Emmanuel
Saez129 make it undeniable that, in many countries, including the US and the UK, the share of income
being received by upper fractions of the population is rising to levels unprecedented since before
the great depression of the 1930s. For example, the best paid 10% in the US now receive just over
50% of the total income in that country – up from around 35% over the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.

The Economist magazine noted in a November 2014 article130, in a section headlined “The really,
really rich get much, much richer”:

The fortunes of the wealthy have grown, especially at the very top. The 16,000 families
making up the richest 0.01%, with an average net worth of $371m, now control 11.2% of
total wealth—back to the 1916 share, which is the highest on record.

Similar trends apply throughout Western Europe (though less extreme).

Similar trends exist in Russia. Writing in October 2013, Ron Synovitz reported findings131 from the
annual global wealth study published by the financial services group Credit Suisse:

A new report on global wealth has determined that Russia now has the highest level of
wealth inequality in the world – with the exception of a few small Caribbean nations where
billionaires have taken up residency… A mere 110 Russian citizens now control 35 percent of
the total household wealth across the vast country.

By comparison, billionaires worldwide account for just 1 to 2 percent of total wealth.

The report says Russia has one billionaire for every $11 billion in wealth while, across the rest
of the world, there is one billionaire for every $170 billion.

127
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts
128
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F0.I.1.pdf
129
http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf
130
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-
america-forget-1
131
http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-billionaire-wealth-inequality/25132471.html

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Billionaire investor Warren Buffet – the admired “sage of Omaha” who has contributed large
amounts of his own personal wealth to philanthropic ventures – commented drily as follows132:

There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the
ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.

If you look at the 400 highest taxpayers in the United States in 1992, the first year for figures,
they averaged about $40 million of [income] per person. In [2010], they were $227 million
per person... During that period, their taxes went down from 29 percent to 21 percent of
income.

The raw statistics are incontrovertible. Where there’s scope for debate is in the interpretation of the
figures.

Many people respond that inequality of outcome is no big deal. People are different, and that it’s
right that their different efforts and talents are rewarded differently. I’ll come back in a moment to
the question of the degree of the inequality of outcome, and whether that extreme is good for
society. But we also need to look at the growing inequality of opportunity. The relevant dynamics
were summed up evocatively in a recent perceptive speech in Washington133. The speech explored
the background to frustrations being expressed by US voters about the performance of their
politicians. Here are some brief excerpts:

People’s… frustration is rooted in their own daily battles – to make ends meet, to pay for
college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how
hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids
won’t be better off than they were. They may not follow the constant back-and-forth in
Washington or all the policy details, but they experience in a very personal way the
relentless, decades-long trend that I want to spend some time talking about today. And that
is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized
middle-class America’s basic bargain – that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.

I believe this is the defining challenge of our time…

While we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity – the
idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort
and merit…

We’ve never begrudged success in America. We aspire to it. We admire folks who start new
businesses, create jobs, and invent the products that enrich our lives. And we expect them to
be rewarded handsomely for it. In fact, we’ve often accepted more income inequality than
many other nations for one big reason – because we were convinced that America is a place
where even if you’re born with nothing, with a little hard work you can improve your own
situation over time and build something better to leave your kids...

132
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-
and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html
133
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/04/the-best-speech-obama-has-given-on-
the-economy/

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 The problem is that alongside increased inequality, we’ve seen diminished levels of upward
mobility in recent years. A child born in the top 20% has about a 2-in-3 chance of staying at
or near the top. A child born into the bottom 20% has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to
the top. He’s 10 times likelier to stay where he is.

The speech was made by US President Barack Obama, and is worth reading in full134, regardless of
your own political leanings (Republican, Democrat, or whatever).

Responses to growing inequality

Let’s look again at the changes in tax rate experienced by the top 400 taxpayers in the US, over the
period 1992 to 2010. While the average income in that group soared more than five-fold – from
$40M to $227M – the tax-rate fell from 29% to 21%.

In my experience, technolibertarians have three responses to statistics of this sort. First, they
sometimes assert that the people benefiting from these hugely increased incomes (and declining tax
rates) uniquely deserve these benefits. The market has delivered these benefits to them, and the
market is always right. Second, they may point out that the tax office is a lot better off with 21% of
$227M than with 29% of $40M. Third, they say that even if the rich are seeing their wealth rise
faster than before, the poor are also becoming wealthier – so we are switching from a world of
“haves and have-nots” to a world of “have-a-lots and haves”. In this new world, even the poorest (if
they manage their lives sensibly) can access a swathe of goods that would have been viewed in
previous times as spectacular luxuries.

There’s a gist of truth in all three answers. Changing market circumstances mean that winning
companies do take a larger share of rewards that in previous times. The factors behind “winner
takes all” outcomes are described in, for example, the book “The Second Machine Age”135 by Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, of MIT:

 The digitization of more and more information, goods, and services

 The vast improvements in telecommunications and transport – the best products can be
used in every market
 The increased importance of networks and standards – new capabilities and new ideas can
be combined and recombined more quickly.

134
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/04/the-best-speech-obama-has-given-on-
the-economy/
135
http://www.secondmachineage.com/

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This effect is also known as “the economics of superstars”, using a term coined in 1981136 by Sherwin
Rosen:

The phenomenon of Superstars, wherein relatively small numbers of people earn enormous
amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage, seems to be
increasingly important in the modern world.

This analysis explains why the photo sharing company Instagram, with only 13 employees at the
time (but with 100 million registered users) was valued at $1B when acquired by Facebook in April
2012. In contrast, another company in the field of photography, Kodak, had its peak valuation of
$30B in 1997, when it had 86,000 employees. This implies that Instagram employees had, on
average, 2,000 times the productivity of Kodak employees. This productivity advantage was due to
how Instagram took special advantage of pre-existing technology.

The analysis is continued in a landmark MIT Technology Review article by David Rotman,
“Technology and inequality”137:

The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss
in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s
technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost
every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley,
a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—
has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the
gleaming, ultramodern city hall.

The homeless are the most visible signs of poverty in the region. But the numbers back up
first impressions. Median income in Silicon Valley reached $94,000 in 2013, far above the
national median of around $53,000. Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or

136
http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/schatzberg/ps616/Rosen1981.pdf
137
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531726/technology-and-inequality/

54
 less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing.
The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent,
according to calculations that factor in the high cost of living.

Even some of the area’s biggest technology boosters are appalled. “You have people begging
in the street on University Avenue [Palo Alto’s main street],” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at
Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University, an
education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon Valley. “It’s like what
you see in India,” adds Wadhwa, who was born in Delhi. “Silicon Valley is a look at the future
we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.”

Rotman goes on to quote legendary venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director at Draper
Fisher Jurvetson. Jurvetson was an early investor in Hotmail and sits on the boards of SpaceX,
Synthetic Genomics, and Tesla Motors:

“It just seems so obvious to me [that] technology is accelerating the rich-poor gap,” says
Steve Jurvetson… In many discussions with his peers in the high-tech community, he says, it
has been “the elephant in the room, stomping around, banging off the walls.”

Just because there is strong market logic to the way in which technological superstars are able to
command ever larger incomes, this does not mean, of course, that we should acquiesce in this fact.
An “is” does not imply an “ought”. Even an enlightened self-interest should cause a rethink within
“the 1%” (and their supporters on lower incomes – who often aspire to being to reach these stellar
salary levels themselves). A plea for such a rethink138 was issued by one of its members, Nick
Hanauer. Hanauer introduced himself as follows:

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and
unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies
across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to
giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded
aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4
billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many
ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and
capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that
the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane,
etc., etc.

But Hanauer was not writing to boast. He was writing to warn. The title of his article made that clear:
“The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats”. This extract conveys the flavour:

The problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning
capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting
worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal

138
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-
108014.html

55
 society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will
be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble
worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are
going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no
example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t
eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police
state. Or an uprising.

Declining costs

But what about the declining costs of both the necessities and the luxuries of life? Won’t the
imminent material abundance, enabled by exponential technologies, remove the heartaches caused
by present-day inequalities? Here, the technolibertarians have a fair point.

After all, Mary Meeker’s annual KPCB reviews of Internet trends contain some eye-popping statistics
of declining costs. Here are some call-outs from her 2014 presentation139:

 Computational costs have declined 33% annually from 1990 to 2013: a million transistors
cost $527 in 1990 but only 5 cents in 2013
 Storage costs declined 38% annually from 1992 to 2013: a Gigabyte of storage came down in
price over that time from $569 to 2 cents
 Bandwidth costs declined 27% annually from 1999 to 2013: connectivity of 1 Gbps came
down in price over that time from $1,245 to $16
 Even smartphones, despite their ever-greater functionality, have seen their costs decline 5%
annually from 2008 to 2013.

139
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/mary-meekers-2014-internet-presentation-2014-5

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One result of that final trend – as reported in Meeker’s KPCB presentation in 2015140 – is that
smartphone US market penetration jumped up from 18% in 2009 to 64% in 2014. Even in the US,
with all its manifest inequalities, access to smartphones evidently extends far beyond the 1%. That
access brings, in turn, the opportunity to browse much more information, 24x7, than was available
even to US Presidents just a couple of decades ago.

Yuri Van Geest of the Singularity University picks up the analysis, in an attractive slideset
introduction141 to his book “Exponential Organizations”.142. These slides illustrate remarkable price
reductions for (broadly) like-for-like functionality in a range of fast-improving technological fields:

 Industrial robots: 23-fold reduction in 5 years

 Neurotech devices for brain-computer interface (BCI): 44-fold reduction in 5 years
 Autonomous flying drones: 142-fold reduction in 6 years
 3D-printing: 400-fold reduction in 7 years
 Full DNA sequencing: 10,000-fold reduction (from $10M to $1,000) in 7 years.

Similar price reductions, it can be argued, will take all the heat out of present-day unequal access to
goods. In the meantime, technolibertarians urge two sets of action:

 Let’s press forwards quickly with further technological advances

 Let’s avoid obsessing about present-day inequalities (and, especially, the appearance of
present-day inequalities), since the more they’re spoken about, the greater the likelihood of
people becoming upset about them and taking drastic action.

140
http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-v1
141
http://www.slideshare.net/vangeest/exponential-organizations-h
142
http://www.exponentialorgs.com/

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However, at the same time as technology can reduce prices of products that have already been
invented, it can result in the creation of fabulous new products. Some of these new products start
off as highly expensive – especially in fields such as advanced healthcare. Sectors such as
rejuvenation biotech and neuro-enhancement may well see the following outcomes:

 Initial therapies are expensive, but deliver a decisive advantage to the people who can afford
to pay for them
 With their brains enhanced – and with their bodies made more youthful and vigorous – the
“winner takes all” trend will be magnified
 People who are unable to pay for these treatments will therefore fall even further behind
 Social alienation and angst will grow, with potentially explosive outcomes.

A counter-argument is that enterprising companies will be motivated to quickly make products

available at lower cost. Rather than pursuing revenues from small populations of wealthy
consumers, they will set their eyes on the larger populations of consumers with lower incomes. But
if the raw cost of the product itself remains high, that may not be easy. Apple’s policy of targeting
the wealthier proportion of would-be smartphone users makes good sense in its own terms.

A similar policy – this time by pharmaceutical giant Bayer – was described in an article by Glyn
Moody in early 2014143. The article carried the headline “Bayer’s CEO: We Develop Drugs For Rich
Westerners, Not Poor Indians”. It quoted Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers as follows:

We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for western patients who can
afford it.

That policy aligns with the for-profit motivation that the company pursues, in service of the needs of
its shareholders to maximise returns. But as Moody points out, pharmaceutical companies have, in
the past, shown broader motivation. He refers to this quote from 1950 from George Merck144
(emphasis added):

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits
follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we
have remembered it, the larger they have been…

We cannot step aside and say that we have achieved our goal by inventing a new drug or a
new way by which to treat presently incurable diseases, a new way to help those who suffer
from malnutrition, or the creation of ideal balanced diets on a worldwide scale. We cannot
rest till the way has been found, with our help, to bring our finest achievement to everyone.

What determines whether the narrow financial incentives of the market govern behaviours of
companies with the technology (possibly unique technology) that enables significant human
enhancement? Other factors need to come into play – not just financial motivation.

143
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140124/09481025978/big-pharma-ceo-we-develop-drugs-rich-
westerners-not-poor.shtml
144
http://todayinsci.com/M/Merck_George/MerckGeorge-Quotations.htm

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The genius – and limits – of free markets

Even within their own parameters – the promotion of optimal trade and the accumulation of wealth
– free markets often fail. The argument for smart oversight and regulation of markets is well made in
the 2009 book “How markets fail: the logic of economic calamities”145 by the New Yorker journalist
John Cassidy146.

The book contains a sweeping but compelling survey of a notion Cassidy dubs “Utopian economics”,
before providing layer after layer of decisive critique of that notion. As such, the book provides a
very useful guide to the history of economic thinking, covering Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton
Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Pigou, Hyman Minsky, among others.

The key theme in the book is that markets do fail from time to time, potentially in disastrous ways,
and that some element of government oversight and intervention is both critical and necessary, to
avoid calamity. This theme is hardly new, but many people resist it, and the book has the merit of
marshalling the arguments more comprehensively than I have seen elsewhere.

As Cassidy describes it, “utopian economics” is the widespread view that the self-interest of
individuals and agencies, allowed to express itself via a free market economy, will inevitably produce
results that are good for the whole economy. The book starts with eight chapters that
sympathetically outline the history of thinking about utopian economics. Along the way, he regularly
points out instances when free market champions nevertheless described cases when government
intervention and control was required. For example, referring to Adam Smith, Cassidy writes:

Smith and his successors … believed that the government had a duty to protect the public
from financial swindles and speculative panics, which were both common in 18th and 19th
century Britain…

145
http://www.amazon.com/How-Markets-Fail-Economic-Calamities/dp/0374173206/
146
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_cassidy/search?contributorName=john%20cassidy

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 To prevent a recurrence of credit busts, Smith advocated preventing banks from issuing
notes to speculative lenders. “Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some
respects a violation of natural liberty”, he wrote. “But these exertions of the natural liberty
of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought
to be, restrained by the laws of all governments… The obligation of building party walls
[between adjacent houses], in order to prevent the communication of a fire, is a violation of
natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are
here proposed.”

The book identifies long-time Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan as one of the villains of the
great financial crash of 2007-2009. Cassidy quotes a reply given by Greenspan147 to the question
“Were you wrong” asked of him in October 2008 by the US House Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and
others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their
equity in the firms…”

Greenspan was far from alone in his belief in the self-correcting power of economies in which self-
interest is allowed to flourish. There were many reasons for people to hold that belief. It appeared
to be justified both theoretically and empirically. As Greenspan remarked,

“I have been going for forty years, or more, with very considerable evidence that it was
working exceptionally well.”

Cassidy devotes another eight chapters to reviewing the history of criticisms of utopian economics.
This part of the book is entitled “Reality-based economics”, and covers topics such as:

 Game theory (“the prisoners dilemma”),

 Behavioural economics (pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) – including
disaster myopia,
 Problems of spillovers and externalities (such as pollution) – which can only be fully
addressed by centralised collective action,
 Drawbacks of hidden information and the failure of “price signalling”,
 Loss of competiveness when monopoly conditions are approached,
 Flaws in banking risk management policies (which drastically under-estimated the
consequences of larger deviations from “business as usual”),
 Problems with asymmetric bonus structure,
 The perverse psychology of investment bubbles.

In summary, Cassidy lists four “illusions” of utopian economics:

1. The illusion of harmony: that free markets always generate good outcomes;
2. The illusion of stability: that free market economy is sturdy;
3. The illusion of predictability: that distribution of returns can be foreseen;

147
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/worldbusiness/23iht-gspan.4.17206624.html

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 4. The illusion of Homo Economicus: that individuals are rational and act on perfect
information.

These illusions remain pervasive in many parts of economic thought. These illusions also lie behind
technolibertarian optimism that technology, without government intervention, will be able to solve
social and climatic problems such as terrorism, surveillance, environmental devastation, and threats
from new pathogens.

Indeed, free markets and innovative technology have, together, been a tremendous force for
progress in recent history. However, they need smart oversight and regulation if they are going to
reach their fullest potential. That thought lies at the core of the technoprogressive stance.

The political landscape ahead

The need for smart oversight and regulation will grow even more pressing, as technology progresses
over the next few decades to the point of displacing ever larger numbers of people from the
workforce. This scenario is described in the recent book by Martin Ford, “Rise of the Robots:
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future”148.

In the scenarios Ford describes, technological unemployment won’t just impact the lesser skilled
jobs currently undertaken by people in, say, the lower 50% of the income spectrum. It will also bite
into the skills used by many of the top 5% in their work. As a result, many people who presently
instinctively rebel against any technoprogressive notion of a new social contract may find their
worldview turned upside down.

Other growing social crises may well accelerate similar changes in mindset. For example, as threats
to personal well-being from poor software security become more widely publicised – as covered in
my recent article “Eating the world: the growing importance of software security”149 – I expect a
growing public clamour for government action to tilt the software security playing field. Any idea of

148
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465059996
149
http://dw2blog.com/2015/06/11/eating-the-world-the-growing-importance-of-software-security/

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a laissez-faire market in software vulnerabilities will become seen as an irresponsible indulgence.
Likewise for any idea about a laissez-faire market in synthetic pathogens, potential nano-weaponry,
and lots more besides.

In short: To the extent that they place whole-hearted trust in free markets, technolibertarians are
indulging in a dangerous fantasy.

But I say all this out of no desire to see the technolibertarian viewpoint be crushed. After all, that
viewpoint puts its finger on a set of valid concerns, which need to be integrated into our collective
response to technological possibilities. Governments and regulatory schemes suffer, as mentioned
earlier, from tendencies towards deep problems: empire-building, poor understanding of new tech,
regulations that become outdated, regulatory capture, and white elephant projects.

So rather than technoprogressives somehow vanquishing technolibertarians, in debate over the next
5-10 years, I look forwards to the best insights of both positions being integrated. The governmental
and regulatory systems of the near future need to be significantly enhanced versions of today’s
incumbent systems. We need government 2.0 and regulations 2.0.

Thinkers whose instincts place them firmly within the technolibertarian heritage can actively
contribute to this discussion. As an example of this kind of positive contribution, Swedish think-tank
Eudoxa founder Waldemar Ingdahl writes as follows in his essay “Anarchy beyond socialism and
capitalism”150 in the first Transpolitica book, “Anticipating tomorrow’s politics”151:

This essay draws attention to a variant of anarchism – market anarchism – which has been
little studied, but whose relevance may increase due to new technology…

Market anarchism is a belief centred on mutual exchange, not economic privilege,

advocating freed markets, not capitalism. Social justice is mainly seen as eliminating the
governmental privileges that rigs the market in favour of capitalists while retaining a focus on
building voluntary institutions such as cooperatives.

Market anarchism pronounces itself a radical liberation while empowering people to

eliminate structural poverty, and redistribute economic and social power. It differs from left-
wing anarchism by its embrace of markets, while setting itself apart from the anarcho-
capitalist view of freedom as simply being present day corporations and capitalist structures,
minus the state’s taxes and regulations.

Indeed, there is much more that unifies technolibertarians and technoprogressives than what
divides them. They can both be seen as part of what pioneering futurist FM Esfandiary152 called “up
wing” as opposed to either “right wing” or “left wing”. In this, these two positions are opposed to
the “down wing” technoconservative position, as well as to the “no wing” technosceptical position.
Esfandiary also endorsed the term “transhuman”, via his 1989 book “Are You a Transhuman?:
Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World”.

Accordingly, I look forward to the following features of the political dialogue of the next 10-20 years:
150
http://transpolitica.org/2015/06/13/anarchy-beyond-socialism-and-capitalism/
151
http://transpolitica.org/publications/anticipating-tomorrows-politics/
152
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030

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 1. The evolution and maturation of an integrated transhumanist political position, that respects
and enhances the best insights of both technolibertarians and technoprogressives
2. The growing recognition of the fundamental inadequacies of both the technoconservative
and technosceptical viewpoints.

Given the inertia present in current political systems and prevailing mindsets, the second of these
tasks may prove harder than the first. But the first may turn out to be the enabler for the second. It
is that task that deserves our fullest attention.

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 3. How do governments add value to society?
By Bruce Lloyd
Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management, London South Bank University

In the wake of current discussions about the future of politics, there is a fundamental question we all
need to be asking. What are governments for? Alternatively expressed: How do governments add
value to society?

The classic answers to this question attempt to find a simple, consistent and sustainable, over-
arching framework within which government policy can operate, whether it is at local, national, or
international, levels. Unfortunately, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find one simple answer as, in
practice, there are two fundamentally different – potentially conflicting – pressures that need to be
reconciled one way or another.

The first pressure is the re-distribution dimension. The second is the need to effectively exploit
potential and actual economies of scale. There is also a third issue, which needs to be integrated into
policy initiatives: the need to develop structures that are the most favourable to effective positive
innovation.

Before these three items are explored in more detail, it is useful to look more closely at the
fundamental question: ‘What is government for?’ This question is relevant, irrespective of the level
of government that exists in any hierarchy of public sector decision-making. To maintain that
government’s primary role is: ‘To define and uphold the public interest’, doesn’t get us very far, and
is in danger of missing a critical dimension.

A core dimension of the evolution of governmental and political/democratic systems in the past –
and today - has been to attempt to reduce ‘abuses of power’ that would otherwise occur within any
totally unregulated society. As a result policies need to focus on, and be evaluated against, a
‘restricting the abuse of power’ agenda. Unfortunately, all too often the processes of government
can, themselves, easily end up also being responsible for abuses by becoming self-serving. Hence the
vital importance of effective accountability within whatever government structures are in operation.

The underlying issue for any government should be, but often isn’t, to attempt to reduce
opportunities for the abuse of power by one group (or individual) over another, essentially by
regulation, and/or the redistribution of resources from ‘haves’ to ‘have not’s’, in the name of
fairness/justice. This is not some idealised, utopian, objective that reflects a Marxist philosophy; it
simply recognises that the redistribution issue needs to be continually, and pro-actively, addressed
in order to generate the conditions that encourage the sustainable evolution of society over the
longer term.

The re-distributional priority would no longer apply, either in theory or practice, within a relatively
homogeneous ‘middle class’ (or any other relatively homogeneous class) open society. Even Marx
argued that, in these conditions, ‘the state would wither away’. In practice, our government, and
virtually all governments in the world today, have to develop policies that attempt to achieve the re-
distributional objective; especially where there is the increasing gap between the top 10-20% and

64
the bottom 10-20%, let alone the top 1% & bottom 1%. Hence there is an acute need for effective
re-distributional policies, and progressive tax structures.

Progressive Capitalism153 by Lord (David) Sainsbury, along with many other publications - including
the recent book by Steve Hilton, More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First154 - focus
on the need to minimise the role of government through decentralised (even outsourced/privatised)
decision-making. This approach, combined with more effective management of the outsourced
activities, is entirely appropriate for relatively equal/homogeneous communities, i.e. a generally
‘middle class’ society, which is essentially relevant to the core 50-70% of UK society today. But any
re-distributional policy area also needs to be consistent with both the effective exploitation of
‘economies of scale’, as well as facilitating effective transfer of innovation related activity and
learning.

However, such a re-distributional focus that attempts to reduce abuses of power within a society,
where power is largely associated by unequal resource distribution, i.e. where relatively
equal/homogeneous communities do not exist, has to operate within underlying processes and
outcomes that are perceived as generally fair and open to improvement by all the stakeholders.
Without this element, divisions in society will, almost inevitably, tend to expand to the point where
there are increasingly conflicts between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

Unfortunately, today, in the UK, the two main political parties generally approach these issues from
very different perspectives, and both seem unable and/or unwilling to recognise this core issue,
which requires them to attempt to get the best of both worlds – practical distributional policies for
the income (and capital) extremes – through progressive tax policies, among other things; at the
same time as maximising the scope for self-management (i.e. non-intervention) around the middle
income/capital groupings. Inevitably policies and regulations tend to be aimed at being generally
applicable. Politically, this dilemma is compounded by the need for all political parties to appeal to
groups across the whole spectrum. This is particularly important because, while most of the votes
now come from the ‘middle’, those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum tend to dominate
the processes that set the respective political agendas and policies. In many ways, the UK is still
working out the 19th century class struggle, where one party still tends to get its main support from
the ‘haves’, while the other from the ‘have not’s’; yet both only succeed by obtaining votes from the
middle.

Any discussion of the role of government has to understand this critical issue. A relatively easy policy
initiative in the UK, as well as elsewhere, that would help overall, would be for all government
budgets and policy initiatives to have a re-distributional impact analysis attached to them. (Not to
the ‘n’th decimal place - just round numbers!) Where the re-distribution impact is negative, or nil,
serious consideration should be given to either, abandoning those activities, decentralising them, or
attempting to see if they can be justified on other grounds, such as possible ‘economies of scale’. If
these policies are then considered justified, what trade-off is made against the re-distributional
objective.

153
http://www.amazon.com/Progressive-Capitalism-achieve-economic-liberty-ebook/dp/B00BQZGP7A/
154
http://www.amazon.com/More-Human-Designing-World-People-ebook/dp/B00SIDCSY2/

65
Overall, the total UK tax income/expenditure probably falls into the following general re-
distributional categories: 20% from rich to poor, 5% from poor to rich, and 75% re-distribution
around the middle group. (However, these figures are simply guesses and a detailed study into
making them more reliable is long overdue.) It is within this ‘middle’ group where the regulatory
(enabling, i.e. essentially non-operational) role of government needs to focus its activities, reflecting
the attempt to increase fairness in the relationships between the various stakeholders, without
being unduly concerned with any pro-active re-distributional agenda. However, on current trends, it
is unlikely any government will be able to operate sustainably entirely, or even primarily, simply
within an ‘enabling’ strategy today, or in the foreseeable future.

But why is this re-distributional agenda important? Essentially there are two reasons: First a
significant proportion of the resources of the ‘haves’ arose from what would now be considered as
past ‘abuses of power’, and these need correcting in the name of ‘fairness’. And secondly, perhaps
most important of all, if there is not this emphasis, the evidence of history suggests that this uneven
re-distribution just gets increasingly unbalanced, until a point is reached where more drastic (often
‘revolutionary’) alternatives are seen as the only way to try redress this underlying imbalance.
Overall, the greater the perceived sense of fairness in these processes, the more likely it is that the
policies will be sustainable in the short term, as well as providing the foundation for further
evolution in a positive direction in the future. Of course, it also needs to be recognised that there is
no ‘perfect answer’ to this resource distribution issue.

The other role for Government is for it to attempt to exploit potential ‘economies of scale’. Basic
examples of this would include such activities as the military and police. But even here, it is
important that these activities do not generate their own self-serving interests, and their role should
not be seen as primarily attempting to preserve the status quo, and/or vested interests of the
‘haves’, rather than focusing on the wider interests of society as a whole. Although there is always
plenty of talk about these ‘wider interests’, too often this is simply expedient window dressing, that
is essentially driven by a combination of a desire to preserve particular interests, at the same time as
recognising the need for the votes from this much wider ‘middle’ grouping.

Another area for potential economies of scale would include major long term investments that any
decentralised system is unlikely to be able to undertake on its own. For example, major power
stations, railway networks, airport developments. In theory, there is a strong case for an active role
for government in these areas, but the key question is at what level (local, regional, national or
international) the decisions should be taken. Even when decisions are taken primarily at one level
there are often implications at other levels that also need to be considered. There are also problems
over the extent to which these initiatives can get caught up with other ‘political’ agendas, and a
(surprising?) number (Concorde etc) become economic ‘white elephants’, although there are other
projects that might well fall into that category, but end up producing considerable social benefits.
(The Channel Tunnel?) Is this likely to be the case for the HS2 high speed rail project?

It is also worth remembering that economies of scale are much more difficult to achieve in practice
than appears to be the case in theory – largely because people issues are not given the attention
they deserve. Hence, the importance of the principle of subsidiarity in considering the link between
economies of scale; the decision-making level should always be moved down where-ever possible,
especially if there are not explicit economies of scale benefits, or re-distributional, issues.

66
There are two other underlying points that are important to bear in mind when considering the
overall ‘added value’ framework mentioned above. First, the more responsible individuals are in
their behaviour towards each other, the less formal regulation processes will be required, and this is
particularly relevant within more homogeneous societies, where the underlying power relationship
are, at least on the face of it, more equal. Secondly, it needs to be recognised that an optimal
decision-making level does not apply to every decision. While some decisions are best considered
globally (regulating international trade, air traffic control etc), others are more appropriately
undertaken at national, or local, levels. In the end, the quality of the final decision at any level
ultimately depends more on the quality of the conversations between the various levels (as far as
possible free from prejudices and vested interests) than on anything else. Unfortunately, in many
situations, the media tends to polarize issues, reflecting prejudices/vested interests, which are far
from helpful to improving our discussion over the role of government -- and the role of decision-
making within it. These are fundamental issues for governments at every level, in every part of the
world, not just in the UK.

An additional dimension that also needs to be considered, in any discussion of the role of
government, is its impact on the quantity and quality of innovation. Generally the more
decentralised the system the greater the scope for innovation; but any policy in this area also needs
to recognise that, in certain situations, the need to benefit from economies of scale is also relevant,
particularly where long time horizons are involved. However, political time horizons are often very
short, and this can create an additional challenge. (For example, decisions about nuclear power
stations and space programmes?) Any decentralised innovation approach needs to develop
structures that encourage the transfer of learning, and best practice, across the various
decentralised (and even centralised) groups.

The challenge for policy makers – and particularly politicians – is to develop and implement policies
that are essentially attempting to reconcile these two, apparently contradictory, policies:
redistribution and economies of scale. This is particularly difficult when the main political parties
have a fundamentally different starting point to their approach to these issues. The need is to get
the best of both worlds, not worst - which is what tends to happens now, in practice, far too often.

The underlying challenge is to recognise that there is a need for intervention to be focused on
helping to manage the re-distributional resource dimension more effectively, while reconciling this
with a minimalist (‘enabling’) role that focuses on managing the relationships and interactions
between those in the ‘middle’. The answer to this dilemma is a combination of both an enabling
framework, and an appropriately focused re-distributional interventionist strategy; combined with
an awareness of the need for structures that enable the effective exploitation of potential
economies of scale. Unfortunately these fundamental issues do not appear to get given sufficient
attention, or even recognised, in the general political discussions about the role of government both
inside and outside the formal political party structures. Operating policies that reflect these two
strategies at the same time can be done. But policies will only have any chance of success if the
conflicting issues outline here are recognised and understood. In addition, it is not only necessary for
the two different approaches to be integrated successfully, but this needs to be done in such a way
that both the media, and the public at large, understand what is going on – and why.

67
Unless the fundamental issues raised here are given much greater attention in all parts of the world,
not just the UK, and at all levels of decision-making in government, we are unlikely to be able to
make progress on the other important challenges, mentioned elsewhere in this book, that we all
face in the decades ahead, which will result in our future being much more precarious than it needs
to be.

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 4. The Benefits of Digital Democracy
By Walter L.S. Burrough and Kay Firth-Butterfield

This Chapter discusses the way in which U.S. citizens could be encouraged to re-engage with the
electoral process and why such engagement will matter. In doing so consideration is given to the
way in which such engagement can be facilitated by the development of an AI ‘trusted agent’, and
the way in which true democracy reveals the uniqueness of the human characteristic to care about
community.

Whilst Presidential elections produce a higher voter turnout than Mid-Term elections, since World
War II, there has been a steady decline in voter turnout and engagement. This is particularly true
amongst youth voters, African American voters and immigrant communities. The notable exception
to this disenfranchisement occurred when President Obama galvanised support from these
communities with a vision of a new political future and strategic use of social media. Only 36.4% of
those eligible voted in the Mid-Term elections in 2014 and research from the Pew Research Centre
shows that about 10% of voters, mostly young, are now simply not interested in politics at all,
indeed they are described as ‘Bystanders’. This situation is far from ideal, because although voters
may be disinterested in politics whilst there are ‘cake and circuses’ to distract them their views may
change dramatically if their position in society changes. If the current system continues in this way,
as has been seen from home-grown jihadists to street gangs to drug gangs, disenfranchisement can
lead to civil disruption.

There are many factors which lead to the low interest in U.S. elections. These include the money
spent on elections, the extensive advertising, a lack of consensus government, long ballots and the
length of election cycle. The authors propose one tool which would address one of these problems
directly and the others tangentially. The tool is a trusted ‘agent’ which is enabled by ‘strong’ AI
which uses logical reasoning to create causal understanding. It would help to disambiguate data
about the candidates and suggest candidates and policies whose views closely mirror those of the
voter. This would allow the individual to feel engaged in the process and would give democracy back
to ‘the People’. However, this system wouldn’t simply be permitting citizens to voice their opinion, it
would be giving them a true opportunity to engage with the governance of their community and
bring about the change which they do not believe can come from the current democratic process.

Historically, democracy has functioned through the electorate selecting representatives to act on
their behalf to collaboratively develop legislation that best reflects their constituents’ beliefs and
aspirations. Of course, the conflicts between different sectors of the electorate and indeed between
different voters represented by the same politician require many compromises of true
representation. The reality is that, in most cases, the electorate only has the opportunity to vote
once every few years for their representatives and, as has been seen, many voters feel disconnected
from the political process.

Electronic town halls have held the peoples’ imagination since the 1970s – a transparent,
collaborative space where every citizen can engage in the political process as equals and their voice
be heard. Instead of voting for a representative once every four years, citizens would steer a
government throughout its lifetime by voting on issues as policy was developed. This could lead to a

69
“perfect” democracy that would overcome the compromises due to the cost and complexity of
polling the citizenry and allow continuous input from voters. Systems of this kind can be seen in the
engagement of many of the citizens with their local government via Twitter in the Spanish town of
Jun, ‘BallotBox’ which encourages community engagement in City council decision making in Austin,
Texas and Liquid Democracy in Germany.

New developments based on the block chain point towards transparent, inexpensive and secure
voting systems like Bit Congress and Agora which could enable this new, Democracy 2.0. However,
much care needs to be taken with such a fundamental change in voting. It is not clear that more
opportunities to vote really improve representation. Micro-voting systems advocated by democracy
2.0 groups promote increased reliance on polls at a more granular level and throughout the political
process. Without helping the majority of citizens, who are already unable to participate
knowledgably in the current political process, there is a real danger of transferring more power to a
minority of especially interested voters. Also, it is likely that voters with particular interests will vote
disproportionately on issues aligned with their own interests resulting in increased polarization.
What is needed is an informed and engaged electorate, not simply an electorate with the power to
vote more often. Unless great care is taken the power of the vote may be left in the hands of a
specialist, educated and engaged minority.

Artificial intelligence could be used to help people to use that power effectively. Currently, there are
many apps which help voters to decide upon candidates but they are clearly not working. Indeed,
they can only work when a voter is engaged enough to use them. However, the proposed ‘trusted
agent’ would monitor a person’s social network communications, media consumption choices,
reading and conversations. By doing so it would develop an understanding of an individual’s political
views. Furthermore, this agent would profile each candidate and issue on every ballot. Then, a
‘strong’ AI trusted agent could make personal recommendations on elections that the citizen may
like to vote in, clarify policies, relate them to the voter, engage in discussion of the issues, or even
debate inconsistencies of the user’s beliefs. Combined with forum projects like DemocracyOS the
agent could engage the user in issues and campaigns that they may not otherwise be aware of. In
effect, the trusted agent would be a voter’s individual political representative and advisor, giving
each voter a full and informed voice in the political process. The voter might even decide to allow
the agent to vote for her.

Of course, in order to obtain public trust the security of such an agent would have to be paramount.
Current studies both in the U.K. and U.S. show that millennials are voting in lower numbers than
ever before. However, studies show that engagement with smart technology amongst the
Millennial/Homeland generations is high and acceptance of its position in their lives is normal. Thus,
the authors propose that these generations can become readily engaged within the political process
by appropriate use of new technology.

The current level of disenfranchisement must be of concern not only because democracies fail if
voters disengage but also because trust in government will be critical as society changes over the
coming decades. By way of example many voters may be facing re-training or a jobless future. A
paper written in 2013 by researchers at the Oxford Martin School155 investigated how susceptible

155
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

70
jobs are to computerisation and concluded that there would be a loss of up to 47% of jobs across all
sectors in the US within the next two decades. The paper concludes that,

the current trend towards labour market polarization, with computerization being principally
confined to low-skill and low-wage occupations.

This will require re-training of low skilled workers if they are not to fall out of the labour market
altogether. Such workers acquire “creative and social intelligence”. Brynjolfsson and McAfee make
the point that the US education system is ill-equipped to do so and authors Satariano, Bass and Clark
argue156 that,

The catch in the 21st Century is that the technological leaps are so big and happening so
quickly, and at a time when service industry jobs are responsible for more than 40 percent of
employment growth in the US, where income inequality is widening.

If it is correct that low skilled and low waged worker will lose their jobs then computerization will be
affecting people in already vulnerable sections of society. They will live in a society which is swiftly
changing and will need a way of feeling part of that society. History, and current levels of civil
disobedience, shows us that when people find themselves unable to understand their new place in a
society engagement between the citizens and their government becomes of vital importance.

The use of the trusted agent represents a superb collaboration of AI and people. Most people care
about their community and many would like to be more involved but do not have the time or are
switched off by the process of voting or the design of the current system. A trusted agent which
helps them to engage with the community through voting would enable people to take ownership of
that community and would help young people to engage with a system which is currently
uninteresting to or not working for them. The Homeland generation will grow up with access to
smart devices as a natural part of their life. Therefore, it could become natural for them to engage
with such tools to vote and get in touch with their community. Already, and increasingly, they know
their community though social media and with Facebook adding news to its feeds that is likely to
increase. On the other hand, the chance that the new generation will become more dis-engaged
from democracy leaves open the very real possibility of social and governmental degradation. From
the early origins of democracy to the Freedom House surveys of today it can be seen that it is easy
to slip from democracy to totalitarianism when a society is disrupted and evolving.

Notes

The views expressed by the authors are their own and do not reflect the views of any organizations
for which they work, consult or teach.

In further work the authors intend to expand this chapter to consider the role of the trusted agent in
fragile democracies which they define as

i. democracies which are finding it hard to develop or embed; fledgling democracies such as
Afghanistan,

156
http://www.biznews.com/light/2015/05/22/artificial-intelligence-takes-off-these-robots-are-cute-gainfully-
employed/

71
 ii. democracies which are developed but are teetering on the brink of totalitarianism (of which
there are more and more each year).

Suggested reading:

 “Agora voting – open source voting software”157

 “BitCongress – Decentralized voting platform”158
 “DemocracyOS - Better Decisions, Together”159
 TED talk by Pia Mancini about Democracy OS160
 Etzioni, A. (1972). Minerva: An Electronic Town Hall. Policy Sciences, 3(4), 457–474.
 “‘Electronic Democracy’ by Scott London”161
 “How Block Chain Technology Could Usher in Digital Democracy”162
 “How Do You Decide Who to Vote for? | Stanford Graduate School of Business”163
 “The Birth of The Digital Democracy.” Theatlantic.com, December 16, 2014164
 BBC World Service. "The society of the minute". The small town in Spain which uses @twitter
to run government business165
 BallotBox166
 David Meyer. How the German Pirate Party’s Liquid Democracy Works. Techpresident: May
7, 2012167
 Liquid Feedback168
 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne. “The future of employment: how Susceptible are
jobs to Computerisation?” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, September 17,
2013169
 Adam Satariano, Dina Bass and Jack Clark. Artificial intelligence takes off: cute robots,
gainfully employed. BizNews.com: May 22, 2015170
 “Wealth without workers, workers without wealth” Oct. 2014 in the Economist171
 http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21621800-digital-revolution-bringing-sweeping-
change-labour-markets-both-rich-and-poor
 Neil Howe. “Artificial Intelligence paves the Way for Ambient Intelligence”. Forbes: 14 May,
2015172

157
https://www.agoravoting.com/
158
http://www.bitcongress.org/
159
http://democracyos.org/
160
http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era
161
http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/ed.html
162
http://www.coindesk.com/block-chain-technology-digital-democracy/
163
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-do-you-decide-who-vote
164
http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/ibm-transformation/the-birth-of-the-digital-democracy/247/
165
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ryvy1
166
http://www.ballotboxonline.com/
167
http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works
168
http://liquidfeedback.org/
169
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
170
http://www.biznews.com/light/2015/05/22/artificial-intelligence-takes-off-these-robots-are-cute-gainfully-
employed/
171
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21621800-digital-revolution-bringing-sweeping-change-labour-
markets-both-rich-and-poor

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  Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and
Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”173
 Martin Ford. “Rise of the Robots”. New York: Basic Books, 2015174
 Briefing. Rise of the machines. The Economist: 9 May, 2015175
 Helen Lewis. Apathy or antipathy? Why so few young people vote. The Guardian: 19 April
2015176

172
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2015/05/14/artificial-intelligence-paves-the-way-for-ambient-
intelligence/
173
http://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393239357/
174
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/0465059996
175
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21650526-artificial-intelligence-scares-peopleexcessively-so-
rise-machines
176
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/19/why-young-people-dont-vote-apathy-or-antipathy-
election-2015

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 5. Cyborgization: A Possible Solution to Errors in Human Decision
Making?
By Dana Edwards
and Alexander J. Karran, Consultant, Transpolitica

Abstract

Accelerating social complexity in combination with outstanding problems like attention

scarcity and information asymmetry contribute to human error in decision making.
Democratic institutions and markets both operate under the assumption that human beings
are informed rational decision makers working with perfect information, situation awareness,
and unlimited neurological capacity. We argue that, although these assumptions are
incorrect, they could to a large extent be mediated by a process of cyborgization, up to and
including electing cyborgs into positions of authority.

Introduction

In the modern information age governing bodies, business organisations and adaptive systems are
faced with ever increasing complexity in decision-making situations. Accelerating rates of
technological and social change further compound this systemic complexity. In this complex
environment the effects of human cognitive bias and bounded rationality become issues of great
importance, impacting upon such domains as political policy, legislature, business practice,
competitiveness and information intelligence.

In this text we shall use regulatory capture as an illustration of how human cognitive bias and
conflicts of interest interact in the politico-economic space to create disproportionate advantage.
We shall also hypothesize a novel potential solution to human cognitive bias in the form of human-
machine hybrid decision support.

In broad terms regulation encompasses all forms of state intervention in economic function, and
more specifically intervention with regard to the control of natural monopolies. The term
“regulatory capture” is used to explain a corruption of the regulatory process. Regulatory capture
has both narrow and broad interpretations. The broad interpretation is that it is a process through
which special interest groups can affect state intervention ranging from the levying of taxes to
legislation affecting the direction of research and development 177.The narrow interpretation places
the focus specifically on the process through which regulated monopolies exert pressure to
manipulate state agencies to operate in their favour178.

What these interpretations express is that regulatory capture generally involves two parties: the
regulated monopoly and the state regulatory agency. The process of regulatory capture can be two
way: just as corporations can capture government regulation agencies, the possibility exists for

177
Stigler, G. (1971), “The Theory of Economic Regulation.”, Bell Journal of Economics and Management
Science, 2, 3–21
178
Peltzman, S. (1976), “Toward a More General Theory of Regulation.”, Journal of Law and Economics, 19 ,
211–48.

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government agencies to capture corporations. As a result of this process, government regulatory
agencies can fail to exert financial and ethical boundaries if they are captured, while corporations
can fail strategically and financially if they are captured.

Regulatory capture takes two forms, materialist and non-materialist capture. In materialist capture,
which is primarily financially motivated, the mechanism of capture is to appeal to the self-interest of
the regulators. Materialist capture alters the motives of regulators based on economic self-interest,
so that they become aligned with the commercial or special interest groups which are supposed to
be regulated. This form of capture can be the result of bribes, political donations, or a desire to
maintain government funding. Non-materialist capture also called cognitive or cultural capture
happens when the regulator adopts the thinking of the industry being regulated. Status and group
identification both play a role in the phenomena of regulators identifying with those in the industry
they are assigned to regulate179.

Given the current socio-political climate of accelerating technological and social change,
consideration should be given to how organizations are formed. Organizations should be structured
to resist or otherwise minimize any service disruption caused by regulatory capture, so that if the
process of normative regulation fails i.e. in situations where the balance of the relationship between
the two entities has become corrupted, the service which required regulation in the first place can
remain available after the failure.

One example of potential government regulatory failure due to a captured agency is the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hydraulic fracking scandal of 2004. The EPA released a
report180 in which they stated that hydraulic fracturing posed “little or no threat” to drinking water
supplies. Whistle-blower Weston Wilson disputed181 this conclusion of the EPA publicly and exposed
five of the seven members of the peer review panel as having conflicts of interest. These conflicts of
interest allowed elements within the administration to apply pressure, and become involved in
discussions about how fracking would eventually be portrayed in the report. Due to this pressure the
EPA may have unable to publish a genuine conclusion about the safety of fracking. This reveals a
potential failure of the EPA to protect the public interest due to regulatory capture.

Another example of regulatory capture concerns a dramatic failure of regulatory oversight for the
British National Foundation (BNF), which is one the UK’s most influential institutes on diet and
health. The BNF, established more than 40 years ago, advises government, schools, industry, health
professionals and the public, and exists solely to provide “authoritative, evidence-based information
on food and nutrition”182. Its ability to provide independent evidence-based advice however has

179
Carpenter, D., & Moss, D. A. (Eds.). (2013). “Preventing regulatory capture: special interest influence and
how to limit it.” Cambridge University Press.
180
Environmental Protection Agency, "Study of Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing of Coalbed Methane
Wells on Underground Sources of Drinking Water." Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water report, June
2004 - accessed May 2015.
181
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/oil-
extraction.html#.VX7TjkbFdlx
182
Chamberlain & Laurance (2010). “Is the British Nutrition Foundation having its cake and eating it too?”
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/is-the-british-nutrition-foundation-having-its-
cake-and-eating-it-too-1925034.html - accessed May 2015.

75
been called into question given its apparent bias towards promoting the views of the food industry
and the organization's lack of transparency when reporting funding sources.

This comes as no surprise when 39 members of its funding membership come from the food
industry183. For example, In October 2009, when a television commercial for a member company’s
probiotic yoghurt product was banned, the BNF spoke out in support of the product (and thus the
company) by claiming that there is "growing evidence that a regular intake of probiotics may
positively influence our health". As a result while appearing to take a stance on the grounds of public
health, it would appear as though the BNF were protecting its own interests and those of a member
company under the guise of regulatory oversight.

Factors that affect human decision making within complex adaptive systems

The examples of regulatory capture described above highlight some of the issues associated with
human cognitive bias, specifically within a complex adaptive system (such as a government or
corporation) where rational choice is bounded by self-interest combined with overarching
organizational goals. In information saturated environments such as these, human cognitive
limitations can become a factor that leads to poor rational decision making, requiring the individual
or organisation to rely on shortcuts which may lead to human error. A number of psychological and
social factors such as "attention scarcity", "information asymmetry", and "accelerating societal
complexity" contribute to poor rational decision making within complex organisational structures.
Awareness has been rising that human attention has become a scarce resource in the information
age, and attention scarcity ultimately relates to the economics of attention.

Attention scarcity relates to a human cognitive limitation which determines the amount of
information a human can digest and attend to in a given period of time (also referred to as an
184
information economy). Simply put, “attention is a resource-a person only has so much of it” . Thus,
in a low information economy any item brought to the attention of decision makers is perceived by
its economic properties which are deemed decisive for its profitability. In contrast, in a high
information economy, the diversity of items mean perception is limited and only choices that expose
decision makers to sufficiently strong signals are viable.

Attention scarcity is a weakness of human cognition which can be purposefully exploited. For
example, consider the U.S. Affordable Care Act, which has over 9000 pages of rules. It is likely that
most voters lacked sufficient “attention” to read through and digest each page at the time when the
act was being debated. Due to the complexity of legislative law, even if a team of “netizens” formed
to crowd source the reading and analysis of a new law, it is unlikely that they would be able to
interpret and understand it within the available timeframe to object if needed.

The effects of attention scarcity are observed in the poor public understanding not only of legal
documents, but also of complex open source software. We see in open source software situations

183
Chamberlain & Laurance (2010). “Is the British Nutrition Foundation having its cake and eating it too?”
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/is-the-british-nutrition-foundation-having-its-
cake-and-eating-it-too-1925034.html - accessed May 2015.
184
Crawford, Matthew B. (March 31, 2015). "Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem". The World Beyond
Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (hardcover) (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
p. 11.

76
where the developers allow anyone to read the source code but in which the source code has so
many lines of opaque obfuscated code that very few users or even other software developers
understand how it works. We can see how attention scarcity produces information asymmetry
between the open source developers who can decipher the source code and everyone else who may
or may not choose to use the software.

Information asymmetry is a serious factor intrinsic to cognitive bias in human decision making, and
concerns decisions in transactions where one party has the perception of, or is in possession of,
more or better quality information than the other. This potentially creates an imbalance in the
transaction power dynamic which may lead to future failure and a collapse of trust, causing a kind of
market failure in a worst case scenario.

Accelerating societal complexity refers to the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions
whose practices are identified by the “shrinking of the present”, a decreasing time period during
which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future185. When combined with
accelerating technological progress this “shrinking” appears to flow ever faster, making decisions
based on belief or the perception of better information problematic.

All of these individual factors can influence the human decision making process; in combination they
potentially create a decision space that becomes more fluid, with a self-reinforcing feedback loop
which requires better decisions to be made in shorter spaces of time with incomplete or asymmetric
information. Indeed, by all accounts humans make errors all of the time, but as society gets ever
more complex, these errors have lasting and increasingly dangerous consequences (such as in the
example of hydraulic fracking discussed above). In order to get a clearer picture of a possible basis
for this error effect, some discussion of human cognitive limitations is warranted.

The impact of human cognitive limitation

As we have discussed previously, information asymmetry in complex adaptive systems allows for
decision error to appear within the system, as the better informed parties possess a marked
information advantage which allows them to exploit the ignorance of other parties. This can occur in
any field of human endeavour, such as law, science, commerce or governance, where new
knowledge will be easier to grasp by those with previous knowledge, given that knowledge is self-
referential and compounds on itself186. As organizations grow larger and the decision requirements
become ever more complex, attention scarcity and information asymmetry can form a feedback
loop that - at scale - slows the rate of innovation/knowledge diffusion, as individuals and
organisations vie for supremacy in transactions.

Research in the area of cognitive neuroscience suggests that the cognitive abilities of an individual
are limited to five core systems (objects, agents, number, geometry and social) 187, each with its own
set of limitations. An example of limitation within the social system is “Dunbar’s number”, first

185
Rosa, H.: “Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity.” Columbia University Press, New York (2013)
186
Klein, S. B., & Kihlstrom, J. F. (1986). “Elaboration, organization, and the self-reference effect in memory.”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115(1), 26-38. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.115.1.26
187
Kinzler KD, Spelke ES. Core systems in human cognition. Progress in Brain Research. 2007;164:257–264

77
proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar188, who posited that the number of social group
members a primate can track is limited to the volume of the neocortex, and while this theory is hotly
disputed189, it has yet to be disproven with any certainty. This limitation, if taken to its logical
conclusion and scaled to match an average complex adaptive system (such as regulatory or
corporate bodies) highlights that the decision making abilities of an average individual could be
impaired significantly, when not augmented by technology or genetic engineering.

This impairment of decision making ability was remarked upon in Herbet A. Simon’s theories of
bounded rationality190. These theories were concerned with rational behaviour in the context of
individuals and organisations and individuals within organisations, which he stated were
indistinguishable under the “theory of the firm”. In this theory the given goals and the given
conditions (of the organization) drive “rational” decision making based on two functions: the
demand function (the quantity demanded as a function of price) and the cost function (the cost of
production as a function of the quantity produced). These two rules when applied to complex
adaptive systems, such as regulatory or governing bodies, demonstrate the vast scope in which
human cognitive bias can affect outcomes at the macro scale while appearing to be a series of micro
decisions made by individuals.

Nowhere can this asymptotic synergy of information, human cognitive ability and bounded
rationality be seen more clearly, than in the case of law. A truism often used in this context is that
Ignorance of the law excuses no one, but the complexity of law confuses everyone. In a world where
few if anyone in society knows the law it may well become necessary for people to supplement their
own cognitive capacities with “apps” to protect themselves from the complexity of the law.
“Lawfare” is said to describe a form of asymmetric warfare which allows for the exploitation of the
esoteric and complex nature of the law to damage political opponents. Just as complex words on an
ingredient list can be used to hide undesirable ingredients from customers, the law and its potential
use as a weapon also remain hidden from most citizens.

The current analogue forms of government have their basis in a complicated combative bureaucracy
(necessary to support representative forms of democracy). Accelerating technological progress,
however, shows that this approach may not scale particularly well as society becomes orders of
magnitude more complex in the coming decades. It is our analysis, that unless a Transhumanist
approach is adopted to enhance the existing human decision processes by merging with
technological decision support, catastrophic failures may occur.

In this socially complex future, it is likely that our politicians may have to rely increasingly on
information technologies, to the point that they essentially become cyborgs, merging fact checking
and recommendation engines - based on rational rulesets - to keep pace with accelerating societal
change and allow them to fully encompass monolithic social structures. In addition, citizens may also
out of necessity need to adopt similar technologies, in order to understand the decisions made by
these new “enhanced” politicians and to adapt to and effectively participate in an increasingly

188
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates". Journal of Human
Evolution 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
189
Wellman, B. (2012). "Is Dunbar's number up?" British Journal of Psychology 103 (2): 174–176; discussion
176–2. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02075.x
190
Simon, H.A. (1972). Theories of bounded rationality. In C.B. McGuire and R. Radner (Eds.), Decision and
organization: A volume in honor of Jacob Marschak (Chap. 8). Amsterdam: North-Holland

78
complex and fast changing society. In addition the institutions of the future will likely have to adopt
human error tolerant designs which use the latest decision support technology to help mitigate and
dampen the consequences of human error.

The Cyborg Citizen: A transcendent solution?

In order to avoid confusion we first have to properly define what we mean by a cyborg citizen. Andy
Clark191 in his book Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the future of Human
Intelligence, argues that human beings are by nature cyborgs, claiming that human neural plasticity
and a propensity to build and utilise tools in everyday life (from handwriting to mobiles phones),
produces a species that thinks and feels most effectively only through the use of its technologies.
Ray Kurzweil192 goes one step further to predict that, by 2030, most humans will choose to be
cyborgs:

Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. We’re going to
gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human - we
transcend our limitations.

In order to understand what a “cyborg citizen” means in today's information and technology driven
society, we must expand upon this definition to include current technological and social
developments. Indeed, we will have to recognize that each individual today, and more so in the
future, will have a digital, virtual, and physical self193. Thus, a cyborg is a person who is (singly or in
combination) enhanced by or dependent upon, robotic, electronic, or mechanical devices such as
artificial hearts, pacemakers, portable dialysis machines or even mobile / cloud computing which
employs storage, search, retrieval and analysis (SSRA) capabilities such as Google, Amazon etc.

Corporations also appear to be taking advantage of technologies to enhance human decision making
as a way to adapt to increasing business and market complexity. Venture capitalist firm Deep
Knowledge Ventures named to their board of directors194 an algorithm called VITAL, which they
intend to someday evolve into a full-fledged artificial intelligence. This move may represent one of
the initial forays in what may become a trend toward human-machine run corporations. Indeed,
some are going much further, to call for complete replacement of humans within complex
organisations (such as government) with artificial intelligence195. However, arguments about the
inevitable rise of artificial general intelligence aside, we push for a “human-in-the-loop” approach

191
Andy, Clark. (2004) “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.”,
Oxford; Oxford University Press.
192
Guia Del Prado “Google Futurist Ray Kurweil thinks we’ll all be cyborgs by 2030”
http://uk.businessinsider.com/ray-kurzweil-thinks-well-all-be-cyborgs-by-2030-2015-6?r=US - accessed june-
2015
193
The digital and virtual while similar are distinct in their differences. To make clear the distinction, something
is virtual if it will only exist contained within a virtual world while if something is digital it is known to exist in
the physical world just in digitized form. The distinction is between digital and virtual space in which digital
space is a subset of what people consider to be part of the physical world while virtual space isn’t directly
referring to a part of the physical world
194
Wile, R. (2014, May 13). “A Venture Capital Firm Just Named An Algorithm To Its Board Of Directors - Here's
What It Actually Does.” Retrieved June 5, 2015, from http://www.businessinsider.com/vital-named-to-board-
2014-5#ixzz31dVwrSEo
195
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20150612

79
through the merger or bonding of human ethical and moral “instinct” with a bounded rational
decision support engine, existing in either digital space or embedded into the human central nervous
system via implants.

So what would such a citizen cyborg look like? Below is a list of a number of hypothetical decision
support systems which are presently borderline (in that they exist, but are not as yet fit for purpose),
which could exist in digital space and employ SSRA capabilities to allow for enhanced human-
machine hybrid decision making.

 Intent casting: Intent casting, originally described by Doc Searls, allows consumers to directly
express their wants and needs to the market. This could allow for the digitization of intent
and for agent-based AI to shop on behalf of customers.

 Algorithmic democracy: Algorithmic democracy in theory, would allow voters to delegate

their voting decisions (and thus agency) to an algorithm, which could be referred to as a
digital voting agent (DA). Examples of digital agents today include Siri, Amazon Echo, and
Cortana. As these DA’s become more capable, it is possible that voters could rely on their DA
to inform them as to how they should vote in accordance to their specific interests and
preferences.

 Digital decision support consultants: These are intelligent decision support systems that
would help professionals make better decisions. It is likely that there will be apps for
different professions such as IBM’s WellPoint for doctors, legal assistant apps, and real-time
196
fact checkers etc. These apps may be decentralized collaborative applications with human
and robot participation or they may be software agent based AI. This category would also
include algorithms such as Deep Knowledge Ventures VITAL and agents to track relationships
and the flow of information between groups within a complex organization or brokers
between two transaction parties.

Examples of algorithms that hypothetically speaking, could run on physiologically embedded

technology, directly accessible by the human brain to provide decision support:

 Generate and test search: a reinforcement learning, trial and error algorithm which can
search through a limited solution space in a systematic manner to find the best solution197.
In operation this algorithm would generate possible solutions to a set problem and test each
until it finds the solution which passes a positive threshold, whereupon the solution is
relayed to the human cognitive process for a potential decision and reinforcement. This kind
of technique can be used to take advantage of simulation testing and solve problems which
have a limited solution space, such as those presented by the “free market” or those
requiring a quick human decision in a “lesser of two evils” scenario.

 Global optimization search: evolutionary algorithms which are inspired by the biological
mechanisms of global optimization search, such as mutation, crossover, natural selection

196
Ciampaglia GL, Shiralkar P, Rocha LM, Bollen J, Menczer F, Flammini A (2015) Computational Fact Checking
from Knowledge Networks. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128193. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128193
197
Kaelbling, L. P., Littman, M. L.,.and Moore, A. W., (1996) "Reinforcement Learning: A Survey.", Journal of
Artificial Intelligence Research, Volume 4, pages 237-285

80
 and survival of the fittest198. These algorithms can search a solution space and compare each
solution to a desired fitness criteria. In the case where human input is necessary to evolve a
solution then an interactive evolutionary algorithm could allow the human to be the solution
selector, while the algorithm is the solution generator. The algorithms can go through a
similar process and be generated and evolved for improved fitness.

 Markov decision processes: an experimental framework for decision making and decision
support. A Markov decision process automates finding the optimal decision for each state
while taking into account each action’s value in comparison to the others, essentially an
idealised decision output for a given problem state. With human decision selection driving
the process, the ramifications of each decision selection at each stage of the problem
analysis can be carefully considered and accepted or rejected based on rational choice.

This list is by no means exhaustive and there may be other borderline hypothetical decision support
systems and algorithms which are not mentioned here. However, this list gives a general idea of how
embedded or digital artificial decision support agents can improve decision quality in certain sectors
of human society. By improving decision quality through technology and semi-autonomous agencies
we may be able to reduce the frequency of poor decisions which result from nothing more than
human error and or human ignorance.

Discussion: Checks and Balances

We do not propose that cyborgization makes for a perfect solution to the problem of human
cognitive limitation and decision error in complex social systems. Indeed, decision support systems
already exist in one form or another. However, they are still in an early stage of development and
not ubiquitous, thus technology such as VITAL benefits only large corporations and perhaps the
intelligence establishment. It is a situation similar to the early stages of computer development or
the Internet, both of which existed, but the benefits were limited to certain domains, back in the
1960s during the Cold War.

We believe the widespread adoption of decision support technology, be it embedded or digital,

could provide the tools necessary for individuals to comprehend the entirety of complex
organizations, model the decision-consequence space and select ethical decisions. These tools would
essentially enable decision makers to take into account individual need and motivation, and provide
ethical solutions which afford the greatest good for the greatest number, without creating
asymmetric information economies.

An example of a beneficial application of cyborg technology would be the doctor who utilises
WellPoint199 to make diagnoses based on a combination of learned skillset and a digital health agent
with a broad specialist evidence based knowledge base. Alternatively, in a quantified-self context an
individual could upload health data gathered from wearable sensor technology, and receive
information of potential health issues which could be treated with alacrity in their early stages by
doctors able to access this information and review treatment options.

198
Weise, T. “Global Optimization Algorithms – Theory and Application.” Germany: it-weise.de (self-published),
2009. [Online]. Available: http://www.it-weise.de/ -accessed 06-2015
199
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/assets/pdfs/WellPoint_Case_Study_IMC14792.pdf

81
However, such technology and its application would not come without limitation or risk. The
widespread use of these technologies could lead to a form of information “cold war”, in which
human and machine agents (singly or in combination) attempt to create a state of “perfect
information” to gain a competitive advantage. They may seek a form of perfect regulatory capture
where one party seeks always to have an advantageous position in any transaction, be it in the free
market or in the policy, legislative or intelligence domains. Arguably, such an information cold war
already exists between various governments, intelligence services and corporate entities and while
the “battle ground” as it were, is in so called cyberspace, it is primarily an analogue concern where
agency is biological i.e. human as opposed to A.I.

It is a sad reflection upon humanity that one “positive” aspect of this cold war scenario, is that
competition (war) leads to innovation, as opposing sides race to gain the information advantage.
This impetus this would accelerate the development of the technologies required to create a “true”
cybernetic individual or generally intelligent artificial agent. It is a matter for debate whether this
would result in a situation that would be to the benefit of humanity in general or lead to a
totalitarian dystopia; in which one entity or organisation exists in a near perfect state of “knowing”,
stifling the development of both technology and society.

It is our opinion that the potential benefits of cyborgization outweigh the potential risks. As our
technological systems and culture grow ever more complex, we must consider the risk of human
error, of bad decisions, of ignorance combined with advanced technologies, in the light of a
technology so pregnant with possibility.

We realize cyborgization is a controversial subject, however we see it an unavoidable and

unstoppable trend. Indeed, Ginni Rometty (Chairman and CEO of IBM) stated recently that:

In the future, every decision that mankind makes is going to be informed by a cognitive
200
system like Watson, and our lives will be better for it

This is a statement is very much in accordance with our notion of keeping the human-in-the-loop
during decision making. Furthermore, an argument could be made that given the current reliance by
vast numbers of the world population on mobile phones and internet search engines, rather than
becoming cyborgs at some specific point in time (as in the prediction of Kurzweil), we have always
been cyborgs (as per Clarke’s argument) and it is merely a matter of time and technology, until the
line between what is human and what is our technology becomes non-existent.

Conclusion

Just as search engines allow for human beings to find the relevant information meeting their
“criteria”, the adoption of decision support engines could allow autonomous digital agents and
human-machine hybrids alike to find the most ethical decision within a given consequence-decision
space. This approach would allow for “what if” hypothesis testing201 of many decision types such as

200
http://www.businessinsider.in/The-CEO-of-IBM-just-made-a-jaw-dropping-prediction-about-the-future-of-
artificial-intelligence/articleshow/47289655.cms
201
Winfield, A. F., Blum, C., & Liu, W. (2014). “Towards an ethical robot: internal models, consequences and
ethical action selection.” In Advances in Autonomous Robotics Systems (pp. 85-96). Springer International
Publishing

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policy determination, legislative impact, market transactions and global consequence. The dawn of
ethical computing is fast approaching and it is in this area requiring our fullest attention.
Transhumanism provides a socially progressive framework that if adopted can allow us to transcend
our human cognitive limitations, so that we can become more effective and ethical decision makers.
We believe that developing the technology which can facilitate our arrival at the cyborg stage of
human leadership should be a top priority, especially in this time of accelerating developments in
Artificial Intelligence, which if left unsupervised could surpass us to become the apex decision maker
for our entire species.

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6. Of Mind and Money: Post-Scarcity Economics and Human Nature
By Stuart Mason Dambrot, Synthesist | Futurist, Critical Thought

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider
fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human
species.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source
of the evil.

– Why Socialism? Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, 1949202

These two quotes from the same article written by Albert Einstein demonstrate that intelligence and
imagination do not necessarily guard against nonconscious cognitive bias and unexamined beliefs.
The question is whether either, both or neither are correct. This chapter, Of Mind and Money,
provides a perspectival answer showing not only that, given advances in science and technology, the
first quote is not necessarily factual, but also that as such it would support the design and
implementation of a post-scarcity economic environment by modifying our fundamental, evolution-
derived beliefs about scarcity, capitalism, class hierarchies, labor, and competition.

The Nature of Human Nature Redux

In the myriad discussions focused on future scenarios envisioned and articulated in science,
technology, humanities, business, politics, or military, and other fields, there is one fundamental
factor that is invariably undefined yet implicitly or explicitly assumed to be an unchanging and
unchangeable constant.

Human nature

This is curious, in that the creators of said scenarios appear to be all about change, be they
Singularitarians, Transhumanists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, or any other of the
countless labels with which we describe ourselves to both ourselves and the world-at-large.
Moreover, this cognitive bias is perhaps most pronounced in those scenarios concerned with post-
scarcity economies, in which goods, services and information are universally accessible without the
need for capital or its exchange in order to produce and acquire said goods, services and
information.

This chapter will examine the evolutionary neurobiology of what we experience and perceive as
human nature203 – the thesis being that as we learn more about the human brain and learn how to
modify ourselves using a range of methods and techniques, human nature will take its rightful place
amongst all other aspects of physical reality that we have studied, understood and modified.

202
Why Socialism? Albert Einstein, Monthly Review, 1949
https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
203
The Zeitgeist of Change
http://transpolitica.org/2015/04/06/the-zeitgeist-of-change/

84
This shift in perspective will then form the cognitive foundation of a new approach to constructing a
post-scarcity/post-capital scenario that is no longer bound to attitudes and behavior long and
erroneously held to be inviolate.

Human Nature: Fixed or Flexible?

In general, we appear to understand what is meant by human nature, accepting the term as if it
refers to well-defined and permanent aspect of our existence. As the above quote demonstrates,
this unquestioned assumption is independent of intellect, education and imagination, being more
akin to religious belief in its unquestioned adherence to the axiom that human nature is, in Einstein’s
words, “fixed and unalterable.” While the concept that human nature is constant is understandable
when viewed as an inference based on observing historically recurrent patterns in human behavior
(which are amplified versions of behaviors found in our closest hominid relatives2), only recently
have science and technology given us discoveries and tools with the potential to change our
evolutionary heritage and architect a very different possible future.

To this end, neuroscience, synthetic biology (a branch of biology integrating evolutionary, molecular,
and computational biology with biophysics and nanobiotechnology – the melding of nanotech and
biology) and other fields of established and emerging science are beginning to provide us with an
understanding of our neurobiology at neural, molecular and genetic levels. These advances will then
be instantiated in technologies that enable us to physiologically modify our dysfunctional attitudes
and behaviors. The resulting shift in perspective will form the cognitive foundation of designing and
implementing a technology-enabled post-scarcity economy by abandoning the belief that our human
nature has not allowed, and therefore never could allow, such an environment to emerge and thrive
on a large – much less global or exoplanetary – scale.

In addition to neuroscience and synthetic biology, the other areas key to designing and effecting
human neuroaugmentation include synthetic genomics (a field within synthetic biology);
optogenetics (a neuromodulation technique using light to control neurons genetically light-
sensitized); neural prostheses; artificially accelerated evolution (already achieved in laboratories
with fruit flies); and biorecalibration (biophysical optimization and health/life extension).

One of the main focal points in this effort might be to fine-tune the effects of the human-specific
gene ARHGAP11B204, which appeared when the ancestral gene ARHGAP11A made an incomplete
copy of itself and subsequently may have contributed to evolutionary expansion of human
neocortex. (When ARHGAP11B was introduced into developing mice, the number of cortex stem
cells nearly doubled and their brains sometimes developed folds – are found in primates but not
mice.) The goal could be to use synthetic genomics to selectively modify phenotypic expression in
the developing human brain of neural tissue and connectivity between the neocortex and the more
primitive brain areas where emotion, motivation, habituation, and other functions occur.

204
Human-specific gene ARHGAP11B promotes basal progenitor amplification and neocortex expansion
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6229/1465.abstract

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One salient example can be seen in recent neuroscience research205 showing strong evidence that
interpersonal differences in a specific area of the human brain are associated with different
prosocial behavior. In another relevant study206, neuroscientists at MIT identified the brain circuit in
laboratory mice that controls how memories become linked with positive or negative emotions, and
as a result were able to modify the emotional associations of specific memories using optogenetics –
a method for controlling brain cells with light. More recently the technique has been used207 in mice
to dramatically reduce stress-related depression-like behavior by activating positive memories.

The question might well be raised of why we cannot rely on widely-promoted sociocultural
measures as a way to create a different conception of human nature, and thereby to change,
abandon or transcend our biologically-determined behaviors by which we practice various degrees
of inhumanity. While science, technology, medicine, knowledge, and other endeavors continue to
advance at an accelerating rate, our basic behavioral patterns (in Einstein’s words, “biological
constitution” and “natural urges”) have not. In fact, despite protests and legislation, other factors
such as air and water quality have globally declined due to capitalism-motivated processes, with air
itself now being carcinogenic208(causing lung cancer and contributing to bladder cancer) and water
becoming increasingly both polluted209 and scarce210.

For these reasons, the assertion that sociocultural programs and legislation (given the role of
corporate and individual wealth in politics) will address our species’ destructive behaviors seems
somewhat naïve. Rather, a solution based on a medical model in which dysfunctional individual and
group behaviors are seen not as causative but as symptoms of a deeper cause – our evolutionary
neurobiology. The transformation of human society via optimizing human nature thus becomes a
crisis to be scientifically analyzed and corrected rather than an anthropological project to be
observed and discussed.

The Ethics of Enlightenment

Would this approach raise concerns? By all means: Does genetically resetting human neurobiology
cross medical and/or ethical lines? Might this approach be considered Eugenics? Should any group or
societal class have the authority to proceed with such a project? And so on. How might these issues
be addressed – and are they, even in principle, addressable? On the other hand, are they in principle
very different from other medical-model-based interventions?

205
Spatial gradient in value representation along the medial prefrontal cortex reflects individual differences in
prosociality
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/25/7851.abstract
206
Bidirectional switch of the valence associated with a hippocampal contextual memory engram
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7518/full/nature13725.html
207
Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7556/full/nature14514.html
208
IARC: Outdoor air pollution a leading environmental cause of cancer deaths
http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/pr221_E.pdf
209
World Water Assessment Programme: Water pollution is on the rise globally
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/facts-and-figures/all-facts-
wwdr3/fact-15-water-pollution/
210
Water Fact Sheet Looks at Threats, Trends, Solutions
http://pacinst.org/publication/facts-on-the-worlds-water/

86
Consider bioaugmentation applied to a serious disease: Imagine the development of a completely
safe genetic treatment for cancer using – the same protocol hypothesized for resetting human
nature. Despite the technology, delivery vector and safety of this cancer eradication protocol being
equivalent to those of the universal transformation of human nature, it is likely that the former
would encounter far less resistance than the latter. Why might this be the case? Several possible
explanations come to mind:

 While eliminating cancer is clearly perceived as a medical protocol focused on a range of

terrible diseases, human nature is decidedly not seen as a disease state despite the parallels
in symptomology (that is, where the problems and crises endemic in human society are seen
as symptoms of many of our evolutionarily-determined behaviors)
 A nonspecific fear of medical or genetic technology that operates at a scale or in a manner
that people do not understand
 There may be a religious factor at play, as evidenced by the belief by a remarkable number
of people (despite the tremendous advances in evolution and genetics) that human beings
did not evolve from earlier hominids, but rather were created by a divinity in that divinity’s
image

In the above situations, education and social programs may be very helpful in laying the groundwork
for accepting a medical model as a way of stopping and reversing the destructive path capitalism, as
well as those who blindly accept its principles despite suffering as a result, seem committed to
pursuing.

The Consequences of Capitalism

Capitalism has clearly demonstrated its profoundly negative impacts on individuals, groups, nations,
the planet, and the space surrounding Earth. In terms of individuals, there is profoundly unequal
access to many critical foundation areas, including food, clean water, electricity, healthcare, income,
housing, transportation, education, security, governance, voting, freedom from, and freedom to.
Two real-world examples illustrate the immensity of the problem:

Extreme Wealth Disparity

 The 85 wealthiest individuals on Earth have assets roughly equivalent to 3.6 billion others
 In 2011 Deloitte & Touche reported that the wealthiest 400 American families had assets of
approximately $11 trillion, with the 2020 estimate being $19 trillion
 Social Security, Food Assistance, Medicaid and other social safety nets are under defunding
attacks from legislators whose salaries are by the citizens who voted them into office

Income and Mortality

The following chart211 shows a nearly linear relationship between income level and age-related
mortality: Those with lower incomes die at an earlier age.

211
Based on data in G. D. Smith et al, Socioeconomic differentials in mortality risk among men screened for the
Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial: I. White men, American Journal of Public Health (1996) 86(4): 486-496.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380548/ (PDF)

87
 Income level and age-related mortality. Source: The Zeitgeist Movement
Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought, The Zeitgeist Group. Creative
10
Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

These large-scale expressions and implementations of capitalism and other problematic behaviors
based on our evolutionary neurobiology are not entities in and of themselves: They appear that way
because large-scale events are agglomerations of more-or-less coordinated individual behaviors.
However, even single events – especially when identified as part of a widespread practice or trend –
deserve our attention. A case in point: a few representative reports from a single daily issue
published on the progressive Daily Kos212 website are representative of a range of dysfunctional
trends – some far more disturbing than others:

 Teen stripped of National Honor Society position because she dared wear a sundress—in
Florida213
 NC Pastor tells graduating seniors they'll be going to hell if they're gay214
 School lunch room manager fired for giving out food to children without lunch money215
 Florida police murder black computer engineer as he listens to music; attempted cover-up
exposed216

212
Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/
213
Teen stripped of National Honor Society position because she dared wear a sundress—in Florida
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/02/1389865/-Teen-stripped-of-National-Honor-Society-position-
because-she-dared-wear-a-sun-dress-in-Florida
214
NC Pastor tells graduating seniors they'll be going to hell if they're gay
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/02/1389845/-NC-Pastor-tells-graduating-seniors-they-ll-be-going-to-
hell-if-they-re-gay
215
School lunch room manager fired for giving out food to children without lunch money
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/02/1389964/-School-lunch-room-manager-fired-for-giving-out-food-
to-children-without-lunch-money
216
Florida police murder black computer engineer as he listens to music; attempted cover-up exposed
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/01/1389661/-Florida-police-murder-black-computer-engineer-as-he-
listens-to-music-attempted-coverup-exposed

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The typical approach to addressing these problems, articulated by Einstein and many others –
whether sincerely or cynically – invokes ethics, culture, education, communication, social programs,
legislation and other indirect measures. Unfortunately, given the increasingly elitist and militaristic
activities trending on a global basis, this solution appears to be (except on a limited and temporary
basis) less than effective.

Human-induced Mass Extinction

Much as global warming is only one factor in climate change, climate change may be part of a much
more severe event caused by capitalism-fueled human activity. A paper recently published217 by
scientists at the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley found, even using highly
conservative criteria, that current extinction rates far exceed those known to exist in our planet’s
five previous mass extinction events218as determined by fossil records. The researchers found that
their estimates reveal an exceptionally rapid biodiversity decline over the previous few centuries,
concluding that a sixth mass extinction – one that would take millions of years, with Homo sapiens
disappearing sooner rather than later – is already taking place.

Cumulative vertebrate species recorded as extinct or extinct in the wild by the International Union
for Conservation of Nature (2012). Source: Accelerated modern human–induced species losses:
Entering the sixth mass extinction. Science Advances (2015) 1:5 e1400253. Copyright © G. Ceballos,
P. R. Ehrlich, A. D. Barnosky, A. García, R. M. Pringle, T. M. Palmer. Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0
219
license. Courtesy: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Specifically, they found that over the last century vertebrate species (that is, those having
backbones) have gone extinct at an average rate as high as to 114 times than the background, or
non-mass extinction, rate – a rate that would normally take place over as long as 10,000 years – and,
critically, that this trend is caused by human activities including climate change, pollution,
217
Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253.full
218
Mass Extinction Event
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Extinction_event
219
Graphs show the percentage of the number of species evaluated among mammals (5513; 100% of those
described), birds (10,425; 100%), reptiles (4414; 44%), amphibians (6414; 88%), fishes (12,457; 38%), and all
vertebrates combined (39,223; 59%). Dashed black curve represents the number of extinctions expected under
a constant standard background rate of 2 E/MSY. (A) Highly conservative estimate. (B) Conservative estimate.
For a larger version of the image, see
http://d3a5ak6v9sb99l.cloudfront.net/content/advances/1/5/e1400253/F1.large.jpg

89
deforestation, habitat loss, and overexploitation for economic gain – all of which, the scientists note,
are related to human population size and growth, which in turn increases consumption
(predominantly by the wealthy) and economic inequity. They caution that “averting a dramatic
decay of biodiversity and the subsequent loss of ecosystem services is still possible through
intensified conservation efforts, but that window of opportunity is rapidly closing.”

Post-Scarcity Economics: Beyond Capital

It should be noted that the term post-scarcity economics is sometimes described as being self-
contradictory, since most – but not all – definitions of economics are based the dynamic between
scarce resources and demand for goods, services and information based on or incorporating these
scarce resources, with capital as the foundation for all economic transactions. On the other hand, a
post-scarcity economy can operate without the need for capital while still responding to supply-and-
demand forces in determining the resources needed to fulfill demand.

This post-scarcity vs. post-capital question can be resolved by reconceptualizing and redefining
economics – as has occurred repeatedly over the centuries – as the transformation of resources into
goods, services and information that are provided to individuals or groups who demand and then
acquire them. Given the technology-based labor-free structure of a post-scarcity environment, the
definition of post-scarcity economics then becomes the post-capital, technology-enabled, demand-
responsive transformation of resources into goods, services and information that are provided to
individuals or groups who acquire them.

That being said, post-scarcity embodiments have been conceptualized for many years. The efforts
most salient to the thesis herein include Technocracy Movement220, which proposed replacing
politicians and businesspeople with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to
manage the economy; Venus Project221, which calls for a culture redesign to make war, poverty,
hunger, debt and unnecessary human suffering unacceptable and explores the determinants of
behavior to dispel the myth of human nature, asserting that environment shapes behavior; Zeitgeist
Movement222, reminiscent of the Technocracy Movement and previously aligned with the Venus
Project, is focused on technology, post-scarcity, post-capital, post-labor and direct
(nonrepresentational) governance; and Transpolitica223, a grassroots Transhumanist political
organization focused on enabling society to transcend the limitations and constraints of today’s
political models.

220
The Technocracy Movement
http://technocracy.wikia.com/wiki/Technocracy_movement
221
The Venus Project
https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/
222
The Zeitgeist Movement
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/
223
Transpolitica
http://transpolitica.org/

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How would a fully-realized post-scarcity environment be structured? First and foremost, despite
having elements in common with some systems, it will not take the form of any existing
sociopolitical economy, including the usual suspects: capitalism (private property and ownership of
means of production, capital accumulation, wage labor, market competition, labor theory of value);
socialism (social ownership of means of production and co-operative management of the economy);
communism (common ownership of means of production; absence of social classes, money and the
State); and anarchism (absolute individual freedom and absence of government).

While the closest post-scarcity analogue is communism, the essential differences are that in
technology-enabled post-scarcity there is neither labor nor ownership of the means of production.
Moreover, analogous to the assumptions about the term economics discussed earlier, it is often
thought that there is only one form of anarchism224 (as per the standard definition above) – but this
is decidedly not the case225. Anarchism variants can support fundamentally different political
systems that vary from extreme individualism to complete collectivism – and in addition, there is a
well-established link226 between specific anarchist schools and post-scarcity/post-capitalism, of
which examples include:

 Post-scarcity anarchism227 – an economic system based on social ecology228, libertarian

municipalism229, and an abundance of fundamental resources

224
Anarchism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
225
Anarchist Schools of Thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_schools_of_thought
226
Post-Capitalism Anarchism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-capitalism#Anarchism
227
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Scarcity_Anarchism
228
Social Ecology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecology
229
Libertarian Municipalism

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  Anarchist communism230 – a communism/anarchism hybrid advocating decision-making by
direct democracy231, abolition of the state, and common ownership232 of means of
production
 Anarcho-syndicalism233 – an ideology centered on self-management of labor, socialism and
direct democracy

A post-scarcity system will therefore have unique features and technologies. Firstly, it will be an
technology-enabled post-capital, post-labor, Crowdsourced Peer-to-Peer Networked Anarchy
characterized by an absence of wealth, class, and governance hierarchies; autonomous intelligent
ownerless production; distributed egalitarian point-to-point self-governance in which each individual
or group can self-define as an independent polity; and Nash equilibrium replacing zero-sum game
theory. Secondly, a valuation system based on positive inclusive qualities and behaviors such as
reputation, inventiveness, equanimity, enablement, and empathy will replace monetization and
profit. Thirdly, a post-scarcity architecture will entail a number of current (but significantly
advanced), emerging, and potential technologies in four primary areas: personal production
(advanced 3D/4D printers, nanofabricators); security (reputation encoding, quantum encryption,
blind quantum computing); Artificial General Intelligence and autonomous robotics; and emerging,
exotic and theoretical energy sources (compact fusion234 and Polywell fusion235, quantum thermionic
conversion236, antimatter237, and zero-point energy238).

Coincident with the science and technology trends outlined above, researchers studying spatial
models of complex systems found that genetically-programmed mortality, while not benefitting
individuals, in certain cases results in long-term benefit to the local population by reducing local
environmental resource depletion. In noting that “Intrinsic mortality is not favored for long-range
spatial mixing or if resources are unlimited,” the paper239 appears to suggest that post-scarcity may

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_municipalism
230
Anarchist Communism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
231
Direct Democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
232
Common Ownership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
233
Anarcho-syndicalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
234
Compact Toroid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_toroid
235
Polywell Fusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
236
Thermionic Energy Conversion (PDF)
https://nems.stanford.edu/thermionic-energy-conversion
(http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/UVaodfDrAb3BdgeRCpoy-w/07-Chen-GCEP-Workshop.pdf)
http://phys.org/news/2011-08-tiny-tech-big-results-quantum.html
237
Antimatter Fuel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Fuel
238
Zero-point Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
239
Programed Death is Favored by Natural Selection in Spatial Systems
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.238103

92
result in an adaptation that would modify the scarcity-based evolutionary default of aging and
limited lifespan – potentially to the point of immortality.

Despite the utopian nature of a post-scarcity economy, however, the transition to a global post-
scarcity environment without human nature being universally optimized not only virtually
guarantees it being rejected and prevented by capitalist interests, but also carries with it the
potential for a new generation of criminal activity corresponding to the technologies described
above– that is, reputation spoofing, false demand process interruption, genome hacking, neural
theft, robotic telepresence hijacking, blind quantum communication capture, induced entanglement
decoherence, and Artificial General Intelligence cracking. These, of course, will necessitate a
corrective response, which will simply replicate our current environment in a more advanced
technological context.

For these reasons, it would be wise to stage the transition such that elevating human nature is
accomplished prior to attempting to construct a post-scarcity economy.

Revolution through Evolution

Summary:

 Einstein was correct about capitalism but missed the mark on human nature
 In a medical model, our myriad problems can be seen as symptoms of a central underlying
condition, rather than cultural problems that can be addressed by social policies
 That causative condition is a direct and primary consequence of our hominid evolutionary
neurobiological heritage
 The path forward to an enlightened world is for each individual to physiologically evolve
beyond that heritage
 We can wait for thousands of generations (natural evolution is slow) or use the science and
technology our brain has manifested to achieve that step in a matter of decades.

The decision is ours to make.

93
 7. Voluntary Basic Incomes in a Reputation Economy
By Michael Hrenka, Constructive Philosophical Futurist, Radivis.com

Abstract

Advanced reputation systems provide the basis for an emerging reputation economy, whose
functioning principles are explained in this chapter. In turn, a reputation economy provides
unprecedented possibilities and incentives for voluntary basic income systems. There are
multiple ways in which a mature reputation economy could make voluntary basic incomes
feasible, and these different routes are explored in detail. Voluntary basic incomes have the
clear advantage of not requiring large political interventions in order to operate successfully,
and thus could be implemented faster and easier. These voluntary basic incomes could play
an alternative or complementary role to a more conventional universal basic income.
However, supportive political actions should facilitate the development of a highly functional
reputation economy, in order to provide better conditions for the emergence of voluntary
basic incomes.

Part 1: The idea of voluntary basic incomes

Voluntary basic incomes (VBIs) are a rather new idea. They are based on the idea of a universal basic
income (UBI) that should be paid unconditionally to all members of a community. The difference
between a VBI and a UBI is that the UBI is typically financed by involuntary taxes. A VBI on the other
hand would be financed entirely by voluntary payments, or innovative wealth distribution or
generation mechanisms.

The complexity of the involved concepts makes it necessary to subdivide this chapter into four
different parts, each with its own focus:

1. This first part introduces the concepts of UBIs, VBIs as well as their rationale. It also
summarizes the most promising VBI ideas which are currently worked on. Finally, it analyses
their motivational prospects.
2. The second part is about reputation systems which can enable a reputation economy.
3. In the third part, the concept of the reputation economy is applied to the idea of VBIs – in
order to portrait five different routes to effectively incentivized and implemented voluntary
basic income systems.
4. Lastly, the fourth part goes on to consider the role of politics in the VBI ecosystem.

Why basic incomes at all?

In my chapter “The Case for Universal Prosperity”240 in the first Transpolitica241 book Anticipating
tomorrow’s politics242 I argued for a generous universal basic income and its likely positive effects:

 Social problems like poverty, inequality, and criminality will be reduced

240
http://transpolitica.org/2015/04/12/the-case-for-universal-prosperity/
241
http://transpolitica.org/
242
http://www.amazon.com/Anticipating-tomorrows-politics-Transpolitica-Book-ebook/dp/B00UZ3ELKW

94
  People will be healthier, more flexible, more motivated, more innovative, and thus more
effective at solving real problems
 Both entrepreneurship, and consumer demand will be boosted, together strengthening the
economy
 Furthermore, the problems of means-tested welfare schemes like extremely high effective
tax rates on small additional incomes would be avoided

The same positive effects can also come from voluntary basic incomes, especially if they are
sufficiently high and widespread.

Current voluntary basic incomes projects

Quite recently, a couple of voluntary basic income projects have sprung up, many of which have
been presented in a recent Vice article243. There is even an effort to classify these new projects as
group currencies244, officially defined in the following way:

A group currency (n) is a cryptocurrency that:

1. provides its identified members with

2. a basic income

3. voting rights over a group fund (optional)

4. and provides adequate means for transparency and accountability.

There is uncertainty whether the following projects qualify as group coins, except for uCoin245, which
fits the bill pretty much.

Cradle

To understand Cradle246, one needs to know what a DCO, a so-called “distributed collaborative
organization”, is. DCOs are a very recent phenomenon that emerged out of the “decentralization
revolution”247 that was triggered by the invention of the blockchain technology in Satoshi
Nakamoto’s famous Bitcoin whitepaper248. In fact, the DCO term was first used in January 2015249. A
DCO is basically an organization on a blockchain, a decentralized data storage, that also manages its
internal governance via the blockchain. Instead of being defined by legal structures and constraints,
a DCO defines its own structure through the way it sets itself up on the blockchain. There’s a more
specific description of DCOs in the “Model Distributed Collaborative Organizations”250 paper.

243
https://www.vice.com/read/the-cryptocurrency-based-schemes-that-would-pay-everyone-just-for-being-
alive-456
244
http://groupcurrency.org/
245
http://ucoin.io/
246
https://swarm.fund/projects/Super_DCO_1429643063
247
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYICruxUkNI
248
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
249
http://www.shareable.net/blog/interviewed-joel-dietz-on-distributed-collaborative-organizations
250
https://fair.coop/?get_group_doc=50/1430309418-SWARMSTANFORDModelDCOTemplate.pdf

95
Cradle is a so-called “Super DCO”. It is basically a network of DCOs who decide to share a part of
their profits with the whole network. Everyone can create or join a DCO251, or even join the Cradle
DCO itself, to participate in that network and its voluntary basic income system. In addition to being
financed by DCO profit shares, Cradle can also be financed by donations.

basicincome.co

The basicincome.co252 project was initiated Johan Nygren and is based on his Resilience protocol253.
This Resilience protocol is a rather complex system used to distribute transaction taxes in a very
personalized and decentralized way – and which is supposedly able to be used with any
decentralized cryptocurrency with a sufficiently flexible blockchain. Explaining its complexity in full is
out of the scope of this chapter, but interested readers can look up an interview I’ve held with Johan
Nygren254 in order to find out how his system works in detail. The following description is a simplified
model about how the Resilience protocol works.

Within a cryptocurrency network using the Resilience protocol, people can enter voluntary sub-
networks simply by purchasing goods or services from members of those networks. These voluntary
networks can set voluntary transaction taxes which have to be paid on all transactions initiated by
customers of the network.

With the so-called incentive layer of the Resilience protocol, the payment of these voluntary taxes
becomes highly incentivized: If you deal with a voluntary network and pay transaction taxes, you
always receive a part of the transaction tax revenue of the whole network! However, if you make a
transaction outside of the network, your income from that network will cease for a while, until you
have made enough transactions with the network again. In other words: You only get a consistent
income from the voluntary network, if you only deal with the voluntary network.

Now, basicincome.co is associated with BitNation255, a virtual state with its own cryptocurrency,
which wants to implement the Resilience protocol. There has also been an Indiegogo campaign256 for
the basicincome.co project, but it has only raised $645 out of the targeted $20000.

uCoin

With the uCoin257 project there is a cryptocurrency that has a basic income integrated in the way it
works. Unlike in the bitcoin system, where miners258 get bitcoins for solving math problems, in the
uCoin system all users get the same amount of new coins!

To prevent users from creating multiple accounts to get multiple basic incomes, a Web of Trust
system is used to only let people into the network that are already identified by several members of
the network.

251
https://swarm.fund/
252
http://basicincome.co/
253
http://www.resilience.world/
254
http://forum.fractalfuture.net/t/voluntary-basic-incomes-in-a-reputation-economy/236/16
255
http://bitnation.co/
256
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/basicincome-co-a-peer-to-peer-safety-net-network--2#/story
257
http://ucoin.io/
258
http://www.bitcoinmining.com/

96
By combining the mining mechanism with the Web of Trust, the energy consumption for mining can
be drastically reduced, so that the uCoin currency can be sustained for a lower cost than the bitcoin
currency.

Circles

A different approach is followed by Martin Köppelmann’s Circles project259 which uses the
decentralized blockchain-based platform Ethereum260. Every Ethereum user can create a Circles
account and then receive a monthly unconditional basic income in their own personal currency!
These personal currencies are only to be trusted by people who actually know the person in
question. So, on this simple level, the Circles system can only work on the micro scale.

In order to reach a larger scale, members of the Circles network can form groups. Verified group
members then can irreversibly transform their own personal money into the group currency, at a 1:1
rate. The reasoning behind this is that group currencies will be seen as much more trustworthy than
personal currencies – at least if the group is known to be legitimate.

Common incentive problems

While all of these systems could work in principle, the real question is whether they will be widely
adopted, so that they can actually provide effective voluntary basic incomes. After all, people would
have to share their money with a whole network of people if they joined a VBI network. Why would
they do that in the first place?

Strengthening the community

One answer is that VBI networks would strengthen their community by making each member more
resilient and motivated to help the community further. After all, a stronger community can pay a
bigger VBI to its members.

Also, a VBI would increase the median purchasing power of its members, thus making it easier to do
business with a wider market. This is comparable to the positive effects of paying workers higher
wages, as exemplified by Henry Ford’s generous wage policy261, which enabled his workers to
purchase the cars they produced.

Of course, pure idealism and the wish for an actual basic income can be significant motivational
factors to join a VBI network, too.

Can these motivations be strong enough to make VBI network really take off? Maybe. But there is
one incentive that would make a big difference and attract lots of people to VBI networks:
Reputation.

259
https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/2228/circles-universal-basic-income
260
http://ethereum.org/
261
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Labor_philosophy

97
Part 2: Reputation as key enabler

Supporting a VBI network can be a much more effective advertising strategy than supporting a
regular charity. After all, so much more people would profit from a VBI than from a charity. In other
words, paying into a VBI is an investment that is quite effective at raising one’s reputation!

Therefore, reputation can be a key incentive for people to set up or participate in a VBI network,
especially if they use appropriate reputation systems in smart ways. To explain how that works, I
will present some basic knowledge about how reputation systems work, and how some of them can
give rise to a reputation economy.

Reputation systems

Informal reputation has always been an important factor in the economy. After all, the sellers with
the best reputation have the best chances for selling their products. This fact hasn’t changed during
all the time that markets have existed – and it can be expected to stay true into the far future.

What has changed, though, is that reputation signals now can spread much faster and further with
internet based reputation systems. Those reputation systems have enabled the fast growth of online
Businesses like eBay, and Amazon. In fact, a large part of the fast growing sharing economy seems to
depend on reputation systems, even though their ability to effectively facilitate trust has been
questioned262.

But how are reputation systems characterized? And what kinds of different reputation systems are
there? Let’s start with some basic definitions:

Definition of reputation systems

A reputation system assigns a reputation score to a person, organization, or a product. A reputation

score is a dynamic rating that primarily depends on the evaluation of the qualities or behaviours of
the entity in question, and must not be exchanged for anything else directly.

The easier it is to buy a good reputation score, the less useful that score becomes, because it will
obviously biased. On the other hand, it would also create a distorting bias, if you could exchange
your reputation points for money, goods, or services directly. This is the reason why it would be
practically impossible to base an economy on reputation alone – without the support of any kind of
money.

Now, let’s examine some general properties of different reputation systems. This will help to get
some understanding about how reputation systems can differ.

Reputation of individuals, organizations, or products

In general, it could be said that brands have reputation. Those brands can be products,
organizations, or individuals. Usually, reputation systems are restricted to only one of those
possibilities.

262
http://tomslee.net/2013/09/some-obvious-things-about-internet-reputation-systems.html

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 General reputation vs. specific reputation

Reputation can be general or context specific. People can have a reputation for performing specific
tasks well, or not so well. On the other hand, people can have a reputation for having an “overall”
good or bad character.

Multiple different kinds of specific reputations can coexist simultaneously for any single entity. A
company could have a great reputation when it comes to the quality of its products, but a bad
reputation for its disregard of the environment or its workers.

Cumulative vs. average reputation scores

This point refers to how different reputation signals for one entity are combined into one reputation
score.

If different reputation signals are simply added up, you get a cumulative reputation score. Karma
systems are typical example for cumulative reputation systems.

If you average different reputation signals, you get an average reputation score. The widespread
“star” ratings that usually range from one star to five stars are such average reputation scores.

Subjective vs. algorithmic reputation

Reputation scores can be purely subjective. Humans like stuff, or they don’t, whether for a reason
they can express, or just for some subtle gut feeling. These subjectively generated reputation scores
can be contrasted with reputation scores created by an algorithm using more or less objective data.

Of course, data can also be produced by subjects according to rather subjective criteria. Some of the
more complex reputation systems out there are of this type: User generated subjective reputation
signals are algorithmically processed to compute a reputation score.

Positive vs. negative reputation

Positive reputation is information only about the good aspects of one entity, while negative
reputation focuses entirely on its bad aspects. Reputation systems can be purely positive, or purely
negative, or count positive and negative reputation separately, or they can be ambivalent.

A good example for ambivalent reputation scores are the “star” ratings. Is a three star rating positive
or negative? What about a four star rating? That may depend on the average score for comparable
brands.

Persistent vs. fading reputation

A persistent reputation score is one that doesn’t change over time, if no further reputation signals
come in to update the score. Fading reputation scores are different: They tend to move towards a
default value, if the inflow of reputation signals ceases.

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Examples of reputation systems

Let’s examine three different reputation systems that might be used as foundation for an advanced
reputation economy: Karma systems, Klout, and Quantified Prestige.

Karma systems

Karma systems are popular in web forums like Reddit263 and Q&A sites like StackExchange264. Users
in karma systems vote contributions of other users up or down. Usually, every up vote increases the
karma score by 1 and every down vote decreases it by 1. Online communities use karma systems to
discourage spamming and contributions of unacceptably low quality. They are also used to reward
contributions of high quality.

Karma systems are

 associated with individual users of an online community

 specific to the community they are applied in, and relate to the quality and quantity of user
contributions
 cumulative
 totally subjective
 positive and negative, either counted separately as positive karma and negative karma, or as
single karma score
 persistent – karma points don’t fade over time

Klout

Klout provides daily updated Klout scores265 to users of social media. These scores lie between 1 and
100. For this purpose, Klout measures social reputation signals from 8 different networks, including
Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. The Klout score is intended as measure for how influential an
individual is in the social media world.

Klout is

 associated with individual users

 mostly specific to social media activity
 cumulative, though the Klout score does not behave linearly – it becomes increasingly
harder to increase an already high Klout score
 based on interactions within the social media world; so it has a subjective basis, but the
Klout score is a highly complicated algorithmic aggregate of all these subjective signals
 positive
 fading – if you are inactive, your Klout score will drop

263
http://www.reddit.com/
264
http://stackexchange.com/
265
https://klout.com/corp/score

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 Quantified Prestige

Quantified Prestige (QP) is a reputation system that I started developing in 2011 with the intention
to create a system that could drive an actual reputation economy. Users have to register in one of
potentially many QP networks and then get the possibility to esteem other users, for any reason
whatsoever. However, each user has the same permanently fixed quota of Esteem points. Esteem
points granted to another user can be withdrawn at any time. If you have used up your quota of
Esteem points, you need to withdraw Esteem points from other users in order to esteem a new user.
Usually, this is done via an automatic reallocation system, so that users don’t have to withdraw
Esteem points manually. The Prestige score on a user is basically the sum of Esteem points she gets
from other users, modified by a few factors which influence the weight of the Esteem.

Quantified Prestige is

 primarily associated with individual users, though it also supports reputation for
organizations or products
 general or specific, depending on the defining context of the QP network in question – there
could be QP networks for different fields of expertise, different communities, or a general
global QP network
 cumulative
 based on subjective peer ratings, but algorithmically modulated by a few factors
 positive
 persistent or fading depending the behaviour of other users – connected to the need to
withdraw esteem points if one’s quota is used up

A reputation economy

What is a reputation economy?

While there are many ways to define a reputation economy, there is one issue that lies at the heart
of the reputation economy: How do reputation and wealth relate to each other? I call this
connection reputation-wealth coupling (RWC):

Reputation-wealth coupling

Reputation can have an influence on your wealth and vice versa. It is certainly possible to “buy”
reputation with lots of money (at least indirectly by illegitimate means), though that effort may
sometimes be problematic and even backfire. What is much more interesting is the other direction
of influence: How does reputation influence wealth?

 Indirect reputation-wealth coupling means that your reputation influences your wealth
somehow, but in a rather indirect way. You might get more customers, because your
reputation, or the reputation of your products, is good. Or you might not get a job, because
your online reputation has been tarnished.
 Direct reputation-wealth coupling is a state in which your reputation has a rather direct
influence on your wealth. Currently, this is a rather rare phenomenon. One example might
be views and likes of YouTube videos of YouTubers who allow advertisements on their

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 videos. If one interprets view and likes as reputation of a video, then this high reputation
translates rather directly into income for that YouTuber via advertisement revenues. Direct
RWC is something which will be much more prevalent in the future, and enabled by new
mechanisms, for example reputation incomes, which are discussed later in this chapter.
 Weak RWC means that the relation between reputation and wealth is statistically weak,
formally expressed as low correlation between both variables. Corporations and persons
might be excessively wealthy, while at the same time having a horrible reputation in the
general population. On the other hand, highly esteemed individuals may be financially poor.
That is a fate that is often experienced by teachers, artists, and philosophers.
 With strong RWC your reputation is your capital. If you have a high reputation, you are
almost certainly wealthy. And if your reputation is terrible, your wealth will go down the
drain.

So, let’s use a rather general, albeit somewhat fuzzy, definition of a reputation economy:

An economy is a reputation economy if reputation-wealth coupling is predominantly direct

and strong.

Effectively, this means that people can make a living out of having a good reputation alone!

A reputation economy would have numerous advantages besides enabling VBIs, most importantly:

 Replacing artificial scarcity with digital abundance

 Providing better forms of motivation
 Rewarding ethical behaviour

Discussing these in detail is out of the scope of this chapter. For more information on these issues,
the interested reader is referred to the relevant posts266 on my personal blog radivis.com267.

Emergence of a reputation economy

Recent books like The Reputation Economy268 by Michael Fertik and David C. Thompson and
Reputation Economics269 by Joshua Klein point out that this prospect may be closer than most
people realize. The importance of reputation is ever increasing in our more and more online-centric
world.

The emergence of a reputation economy is not only a prediction that I make. In fact, I’m actively
working towards establishing a reputation economy with REPDEV270, the Reputation Economy
Promotion, Development, Exploration, and Vitalization Network. I encourage the reader to consider
joining the REPDEV Network in the effort to create a true reputation economy together, so that we

266
http://radivis.com/tag/quantified-prestige/
267
http://radivis.com/
268
http://www.amazon.com/The-Reputation-Economy-Optimize-Footprint/dp/1491585757
269
http://www.amazon.com/Reputation-Economics-Know-Worth-More/dp/1137278625
270
http://repdev.net/

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will have that economy sooner, rather than later. The best place to learn more about the REPDEV
Network is the blog post “What is the REPDEV Network?”271.

Part 3: Reputation driven Voluntary Basic Income Systems

There are multiple ways in which mature reputation systems can enable VBIs:

1. via basic income donation funds

2. via reputation driven voluntary income taxes
3. via reputation for group currency participation
4. via basic reputation incomes
5. via data incomes

All of these options will be discussed in the following sections.

Basic income donation funds

A basic income donation fund is a donation based fund that is used to pay a regular basic income to
a specific set of people. These funds could collect money in cryptocurrencies or conventional
currencies.

How can people be incentivized to pay into such basic income donation funds? There are two
different models that work with different kinds of reputation.

An algorithmic reputation based incentive design

The first model272 was devised by a blogger known in the decentralization community as darklight273.
It could be used in cryptocurrencies that support so-called smart contracts.

First of all, we need a cryptocurrency with “semi-transparent blockchains”: Semi-transparent

blockchains are ledgers for a decentralized electronic currency in which the accounts of specific
people or organizations are publicly known. A basic income donation fund would have such a
transparent account.

Next, smart contracts add programmable options to interactions within such a blockchain. A smart
contract could add algorithmic reputation to those accounts that have provable paid into a basic
income donation fund.

Finally, smart contracts could grant those accounts lottery tickets according to their algorithmic
reputation. A part of the money in the basic income donation fund would be used to pay the lottery
winners. This would make it attractive to actually pay into a basic income donation fund, even in the
case that an unknown pseudonymous identity is used by the donor.

This model uses the fact that gambling is exciting and behaviour forming for a positive purpose.
There are actually lotteries that pursue socially beneficial purposes like the German Aktion

271
http://fractalfuture.net/what-is-the-repdev-network/
272
http://darkai.org/?p=190
273
http://darkai.org/

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Mensch274 (“Mission Human”), which uses its revenues to finance projects for disabled and
disadvantaged individuals.

Public subjective reputation as donation incentive

If donors prefer to donate publicly, that would enable them to increase their public reputation
among their fellow humans. In a mature reputation economy, that is a really solid incentive to
actually spend money in a rather altruistic way.

An obvious advantage over the previous model is that it doesn’t require costly lottery prizes. On the
other hand, it would really require a mature reputation economy to be optimally effective.

Reputation driven voluntary income taxes

In a reputation economy, individuals and companies have real incentives to pay taxes voluntarily –
even if they are in addition to involuntary taxes. The mechanism is, of course, that payment of
voluntary taxes would help to increase the reputation of the individual or company paying those
taxes.

These voluntary taxes could then be used to fund a VBI.

Reputation driven transparency as prerequisite

Of course, individuals and companies would need to make their income transparent in order to
verify whether the voluntary taxes paid correspond to the claimed percentage of their income. This
transparency alone might already be rewarded by positive reputation.

Decentralized voluntary taxation politics

In the long term, voluntary taxation might replace involuntary taxation entirely. Voluntary taxation
would be more flexible, and might even be more effective than involuntary taxation. It totally
bypasses the shortcomings of centralized parliamentary politics.

Every person could have her own voluntary income taxation preference which is used to allocate
reputation to companies automatically (with the help of personal AI agents) – depending on whether
companies fall short of paying the desired level of voluntary taxes, or even surpass it. The effective
decentralized income taxation policy would be an aggregate of all these personal income taxation
preferences.

Decentralized government budgets

This decentralized voluntary income taxation scheme might even be used to determine the effective
government budget in a completely decentralized manner. For each area that the government
spends money in, for example basic income, health care, or education, people could set up their own
voluntary taxation preferences.

274
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_Mensch

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Individuals and organizations could then decide how much voluntary taxes they pay for each area,
but their reputation would suffer, if they are too thrifty. Paying more taxes than is usually expected
could be used to boost one’s reputation.

Reputation for group currency participation

Similarly to the reputation driven voluntary income taxation scheme, people could be rewarded with
positive reputation for participating in group currencies paying out basic incomes.

However, there would be less readiness to make one’s transactions in different currencies
transparent than “only” to reveal one’s income. Luckily, complete transparency is not really needed!
It suffices if people only influence the reputation of those they deal with directly. So, if you would
make business with someone who uses a group currency, you would increase his reputation score.
But if he used a currency that doesn’t have a built-in basic income, you might decrease his
reputation score.

Sooner or later, people would notice that doing business with group currencies is so beneficial for
their reputation that they would dump their reserves in other currencies. At that stage, group
currencies would become the norm, and using other currencies would be generally deprecated.

Reputation incomes

The idea of reputation incomes has been developed by me in the context of the Quantified Prestige
system. A reputation income is a regular income that is coupled to a reputation score. The higher the
reputation score, the higher the reputation income. Reputation incomes provide a relatively simple
mechanism for implementing direct reputation-wealth coupling.

There are basically two types of reputation incomes: Distributive reputation incomes and generative
reputation incomes.

Distributive reputation incomes

Distributive reputation incomes are paid out of a reputation fund. Those funds would be similar to
basic income donation funds, with the difference that they aren’t used to pay a basic income, but a
reputation income.

Organizations could set up internal reputation funds for providing meritocratic incentives for their
members based on an organization-specific reputation system.

Generative reputation incomes

A generative reputation income is an income in a reputation currency, which is directly generated in

the user account of an individual, in proportion to the reputation score of that individual.

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To my knowledge, there are no reputation currencies currently in existence. The first example for a
theoretical reputation currency is the Fluido, which I’ve designed for the Quantified Prestige system.
It is described in detail in the Quantified Prestige documentation275.

Basic reputation incomes

Basic reputation incomes are a minimal component of a reputation income. This can happen in three
ways:

 The basic reputation income is a reputation independent part of a reputation income

 There is a positive minimum for the reputation index, so that it automatically translates to a
positive minimum for the reputation income
 A combination of both options above

Reputation incomes can have a basic income component, or not. Why would people join a
reputation income system with such a component rather than one without? This is basically the
same question as why people would use a group currency instead of a more conservative currency,
and it has the same answer: Using a reputation income system with a basic income component
would be good for your reputation – and thus for your reputation income!

The height of the basic income component of a reputation income would then depend organically on
the expectations of those who give reputation feedback to participants of reputation income
systems. It would be similar to the mechanism that determines the effective height of voluntary
income taxes.

Data incomes

There is a popular saying that “data wants to be free”, but people are often reluctant to free their
personal data and make it public. This reluctance is of course created by the desire for privacy. If we
could guarantee a basic level of data privacy for everyone, then this could enable people to gain
additional incomes by sharing their personal data with certain organizations or even the whole
world. These incomes are what I call “data incomes”.

Personal ownership of data

If data incomes are supposed to be meaningful, then people actually need to own their personal
data. In an economy in which customers are expected to give away their data for free to service
providers they use, this becomes a seriously political issue.

One possible approach would be to declare that personal information permanently belongs to the
person it is associated with. Personal data could not be sold or donated. If another person or
organization used that data, they would need to pay a data usage fee to the person in question. Of
course, this policy might be seen as quite extreme and bureaucratic. Whether it would be actually
beneficial is hard to estimate at this point. So, the following considerations do not depend on this
quite hypothetical policy.

275
http://radivis.com/public/quantifiedprestige002.pdf

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 Personal data buying companies

New companies could start buying the personal data of their customers – in order to attract those
who have so far shied back from sharing their personal data without a sufficient incentive for doing
so. Could such companies be successful when most other companies get personal data from their
customers for free? Maybe. But in a reputation economy, these new companies might get higher
reputation scores and thus gain a competitive edge over their old competitors.

Data release reputation incomes

Within a reputation economy with reputation incomes there is another interesting possibility to get
data incomes: People could share their personal data in the expectation to get reputation for that
act in return. They might negotiate with companies and agencies about how much reputation they
expect to gain from releasing their personal data, before actually doing so. Companies and agencies
which then rip off their customers by not providing the expected reputation boosts would get bad
reputation scores in return.

Part 4: The political dimension

These new voluntary basic income systems depend on a well-functioning reputation economy. The
main role of politics within this context is to provide optimal, or at least sufficient, support for an
emerging reputation economy.

Legality of core elements of a reputation economy

First of all, the core elements of a mature reputation economy need to be legal. These necessary
elements are:

 Cryptocurrencies
 Reputation systems
 Reputation currencies

If these systems are burdened with stifling regulation, then they won’t take off, and the idea of
voluntary basic incomes will have little changes for actual success.

Support for identity verification systems

Reputation systems and group currencies are vulnerable to so-called Sybil attacks276 in which a user
creates multiple accounts to maximize her influence and basic income in a system.

There are multiple approaches against such Sybil attacks. One of them is the Web of Trust approach
followed by uCoin. Another approach is the Proof of Work277 scheme used by bitcoin, which makes
Sybil attacks prohibitively expensive – at the same time, unfortunately, it also makes legitimate use
of the system expensive.

276
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
277
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

107
The best way to solve the Sybil attack problem is to use a foolproof identity verification system,
which could be called “Proof of Unique Human”. Governments could provide such an ID system, or
they could support private or decentralized ID verification services like OneName278.

Support for information verification systems

Slander and general dissemination of false information is an extremely serious problem in a

reputation economy. Governments should help to minimize its impact.

If reliable information verification systems were available, false information could be quickly
debunked. Of course, it’s quite utopian to expect a system that reliably distinguished between true
and false information. A crowd-sourced information agency with multiple automatic and manual
verification checks might be the best approximation to such a system. Creating or supporting such
an agency could make a reputation economy much more viable.

Non-interference in the reputation economy

The government should not interfere into the reputation economy directly. It should not manipulate
reputation scores in any way. It also needs to refrain from manipulating the reputations of
individuals and organizations.

Secret services and big media corporations need to be prevented from criminally manipulating the
reputation economy for their own advantages.

Relation to a universal basic income

The emergence of VBIs might give political support to the idea of a UBI, because if people start to
create basic incomes on their own, they really signal that they actual want a universal basic income.

So, instead of making the introduction of a UBI less likely, voluntary basic incomes might actually
encourage governments to hurry up with providing one. If significant VBIs exist, the required height
of a UBI might be lower, so that it could be financed more easily.

Though it might seem quite optimistic or even utopian, it may even be the case that after a UBI is
introduced and a mature reputation economy emerges, taxation becomes voluntary, so that the
universal basic income becomes entirely financed by voluntary taxes.

Towards a reputation democracy?

Advanced reputation systems might even revolutionize the political process itself.

There is already one example for an innovative political system which is based on reputation: The
Democratic Intelligence system279 designed by Stephen Oberauer, which he has presented in the first
Transpolitica book Anticipating tomorrow’s politics.

Alternative or complementary systems might be conceivable, too. Instead of votes, we could have
continuous reputation ratings of politicians and political advisers. This political reputation in turn,

278
https://onename.com/
279
http://transpolitica.org/2015/04/02/democratic-intelligence/

108
might generate political influence tokens which could be used to boost one’s weight in certain votes.
This system would be an interesting mix of political meritocracy and direct democracy.

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 8. Specifications: An engineer’s approach to upgrading politics
By René Milan, Thelemic Transhumanist [see editor’s note280]

Introduction

When i first heard about the prospective title of this book i was baffled. Politics 2.0 – what might
that mean? Like most people probably would, i immediately associated it with the numbering
system commonly used in software releases, but having worked as a programmer for 30 years i
could not see how this could be applied to something as complex and diffuse as politics. However if
taken as something like a cognitive metaphor i still could not clearly grasp its meaning, beyond the
vague implication of improvement over Politics 1.x, presumably what humanity is struggling with
today.

As is my habit in such cases i forgot about this for the time being, and three days later as hoped a
possible solution occurred to me. What if i simply maintained the software approach and regarded
the task as coming up with an improved kind of politics according to user requirements?

And already i run up against a fundamental problem in business software development, which
constitutes the bulk of my experience: user desires are taken into consideration, but mostly within
the strategic framework of increasing productivity, which can under smarter management even, and
at best, include user contentment. But the real driver is always some kind of business case for
increasing profitability. “Who pays the piper calls the tune.”

However in this case only the user pays (the very minimal cost of this book), so i am free to assume
the user’s perspective in presenting, not a completely deliverable solution, which would be way
beyond any single person’s capacity, but at best a draft of specifications for an upgrade to current
politics with the aim of providing an improved user experience. Unfortunately i can not query all
seven billion users, but as i am one myself, and as the major shortcomings of current politics can be
seen so clearly, i believe to have enough to go on.

Thus in the following i shall attempt to identify the drivers and mechanics of current politics,
determine what effect they have on the people subjected to them (users, willy or nilly) and offer
conclusions on how they could and should be improved for a Politics 2.0 release.

The current state of affairs

Sampling the currently prevailing conditions, unscientifically, simply from the common anecdotal
user experiences gained by following international news, one can easily identify the main factors
determining the ideas, the interests and the effects shaping the reality of current politics worldwide.

280
Editor’s Note:
The author of this chapter has chosen to abide by his personal style which includes customised spelling,
neologisms, minimal capitalisation, and other peculiarities, which may appear to the reader to be mistakes

110
I Nation

The ultimate determinant of politics within a certain geographical area is, at least theoretically, the
nation controlling this area, regarding the area and the idea of the nation as inextricably intertwined,
as different aspects of the same national identity, which is claimed to be sacrosanct and tends to
take on mystical proportions by associating itself with concepts of destiny, providence and even
divinity. Two good examples of how the myth of the nation was, and keeps getting to be, reinforced
over the decades are the films “Birth of a Nation”281 by Griffith from 1915, and “Triumph des
Willens”282 by Riefenstahl from 1935. The current state of affairs is rather surprising considering that
as recently as 500 years ago the idea played virtually no role in politics; the basic units then were
empires, kingdoms and lower level fiefdoms. While even only 200 years ago, and in reality even
now, fixed borders were not effective in large parts of Africa, the middle east and elsewhere, today
everybody claims ‘national sovereignty’ to be the highest good, in practice only one’s own. The days
of internationalism being part of anyone’s political agenda are long gone (early 20th century
communism). And even though there are international treaties and organisations, they are by
design subservient to the interests of (the strongest) nations. A possible exception to this was
initially the EU, conceived out of the fresh experience of what nationalism ultimately results in, but
as time passed even that unique experiment seems to have become secondary to the interest of the
nations who were supposed to be absorbed and dissolved into this new structure.

The effects of this common paradigm are obvious. In the name of ‘national security’ large
proportions of the people’s wealth are endlessly spent on weaponry, subventions and trade
preferences in order to make the nation ‘stronger’, but as this happens everywhere simultaneously
in proportion to national wealth and moderated only slightly by variations in national ideologies, the
effects of these efforts are largely cancelling each other out. But what are the effects on the objects
of our deliberations, the users of politics 1.x?

It appears that among the users three distinct groups can be identified.

1. Those who directly or indirectly benefit from the expenditures generated under these
conditions
2. Those who get some emotional satisfaction merely from abstract ideas like that of a ‘strong
nation’
3. The rest

It also appears that ‘the rest’ constitute an overwhelming majority, and that they are therefore
disproportionally exposed to the negative effects generated under current conditions, namely

a) an increase of influence of the small groups identified under 1. and 2. above, and the
resulting decrease of influence of the majority, meaning that most users are deprived of
their voice in these matters
b) the loss of resources wasted on this global zero sum game, which could otherwise be spent
on truly beneficial endeavours such as improvements of health, educational, infrastructural
and environmental conditions even in times of those destructive tools not being used

281
https://youtu.be/PTDDcJaJz64
282
https://youtu.be/b0kwnLzFMls

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 c) direct (death and wounding, loss of habitat) and indirect (loss of resources, property,
income, health and home) effects in times and places when and where these tools are used

To stay within the metaphor this importance of the nation could be seen as a current operating
system feature, and as a consequence of the above it seems obvious to this engineer that for an
upgrade to Politics 2.0 with the aim of an improved user experience the first prerequisite would be
an OS upgrade that completely eliminates the role of the nation from the operating environment.

II Religion

Increasingly we can observe over the last few decades the effects of religious influence on politics
and beyond. This influence has been with humans at least since the agricultural revolution 10,000
years ago and the resulting congregation in large settlements (cities) and division of labour. Even
before that time this influence was obvious and actually potentially useful, for instance in the
chieftain asking the shaman for advice in matters of hunting, planting, moving or fighting. But in
those days there was not yet a clear separation of religion and science. After that time it took the
form of identification of political leaders as divine entities (egypt etc), which was, for reasons which
to explore would be beyond the scope of this brief analogy, common in the three early human large
cultural evolutionary centres based in Mesopotamia and along the Nile and the Indus. In the more
off centre and smaller kingdoms it was less common. Through the Greeks and then the Romans
Europe inherited many values and institutions of the earlier civilisations, but the Greeks establishing
philosophy and science outside of the domain of religion constituted an early break of the religious
monopoly on politics which was only reestablished, partially, when Theodosius I decreed, of all the
choices, xtianity to be the new state religion of Rome, which then survived the collapse of the
western empire and positioned itself to sanction, or not, subsequent european monarchies. This
lasted throughout the middle ages and ended through the reformation, but was not ideologically
questioned until the emergence of the enlightenment over a century later. Nonetheless, religious
influence and privileges are still common in Europe, and more so in the u.s. Islam, being 500 years
younger, is still at the beginning of its own reformation, and most countries in which it is dominant
are explicitly defined as ‘islamic nations’.

Again let us examine the effects of this state of affairs on the users of politics 1.x.

The users are divided along similar lines and in similar numbers as under I. In simple and direct
terms there are the beneficiaries (who gain material advantages), the ideologues (who gain
ideological, mental advantages), and the victims (who gain nothing). And again we see a
disproportional allocation of desirable and undesirable effects: too much political power for the first
two smaller groups to the detriment of the third and largest group, a waste of resources on the
privileges enjoyable by the first two groups largely paid for by the contributions of the third, and a
host of policies restricting freedoms of users, most of whom are part of the latter group, as in
marriage, abortion, political and sexual privileges.

Thus it becomes clear that a second OS upgrade is required in order to completely eliminate the
influence of organised religion on the political domain, before implementation of Politics 2.0 with
the aim of improving user experience can be undertaken.

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III Greed

I had briefly considered giving this section the heading ´Money’, however money is merely a
quantification of material value, created to have something approximating an objective measuring
device for this value. Clearly ‘objective’ is meant in a very relative manner, only in the sense that
many would, or are simply forced to, agree that certain material and even immaterial objects have a
particular value that can indeed be expressed by using this device. In reality monetary value is
defined by desirability, a very subjective concept, which in turn derives from real (biological) or
artificially created (psychological) need. Another option could have been ‘capitalism’, but that is just
the currently fashionable term for the underlying force, which is truly greed, and which has been a
driver of economic activity for much longer (in fact since the concepts and activities of hoarding and
raiding proved to be conducive to survival) than the term ‘capitalism’ existed.

Again the effects on the experiences of the vast majority of the users are dismal to say the least. As
before, and more so than above, we have a subgroup of users who benefit materially, giving in to
the genetic imperative of hoarding more than is reasonable, needless to say at the cost of the
majority, many of whom do not have enough to even ensure material survival. In between we have
what used to be called the silent majority, which is not so silent anymore, and on a global scale
certainly not a majority, who get by materially, but get nothing more out of a bad deal than some
sort of intellectual satisfaction for which they were psychologically conditioned by the media
controlled by the material beneficiaries in the first place.

This then is the third, actually the most important, operating system upgrade that is a prerequisite of
even being able to implement a set of policies that could qualify as Politics 2.0. I say the most
important, because all the problems caused by ideologies such as nationalism and exoteric religion
ultimately are maintained in the service of this same force, namely greed. I am well aware that to
resolve this problem requires a deep intervention in what is generally perceived as ‘human nature’,
in reality merely the current manifestation of a genetic configuration resulting from arbitrary
biological and historical conditions, which humans are becoming finally able to change, if only
agreements on these issues can be arrived at. But this subject is again beyond the scope of this
piece. Nonetheless i must point out that this must and will be addressed in the appropriate context.

The Needs

Once these operating system changes are in place, meaning that we can work on a basis of not
meeting fundamental resistance to changes in software, or in policies, we can try to determine what
is actually needed in order to arrive at maximal user satisfaction.

What do users want? It might be helpful to take a fresh look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs283, as
users want most what they need most:

283
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow's_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg

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The hierarchical nature of this concept seems to be quite obvious. Nobody will be too concerned
with self esteem or even family if they can not fulfil their needs for food and drink. So it must be,
contrary to currently prevailing conditions where certainly safety requirements are not guaranteed
to be met for millions of users, paramount for policies meeting the specifications of Politics 2.0 to
ensure that these needs are met. Then the question of priorities arises. As politics will consist
largely in the art of applying still, even after eliminating the parasitical forces described above under
III, limited resources equitably on a global scale, before the needs above the basic two lower levels
can be addressed all users must be elevated to that level, explicitly the first global priority must be to
create conditions within which all users can elevate themselves to level three, or in other words,
everyone’s physiological and safety needs must be met.

On this basis let us examine how Politics 2.0 can and should impact the safeguarding of meeting
these needs.

1. Physiological

On the physiological level it is clearly the first three items that are vulnerable to adverse political
conditions. Even a partly commercial, partly scientific and purely adventurous project like MarsOne
must include provisions to guarantee the users’ access to air, water and food, and to do so is a
political decision. On this planet environmental conditions vary so widely that pressures are quite
different between various places. Nonetheless given current population distribution it is the
function of politics, and 2.0 in particular, to safeguard supply of these resources within the powers of
current technologies, whose limits are increasingly tested as by rising sea levels and desertification.

a) Air is one of the oldest problems. In recent decades air pollution caused problems in the 20th
century, famously in L.A., Tokyo, Mexico etc, but these problems have been solved there
long ago and the knowhow and technologies are easily available. Nonetheless we have seen
recent recurrences, especially persistent in Beijing, and surprisingly in Paris. Other recent
incidents were caused by burning of rainforest in Borneo and even volcanic eruption in
Iceland. With the exception of the latter these occurrences can be more or less easily

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 controlled, especially after elimination of the greed factor, and the will and means to do so
must be part of Politics 2.0.

b) Food is a much more complex issue than the problems with air. It has environmental,
technological, cultural and social components. Since its establishment 10,000 years ago
agriculture has undergone, and caused, some profound changes. Its industrialisation
throughout the 20th century is perhaps the most important, and its results are mixed.
Efficiency has increased, but its social effects (transfer of ownership to corporations), the
impact on health and environment (large scale use of industrial chemicals, large
monocultures and subsequent environmental degradation), and cultural consequences
(establishment of an unprecedentedly large meat eating habit) are mostly negative. Even
the potentially so positive impact of genetic modification technologies has under the current
capitalist paradigm often had negative social consequences (but these should be eliminated
by the measures recommended under III). To rectify these problems will constitute a major
chunk of work writing low level requirements and coding for a release as part of Politics 2.0.

c) Water availability is strongly intertwined with the issues hinted at under b) as 70% of the
water utilised in the context of human activity is used in the service of food production.
Therefore some of the current problems with water shortage deriving from overuse of
current resources, as practiced in the course of industrial meat production, will be alleviated
by measures designed to improve global food supply. Nonetheless global aquifer
depletion284, which is currently gaining attention in California, besides the many places
where it has long been an urgent issue, will remain a problem alongside political issues such
as conflicts around water rights, such as in the middle east and along the Nile, and will have
to be addressed when developing Politics 2.0. One hope i have in this context is large scale
cheap implementation of new desalination technologies.

d) A resource not explicitly mentioned in the above hierarchy triangle but certainly closely
intertwined with the three mentioned above is energy. Energy is needed in providing the
other three, in transportation and communication, and even to provide creature comforts
(making it warm where it is too cold and vice versa). But energy has been the subject of
global discussions for quite some time, largely in a context of power politics (in the name of
obsolete nationalism), but increasingly also as an environmental issue. Even after the
recommended OS upgrades, which will eliminate the profit motive and the attendant
manipulation of energy prices, a lot of creativity and effort will have to be applied to better
provisions in Politics 2.0.

e) Health is listed on level two of the pyramid, but it really affects all the levels throughout.
What is referred to as level two health, is probably something like the minimal health
required to allow the individual to function reasonably well in its survival activities within
nature and society. But if health is negatively affected by crippling or disabling, chronically
painful, or fast progressing mortal disease, functionality even on the physiological level is
denied. Of course there are cultural practices prevailing in some human and other
mammalian societies designed to mitigate the effects, but they amount to palliative

284
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/16/new-nasa-studies-show-how-the-
world-is-running-out-of-water/

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 interventions at best. Therefore it must be addressed here. Like the four previously
mentioned issues it is out of the control of individuals, and even the most advanced efforts
by organised health institutions are still far from understanding aetiologies of, or developing
therapies for, many diseases including death. Clearly political efforts in this area are also of
the highest priority and must be a fundamental consideration in the process of upgrading
politics.

f) The other listed items, sex, sleep, homeostasis and excretion, are, in a healthy individual
(and society), pretty much self regulating physiological processes. One other issue relevant
in this context and connected with health, education, infrastructure and last not least direct
individual control is hygiene, but its centre of gravity lies probably on the next level.

2. Safety

Beginning on the level called safety things get somewhat more complicated. It becomes obvious
that two factors, relevant throughout, that are not explicitly listed, assume increasing importance:
education and infrastructure. Listed however are several items that are quite culture specific and do
therefore not belong into this pyramid of needs at all.

a) Education beyond the level of basic survival skill is clearly a prerequisite for maintaining
control of access to resources, specifically those pertaining to economic activity, caring for
offspring, health and hygiene, and perhaps issues of morality. And its need goes way
beyond this level, after all how can one currently fulfil one’s needs for esteem and self
actualisation if one can not read or write or has not developed one’s capacity for logical and
critical thinking? It is a prerequisite best met by society, not private enterprise with its
overriding profit motive, which is also not exactly interested in maintaining and growing a
customer base with capacity for independent thought as history has shown and does to this
day, but we will have eliminated its influence already with the measures undertaken as
recommended in III. But education itself is undergoing profound paradigm shifts. While in
many places primary and secondary education still takes the form of assembling the youth of
the village in (or at) one place for communal teaching, investigation, experimentation and
conversation, or that of not yet technologically replaceable traditional individual teaching by
experts or masters, in places with access to advanced technology education is becoming
increasingly nonlocal and free of cost. This is very welcome in principle, but the difference in
possibilities of access to the enabling technologies between these places raises another
issue: infrastructure.

b) Infrastructure is even more important in the provision of health services than in education.
Advanced knowledge and technologies are of no value to the users unless they can be
delivered to where they are. Thus a complete network of operators (hospitals with
physicians, equipment and personnel) within reasonable proximity to users, which is still
widely lacking, must be established. This in turn is dependent on solid transportation
facilities. If health and education services are provided online, as is becoming more and
more common, requirements include a reliable and secure communications network.
Needless to say, both types of infrastructure require availability of the energy to operate and
maintain them.

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c) Security of body is a concept subject to various influences. The most direct and often
irresistible one is force majeure, as executed by natural disasters. Human technology may
never be able to completely shield users against its impacts as long as life is based on
physical substrates within this universe. But given that terra is a normally slowly changing
environment compared to current user life spans, much progress has been made for
example in adjusting construction technologies in earthquake prone japan or fending off the
sea in the low lying netherlands. Much more must be done especially in the light of climate
change and rising sea levels. Security threats caused by humans must be considered as
criminal after military conflicts have been eliminated by overcoming the nation concept, and
are being handled in two major ways: law and therapy. It is clear that both approaches are
still in their infancy; therefore much research in these areas must be undertaken under the
provisions of Politics 2.0.

d) Employment and property are both economic concepts and can be discussed together. The
original function of both is to secure the user’s economic basis, in other words they are tools
toward guaranteeing the fulfilment of the user’s needs, on all levels of the hierarchy, within
the current system characterised by scarcity and the exchange of privately (lit.: stolen)
owned property without which the user is totally dependent solely on the commodity of his
physical productive capacity. A huge number of users are currently subject to this latter
condition: without employment and without property. This of course is largely caused by
the force described under III, which we assume to have eliminated before implementing
Politics 2.0. Thus alternative ways to secure users’ material needs must be found. Many
alternatives such as cooperative production and more recently universal basic income have
been developed, tested and discussed for a long time. Building on this work developing
requirements for an upgrade is one of the major issues in improving user satisfaction, as it
affects billions, indeed the vast majority of current users.

e) I will be generous and interpret ‘family’ as code for ‘securing the survival of offspring’ since it
is clearly not a biological but a cultural concept. Throughout history, in different human
cultures and more so among other species, family is just one of the many social forms in
which this function is being executed, and it is itself undergoing constant change. The last
century saw a transition in developed regions from ‘Großfamilie’ (apparently there is no
english term describing the typical 19th century configuration with three or more generations
and sidelines living together) to the currently common core family, and recently we are
seeing the introduction of legally sanctioned non gender based models. Throughout history
we have seen different social constructs that among others all have proven capable of
executing this function, while none is guaranteed to do it well, such as single parents,
institutions, communes, polygamous and polyandrous groups. Nonetheless i submit that
groups operating on liberal principles tend to do a better job than those based on
authoritarian ones. Complexities of this issue are defined by the gradual change of
children’s capacities throughout development, which requires finely grained understanding
of the development processes while avoiding the traditional, and current, underestimation
of these capacities. The issues of child rearing are also closely related to those of education
(addressed above under a), and to privilege (to be addressed below). In conclusion Politics
2.0 must include provisions to secure childrearing with the goal of enabling the highest

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 physical and mental potential of children while abstaining from interfering in the social
constructs providing this function for any other reasons than goal oriented ones.

f) Morality is an interesting issue for several reasons. An obvious one is that it occurs twice in
this hierarchy, once here and again on the highest (self actualisation) level. This can be
interpreted to mean that here we are discussing morality as something learned, in whatever
framework and by whatever authority (do good, don’t do bad), while under the self-
actualisation paradigm it is understood as something coming from a combination of
character and experience, from ‘within’. But this interpretation implies a simplification that
will not suffice to do the issue justice. First let us examine the meaning of the term
‘morality’. Derived from the latin ‘mores’, roughly equivalent to ‘custom’, meaning the way
things are done, the term does not include any obvious legitimacy, other than perhaps that
of evolutionary success. But evolution is equivalent to change, so the conservative notion of
morality is already questionable. Then there is the question of the distinction of morality
and ethics. A brief but plausible treatment i have come across in my perfunctory
investigation is presented here285. According to this morality would be the appropriate term
here while under ‘self-actualisation’ it should read ‘ethics’. Consequently morality, being
conditioned by culture, of which humans and other animals have many, should not be listed
under ‘needs’. More precisely what is meant here is playing by the rules that prevent
ostracisation of the user from the cultural context in which he happens to find himself. The
value of this ‘in the wild’ is obvious, but it must be a point of importance in Politics 2.0 to
liberate users from this constraint.

3. Love/belonging

Fortunately upwards from level three (love/belonging) the influence of politics diminishes. Policies
can create or obstruct conditions conducive to meeting the needs of this level and beyond, but a lot
of the required effort is dependent on the individual user.

a) Family here, as opposed to ‘the family’ (this brings up, perhaps not without reason, mafia
associations, a social construct which indeed attempts to guarantee survival in exchange for
playing by its rules) under 2.e, seems to indicate a sense of belonging and protection, and a
construct that can respond to this need. Again, the traditional family is not the only social
unit ensuring the desired outcome, and certainly not one to guarantee this outcome. My
generation (i was a young man in the ‘60s) had to and did find, or build, other social entities
to provide for this kind of need, and i do think this holds true today, but i do not know how
successfully, or even if, this is undertaken these days. There is not much an upgrade can do
beyond removing all systemic obstacles, which do currently still exist, toward letting
individuals build these entities, fleeting and transitory as they often turn out to be.

b) Friendship and sexual intimacy can be addressed together. Friendship is equivalent to

intimacy; if it takes on sexual qualities, and to what degree, is dependent on psychological
configurations and definitely must not be subject to policy. In fact friendship is the
overriding quality needed to ensure users’ needs are met on all levels of this hierarchy.
There is not much point in having a ‘family’ if none of its members can offer friendship to the

285
http://www.ethicsdefined.org/what-is-ethics/morals-vs-ethics/

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 user, and the same applies to alternative social constructs mentioned above. Apparently
sexual expression and conduct has been more or less subject to cultural conventions and
pressures for a long time, and clearly since religion assumed its position of control of
individual behaviour during the agricultural revolution. Currently we are seeing two
contradictory trends. In more enlightened societies there is a steady retreat of powers
attempting to regulate sexual behaviour of its citizens with one notable exception being the
area of ‘underage’ regulation. Children are widely and falsely seen as asexual beings, and
arbitrary age limitations are set by law. This is an important issue to be addressed within
Politics 2.0 along the lines described under 2.e. Simultaneously there is a strong reactionary
backlash against this increasing liberalisation observable even within, and stronger outside
these societies. An upgrade of politics must include complete decriminalisation of these,
and other, victimless activities.

4. Esteem and self actualisation

The needs described on the remaining two levels, esteem and self actualisation can be addressed
together. Those listed under esteem (self esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of and by
others), are all more or less dependent on the realisation of the quality of friendship, which was
mentioned in the previous paragraph. Friendship appears to emerge from fulfilling the needs
mentioned on this level and in turn to facilitate this fulfilment, as in a virtuous cycle. Friendship
must include a well developed capacity for empathy resulting in knowing when and how to step in
and when to keep out, and again it plays a beneficial role in this development. However empathy
can, and should, apply beyond established friendship in relation to strangers, who after all are
potential friends.

Of the six items listed under self actualisation, the latter three, problem solving, lack of prejudice
and acceptance of facts, are all results of basic education, and should have been addressed and
resolved long before this level is discussed. Thus they are the only ones mentioned in these two
highest levels that are actually subject to politics.

Of the other three, morality, creativity, spontaneity the first one has already been mentioned under
2.f “as something coming from a combination of character and experience, from ‘within’”, and
labelled as ethics rather than morality. Like ethics, creativity and spontaneity are properties of
‘character’ or ‘personality’, but how much they are also subject to a learning process is to be
researched and discussed. Another open question is whether any or all of these three can be
rightfully described as needs. One can lead a perfectly fulfilled life without being spontaneous,
creative or having a finely developed sense of ethics. However much i share Maslow’s ideas about
what it takes, for me personally, to become a fulfilled human, or transhuman, being, these ideas can
not be automatically presumed to be true for others. What we are discussing here is politics, an
activity with the potential to facilitate, and on the lower levels to guarantee, or as is widely the case
today to obstruct, the possibility of living a fulfilled life. How that opportunity is used if attained
must remain subject to individual choice.

5. Further discussion

There are two issues which are rightfully, as they do not constitute needs, not discussed within the
preceding, but which are intimately connected with its content and with each other.

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 a) Taxes – this is here just meant as code for any number of ways in which societies take
responsibility for issues that can reasonably and successfully only be addressed through a
communal approach. All of the policies required by these specifications take resources,
expressed in monetary value (money), and this money is usually raised through collecting
taxes. Even after recovering the money currently drained into private holes by greed as well
as that wasted on the nationalistic zero sum military game, and by sheer incompetence,
there may be additional funds required to be raised as taxes, unless government, or better
society, is set up as a wealth generator itself. This is a wide open issue which will however
have to be discussed, agreed upon and included in the new version of politics.

b) Privilege (lit.: private law) is another huge factor currently draining resources from the
community into the hands and pockets of the minority that benefits from these transactions,
the privileged. These are mostly corporate, political and religious structures as well as
wealthy individuals, which have managed to manipulate legislative processes in order to
maintain or establish these privileges. Code within Politics 2.0 must ensure the elimination
of all privileges. Law can only apply to all.

Conclusion

The list of specifications arrived at here through one of many models describing users’ needs is far
from complete, and it is merely that: a list of high level specs. This must be discussed, revised and
fleshed out in low level requirements, then coded and tested before being put in production. At
least that is how it would work in a well designed and executed project which itself is a rarity in the
real world.

And now it is time to give up the conveniently assumed illusion of Politics 2.0. The basic changes to
‘human nature’, that i nonchalantly presented above as prerequisite operating system upgrades, in
reality will be, and already are being, hard fought over, mentally, politically, economically and
militarily, and the outcome is far from clear. Those who think that their greed has served them well
are not willing to give up the benefits it has allowed them to accumulate, and may not even be
willing to give up the trait of greed itself, if and when genetic reconfiguration tools which can do this
become available.

On the other hand many desirable policies described in these specifications are already, and have
been, subject to attempts at introducing them, with mixed success, despite and against the
unfavourable conditions of this faulty operating system that is human, but hopefully not posthuman,
nature. If there has been progress or not over the last 100,000 years, when discussed from various
utilitarian viewpoints, remains an open question. However we have no other starting point than the
present, and in this sense the best i can hope for is that this list of specifications may contribute to
the debate on where to go from here.

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 9. Extended Longevity: An Argument for Increased Social
Commitment
By M.H.Wake

The US National Advisory Council on Aging (NACA) described “the dramatic increase in average life
expectancy during the 20th century” as “one of society’s greatest achievements.”286 Twentieth
century improvements in global life expectancy have been accompanied by a growing popular
assumption that “we’re all living longer”287 288 289 and that the improvements are somehow
inevitable and will continue indefinitely. This chapter will argue that improvements in life expectancy
are the outcome of social forces – developments in medicine and in social welfare – which were
specific to the twentieth century and that continuing progress is by no means inevitable, without the
adoption of deliberate policies to promote longevity. Acknowledging the centrality of social
development in improving lifespans, Kristjuhan argued that

It is possible to decrease the rate of this accumulation of damage in humans, as already does
occur in developed countries. Initiating the sorts of changes that extend healthy life span has
been a relatively slow process, because it has been a by-product of general economic
development, but it could be made to proceed more rapidly.290

Given that increased longevity must be ascribed to social forces, it will also be argued that we are
increasingly fostering a mistaken focus on individual choices, as if these are the main determinants
of public health outcomes.

Evidence

Life expectancy at birth is a statistic that underpins most of our common-sense expectations about
ever-rising lifespans. For example, Geoba.se291 ranks the world’s countries by life expectancy, from
89.52 in Monaco to 49.72 in South Africa. The UK comes in at number 30. The most obvious thing
about the list is that small rich countries tend to do very well. Poor countries generally do very badly.
It is reasonable to assume that people in Afghanistan (50.87), Guinea-Bissau (50.23), Chad (49.81)
and South Africa (49.72) are not more likely, smoke, drink to excess, fail to exercise, eat junk food,
be obese, etc. than people in, say, Australia (82.15) Italy (82.12) or the USA (78.88). If anything, they
are very much less likely to show such behaviours. The most crucial component of the variation in
life expectancy, therefore, appears to be the nature of the society.

286
US Department of Health and Human Services National Institute on Aging:
https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/publication/global-health-and-aging/living-longer
287
Eg. http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/235258/Why-we-are-all-living-longer Sunday Express, Mar 18 2011.
288
http://healthland.time.com/2013/07/29/were-living-longer-and-healthier/ Time, July 27 2013 “good news is
that we are all living longer than previous generations”
289
http://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/archive/people-living-longer-but-are-they-living-healthier/ “Professor
Les Mayhew of Cass Business School said: 'The good news is that we are all living longer than previous generations.
However, if policymakers fail to respond to the longevity challenge, taxes could increase, public spending including
pensions could be squeezed and pressures for immigration could increase.”
290
Kristjuhan U Real aging retardation in humans through diminishing risks to health. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2007
Nov
291
http://www.geoba.se/population.php?pc=world&type=15. The World: Life Expectancy 2015

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By their nature, any statistics for life expectancy are projections. We cannot reasonably make
accurate predictions about the prospects for a child born in 2015, when the only real sources of
evidence we have for lifespan are based on the length of lives of people born almost a hundred
years earlier. Taking the UK as an example, over the past hundred years, there have been certain
social events that killed large numbers (two world wars, a global flu pandemic) but many more social
events that kept large numbers of people alive (huge strides in medicine and medical technology;
the growth of a welfare state; two decades of full employment).

British people born in the 1930s and 1940s – i.e. a large proportion of our older population – will
have successfully dodged the high rates of child mortality of the early years of the twentieth century
and will have spent their working lives in a world in which society was becoming ever more equal,
with very much improved access to housing, health care, education, welfare benefits and adequate
nutrition. Great strides were made in medicine. The big threats to life – polio, rickets, TB, diphtheria,
etc. – were all but eradicated, through immunisation, antibiotics and free milk and National Health
vitamins.

In short, the lived experience of these individuals took place in the context of an assumption of
social progress. Ever greater health and prosperity for the masses seemed inevitable. However,
many of these changes were by no means inevitable but were achieved, both nationally and
throughout Europe, as a result of the post-war social and political consensus. Thus, crucial as
scientific developments were, these cannot be seen as the only factors in increased longevity over
the past century.

The social environment in which lifetimes increased was not analogous to that of the present time or
the foreseeable future. Hence, it seems unlikely that we can rely on estimates of life expectancy
where the base population is quite different from the population to which the estimates are to be
applied.

The UK Office of National Statistics was confident enough to publish a projection that:

One third of babies born in 2013 are expected to live to 100292

The cohort life expectancy for those born in 2013 is 90.7 years for men and 94 for women. However,
clearly, no baby born in 2013 has lived more than 2 years yet, so the estimate is hedged with caveats
and confidence intervals. Nevertheless, this sort of assessment is the basis on which public policies
are developed, with limited interest on the part of the policy-makers as to what might be
speculative.

An associated ONS infographic293 shows three “Reasons for better survival rates”: Smoking
prevalence; Medical interventions; and Healthy diet and lifestyle. It is argued here that these are not
scientifically valid projections, despite the fact that the method of calculating them was statistically
valid. The “reasons” appear to be an unthinking application of “common-sense” assumptions. For

292
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/historic-and-projected-data-from-the-period-and-cohort-life-
tables/2012-based/sty-babies-living-to-100.html Office Of National Statistics, December 11 2013
293
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/historic-and-projected-data-from-the-period-and-cohort-life-
tables/2012-based/info-surviving-to-age-100.html

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example, it would be interesting to see any evidence that current centenarians lived most of their
lives in a world in which smoking was as socially unacceptable as it is as present and in which current
views on healthy diet and lifestyle were observed.

The only real evidence – based purely on their age – is that these people lived in a world in which
medical technologies advanced and living standards improved dramatically for the mass of people.
However, only “medical interventions” make their way into the reasons list and even these are
abstracted from the social context, in which access to the benefits of medical advances is a crucial
factor. The other “reasons” are presented purely as matters of individual choice. Despite the
evidence that variations in longevity vary dramatically between countries and within countries
according to wealth, current “common-sense” about health locates responsibility almost entirely
with the individual. We blame the victim for any failure to be well. If we hear someone has a life-
threatening illness, we tend to protect ourselves from the reminder of our own frailty and mortality
by treating ill health as something the victims must have somehow caused. This odd psychological
defence mechanism takes on an overt moral flavour, to the point that there is even support for such
anti-humanist views as refusing to treat the obese, smokers or alcoholics.294 295

King et al argued that the overall health of US ‘baby boomers’ is actually lower than that of the
previous generation, attributing the differences to “healthy lifestyle factors”, which were generally
presented as matters of personal choice.296 We do not, of course, have certain numbers of long-lived
“baby boomers” – as, by definition, they have not yet lived more than about 70 years - so, even if
one accepted that individual choices are the primary motor of longevity, there is limited evidence
that an upward trend is certain. In January 2015, the Independent newspaper reported a fall in life
expectancy for the over 85s.297

294
Eg http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1156678/AMANDA-PLATELL-Sorry-NHS-treat-people-fat.html
Daily Mail 27 February 2009 and http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/obesity-not-disability-its-time-
3693023 Daily Mirror15 June 2014
295
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/29/health.healthandwellbeing “Smokers who need heart bypasses
and alcoholics who need liver transplants should not get them free on the NHS, according to four out of 10 hospital
doctors. A quarter of those questioned in a survey also believe obese patients should not be given free anti-obesity drugs
or receive free orthopaedic treatments.” Guardian 29 June 2006
296
King, Dana E; Matheson, Eric; Chirina, Svetlana; Shankar, Anoop; Broman-Fulk; Jordan The Status of Baby
Boomers' Health in the United States: The Healthiest Generation? JAMA Intern Med. 2013;173(5):385-386.
“With regard to healthy lifestyle factors, obesity was more common among baby boomers (38.7% obese vs 29.4% [previous
generation]; P < .001) and regular exercise was significantly less frequent (35.0% vs 49.9% exercise >12 times per month;
P < .001); more than half of baby boomers reported no regular physical activity (52.2% vs 17.4%; P < .001). Moderate
drinking was higher in the baby boomer cohort compared with the previous generation (67.3% vs 37.2%; P < .001). There
were fewer current smokers in the baby boomer cohort than in the previous generation (21.3% vs 27.6%; P < .001).”
297
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/alarm-at-surprise-fall-in-life-
expectancy-amid-fears-that-cuts-and-pressure-on-nhs-may-be-to-blame-for-earlier-deaths-9973848.html
Independent, 12 January 2015 “Health officials are investigating a “statistically significant, sustained” decline in life
expectancy among elderly people in some parts of England, amid warnings that cuts to social care and pressures on the
NHS may be contributing to earlier deaths”

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Benjamin Radford presented a less Pollyanna-ish take on longevity in a LiveScience298 post, arguing
that human lifespans had remained nearly constant for 2,000 years. Based on figures produced by
The US National Center for Health Statistics, he argued that:

The increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing
infant mortality rate, which was 9.99 percent in 1907; 2.63 percent in 1957; and 0.68 percent
in 2007.

And furthermore, that

The idea that our ancestors routinely died young (say, at age 40) has no basis in scientific
fact. Yet this myth is widespread, and repeated by both the public and professionals.

Is increased longevity a good thing?

My underlying assumption is that a longer lifespan is an obvious benefit to humanity as a species.

This assumption is not universal. The “ageing population” – i.e. increasing longevity – is usually seen
as a problem from public policy perspective. How can a decreasing proportion of the population –
those of working age and sufficient fitness – support an ever-growing army of the aged?

The assumptions that increased lifespans are a problem include

...the likelihood of a massive increase in health expenditures for the population aged 65 and
older, the potential for outliving financial resources, challenges to the viability of Social
Security and pensions, concerns about quality of life, and possible intergenerational
antagonisms.299

Such concerns were investigated by a UK House of Lords300 committee301 , which looked at the
increasing age of the population in terms of policy challenges, such as “how we will support
ourselves”. Their answers to this particular question are found in “later working”; “reforming
pensions and savings” and “using the value in our homes”. None of these issues are approached
insensitively. For instance, the committee argues that

People should … be enabled to extend their working lives if they wish to do so, as a vital part
of the response to increased longevity… The Government should, with employers, help
support those in manual or low-skilled jobs, who might need to work longer but have most
difficulty in doing so. Welfare to work policies should also address the needs of older people.

In practice, the most recent solution adopted by government involves deferring pension ages to the
point at which people will live fewer years collecting a pension than they will gain from an increased

298
Benjamin Radford, http://www.livescience.com/10569-human-lifespans-constant-2-000-years.html Live
Science August 21 2009
299
Louria, DB .Extraordinary longevity: individual and societal issues. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2005 Sep;53 (9 Suppl)
300
“At 30 April 2012 the median age of Members of the House of Lords was 69 years. Only one in six peers (16%) is aged
under 60, while 18% of peers are aged 80 and over. Crossbench peers tend to be older than peers from the main parties.”
http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN03900/SN03900.pdf
301
HOUSE OF LORDS March 2013 Select Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change Report of
Session 2012–13 “Ready for Ageing?” Stationery Office

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lifespan. (Whether building labourers or PE teachers are able to carry out their jobs at 68 is not
considered an issue.)

Even taking the most optimistic view of such an approach it is not sustainable. It represents a failure
of the imagination. For example, given technological advances, production could be achieved with
much smaller workforces and much less time spent in work. However, this raises questions of how
resources are distributed and how more equitable distribution of employment and wealth can be
achieved. There is also a question as to how quickly an ever growing population will outstrip the
world’s resources. The countries with the longest lifespans tend to be those that are the greediest
consumers of the products of natural world and the most reckless polluters. There is a major
question as to how we can achieve enhanced lifespans without causing so much damage that we kill
ourselves off by exhausting our environment.

The approach of the House of Lords assumes that an increasing lifespan is accompanied by
increasing levels of need for healthcare. This may currently be true. However, De Grey and many
others have urged the adoption of a range of regenerative therapies aimed at postponing age-
related diseases.302 Olshanksy et al argue that the social, economic, and health benefits that would
result from slowing the ageing process could be seen as producing ‘longevity dividends’.303 The
argument is that the costs of failing to extend healthy lifespans are untenable. The longevity
dividends include reduced health care costs and a longer span of productivity. (For example, the
Alzheimer’s Society estimates that total economic cost of the disease to the UK is £26 billion a
year,304 rising to £34.8 billion in 2026). There is however, an underlying ethical issue of whether
“regenerative medicine will become standard or a luxury of only a privileged few.”305 Without a
social commitment to increasing lifespans in general, regenerative medicine has the capacity to
magnify existing disparities in access to healthcare. So, together with regenerative medicine, there
must be a global commitment to ensuring that the benefits of longer lifespans are universally
available.

There is room for hope that greater longevity would bring about improvements in the ways that we
interact with each other and our surroundings. We would be obliged to change our approach to our
fellow humans and our environment if we realised that we would find ourselves facing the
consequences of our actions.

302
de Grey, Aubrey (2005). "A strategy for postponing aging indefinitely". Stud Health Technol Inform. 118:
209–19.
303
Olshansky, SJ; Perry, D; Miller, RA; Butler, RN. Pursuing the longevity dividend: scientific goals for an aging
world Ann N Y Acad Sci. Oct 2007.
304
Alzheimer’s Society, “Financial cost of dementia”
http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=418
305
McDonald Glenn, L, “Aging and Regenerative Medicine”, ETHICS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND
ENGINEERING, 2ND EDITION http://www.academia.edu/10572951/Aging_and_Regenerative_Medicine

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 10. Longevity, artificial intelligence and existential risks:
Opportunities and dangers
By Didier Coeurnelle, co-chair of Heales, Healthy Life Extension Society

Today, like most days since the 1960s, is at the same time the nicest day of the history of humankind
and one of the most dangerous.

Why is today the nicest day?

It is the brightest day ever because we can live better than ever with more food, more goods and for
longer. Each day, the average life expectancy in the world rises by 5 to 6 hours thanks to economic
growth, peace, improvements in hygiene, and developments of medicine.

This progress is benefitting people in the whole world, but it is more spectacular in the South, where
massive absolute misery still exists and where there is more to win in terms of abundance and
longevity.

By way of example:

 During the last 20 years in Bangladesh, life expectancy rose by 9 years (but less than 5 years
in the United Kingdom)306
 Between 2000 and 2013, malaria mortality decreased by 47%307
 In 2013, about 6.3 million children globally died before 5 years of age. While it is insane that
so many young children die in a world of abundance, in 1990 it was a lot worse: 12.7 million
children died.308
 Even in the countries who suffer the worst situation, namely the Sub-Saharan countries
where Aids is the most widespread, life expectancy is now around 50 years or higher. There
are less than 20 countries in the world where life expectancy is less than 60 years.309

Nowadays, life expectancy in Shanghai is already higher than life expectancy in Washington DC. This
is not because life expectancy is going down in the US (contrary to what many people think); it is
because life expectancy is going up way faster in China than in the U.S.310

Many people still see the world as profoundly divided between North and South. This is not anymore
the case. This mistake is especially frequent for people politically active and situated on the left side
of the political spectrum.

For many people around the world and for most of the techno-progressive community, an even
brighter future could be relatively close, within 15 to 30 years. The most important progress is the
possibility of living much longer and healthier lives due to new medical technologies. Also, this world

306
http://www.gapminder.org/world/
307
http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2014/en/
308
http://data.unicef.org/child-mortality/under-five
309
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
310
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=0

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could be a world almost without necessity of work, but this aspect will not be approached in this
article.

Why is today not only the nicest day, but also the most dangerous one?

Each day, we understand the world better. Each day, we are more connected and share more
knowledge. This is in many aspects beautiful. But each day, we acquire more knowledge and more
capacity to destroy.

The idea that we could use our power to destroy the whole of humanity is older than the moment it
really became possible. Science-fiction and apocalyptic stories often imagined a world without
humans, who had been destroyed by our own madness. Of course, up to now people who have
announced that we will destroy ourselves have been proved wrong, but this doesn't mean that we
are not at great risk. It is not even unthinkable that we are doomed, but that we do not know it yet,
a little bit like being in a lift falling in a free fall not noticing we are approaching ground zero.

Nuclear weapons are still the most destructive weapons we can use. Since the sixties and even since
the end of the fifties, many scientists, politicians and thinkers have imagined a third world war that
could destroy humanity. Actually, during the sixties, while a generalized thermonuclear war could
have been the cause of billions of deaths, a part of the world population would have survived. Even
when the number of nuclear weapons was at its peak, it was probably not enough to be the cause of
lethal radiation everywhere in the world. It would have killed most people on the planet, but, not
directly at least, all people311.

Today, the risk of massive destruction with nuclear weapons is still present. We are less afraid, but at
least eight countries have nuclear weapons and it is still entirely plausible that after a short period of
degradation of the international situation, a conflict involving at least one of these countries ends up
with a general nuclear deflagration.

Concerning nuclear wars, we have in a sense been incredibly lucky during the past seventy years. We
have the "good fortune" that to build very destructive weapons is still quite complicated and
expensive. Can you imagine a world where creating a nuclear weapon would be possible for any
rogue organization, or even worse for anyone with enough money, to be able to buy the work of a
few scientists and some fissile material? Can you imagine a world in which computers are still
enormous expensively, as they were in the fifties, while the price of a nuclear weapon is the price of
a good computer today?

We have the "good fortune" that nobody technically able to start a nuclear war ever did so since
1945. However, there have been a few times when the cold war almost became hot. In at least two
cases, a nuclear conflict was avoided almost certainly due to the decision of only one person (in both
cases Russian officers, once in a submarine, once in a center of command in Russia)312.

It is not known how many people are technically able to start a nuclear war, but it is very probable
that it is more than 10, and has been for more than 50 years.

311
http://www.oism.org/nwss/s73p912.htm “The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons: Myths and Facts”
312
http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-war-black-swan-we-can-never-see7821 and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

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Current thinking is that the probability of nuclear war and the risk it poses is rising313, indeed:

 If technological progress continues, it will almost certainly concern nuclear weapons

 We could discover destructive arms using new and as yet unknown technologies
 We could use artificial intelligence able to start a nuclear war or another (new) type of war.

Eliezer Yudkowsky once remarked, half-jokingly, that every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to
destroy the planet is decreasing by one percent314. Sadly, except for the precision of the percentage,
this sentence is quite accurate.

We know that using thought to work on a computer is possible315. Military people in the US and
probably in other places already use computers to pilot drones and kill people (sadly they do not
"liquidate" only -potential- terrorists) who can be thousands of miles away. We can therefore quite
logically consider a future - hopefully but not certainly a far future- where the destruction of the
world would be possible not even by pushing on a button, but just by thinking. This destruction
could be available to millions of people, due to technological progress.

We can assume that, with this technology of the future, but the psychology of the humans of today,
humanity would not survive long. One day, one crazy or depressed person would destroy our world,
as far as we know the only place where there is intelligent life, even life tout court.

Some scientists316 consider that this technical capacity for self-destruction could be the main reason
of the so-called Fermi Paradox. We are apparently alone in the Universe because when a civilization
becomes clever enough to conquer space, it also becomes "clever" enough to destroy itself and it
(almost?) inevitably does so.

To immediately temper this very pessimistic view without arguing about the necessary improvement
of ourselves or the artificial intelligence we design, we have to remind ourselves that the arms race
is among other things a race between offensive weapons and defensive means. If it ever become
possible to destroy the world just by thinking, it could become possible to prevent this destruction
also just by thinking.

However the balance between attack and defense is often a quite unequal one. There is at the
moment no real way to stop most nuclear attacks and certainly no possibility to prevent the suicidal
use of nuclear weapons by military leaders on their own soil.

Another way to temper pessimism is to imagine that we could reach an agreement not to use and
not to develop too dangerous weapons.

Nine centuries ago, during the second council of Lateran317, Pope Innocent II tried to prohibit the use
of crossbows (though only between Christians). He was not very successful, Japanese leaders have

313
A.M. Barrett, S.D. Baum, K.R. Hostetler, “Analyzing and reducing the risks of inadvertent nuclear war
between the United States and Russia”, Sci Glob. Secur. 21 (2013) 106-133.
314
Yudkowsky, Eliezer. 2008. “Artificial Intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk” in Bostrom,
Nick and Ćirković, Milan M. (2008), “Global Catastrophic Risks”.
315
Wolpaw, Jonathan R., et al. "An EEG-based brain-computer interface for cursor control."
Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology 78.3 (1991): 252-259.
316
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/409936/where-are-they/
317
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum10.htm

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been more successful. During more than two centuries (the so-called Edo period during the
seventeenth and eighteenth century), fire guns were almost unused in Japan even though there was
no general prohibition.

We can consider that the 20th century was the most successful period for the prohibition of
weapons. Chemical weapons were widely used during the First World War, but not used on military
fields during the Second World War, although they were, massively, used during mass killings of
Jews, Romani people and others, mostly in the infamous gas chambers. Nuclear weapons were used
as a weapon only in 1945, and never afterwards.

Developing research for longevity is important

Every day, around 110,000 people die of diseases related to old age318. Communicable diseases,
hunger, wars, crimes, accidents, natural disasters, and suicides are, all combined, two times less
deadly than the consequences of time on our bodies. In the whole world, there is not one person
who was already alive on March 4, 1899 when the first car ("La Jamais contente") passed for the first
time the speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The car is still in relatively good shape.

The right to life is not only the most precious human right, but a necessary condition for the exercise
of all other rights. Aubrey de Grey, the most well-known longevity advocate, has said on various
occasions that even accelerating the defeat of ageing in one day could save 100,000 lives319.

If we think that medical progress can make it possible to defeat ageing, then we can consider that, in
the year 2015, there is no more important question than to invest politically, socially, economically
to defeat ageing.

A longer and healthier life is not only important for people individually. It is also important for the
society as a whole. In this article, only aspects related to existential risks will be approached. These
risks are lower if we are more careful and we use less violence. If we live longer:

 We will be more careful because if life is longer, life is more precious.

 We will have more time to respect and love each other. In a society where life is short, we
have less time to invest in understanding and in trusting each other. For example, until a few
centuries ago, infanticide was considered a less serious crime than a "normal" murder320. It
was not because people were less able to love children. It was because it was more difficult
to invest in love and care for a child who was more likely to die before the age of five than to
survive.
 We will be less violent, because life is more precious. Where people live longer, where death
becomes more exceptional, it is psychologically more difficult to use violence. Until today -
and sadly certainly still for a few years at least- if you kill, you are only accelerating an
inevitable death. If senescence is suppressed or radically delayed, a murder could become a
more unthinkable crime than ever.

318
Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey (2007). "Life Span Extension Research and Public Debate: Societal Considerations".
Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 1 (1, Article 5).
319
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/01/aubrey-de-grey-ageing-research
320
http://www.infanticide.org/history.htm

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  Older people commit fewer crimes than younger people. This seems to be especially true for
violent crimes321. The difference in levels of criminality is very high and the rate of crime is
decreasing fast even in young adults. This is not because people are physically less able to
commit crimes, but because to learn how to live harmoniously in society takes time. People
aged thirty, or even only twenty-five, are already more peaceful than younger adults.

Developing research for longevity is complicated

It is now generally well known that life expectancy has risen on average more or less three months a
year over the past 150 years. It is less well known that, before the last fifty years, this trend was
almost exclusively due to the decline in child mortality, diseases and violence. The number of people
reaching old age was rising fast, but the average span between the age of sixty years and the age of
death was going up very slowly or not at all.

Over the past few decades, things have also been going better concerning this aspect. The life
expectancy of people reaching sixty years is growing and the trend is accelerating. For example, a
man reaching sixty years today can expect to live at least 20 years today. In 1995, he could expect to
live only 16 years.

However, as regards maximal lifespan and our hope of more significant life extension, the situation
is quite different. The first person who ever reached 100 years probably died in China or in Greece
more than two thousand years ago. Nowadays, the number of people reaching 100 years is still very
low. There are less than one million centenarians in the world. The chances of reaching this age even
for women in a rich country are still low. Sadly, even for those lucky people, the chance to live for
significantly longer than one century is, in the absence of radical progress, practically non-existent.

Around 99.9 % of the centenarians will die before becoming supercentenarians (110 years or more).
In the whole world, less than 500 people are supercentenarians. If you do not take into
consideration the many unproved claims of longevity, which are almost certainly false, the oldest
person in the world in 2015 is "only" 116 years, The oldest person who ever lived, Jeanne Calment,
died in 1997 at the age of 122 years. Thus, she will remain the oldest person ever at least until the
year 2021!

They are many scientists, journalists and others claiming that it could become possible very soon to
live much longer lives. The hard reality is that to extend the maximal lifespan, to be able to live in
average longer than ninety years (ninety five years for women), we will need intensive work on
ageing.

In a sense, this is both sad and counter-intuitive. Compared with 2500 years ago, we can travel
hundred times faster, we can fly, and we can go to the end of the world and beyond. We also
understand so much better the human body: we can see inside our body and our brains, we can
examine each of our cells, we understand our DNA, we can detect and partly understand the
structure of millions of living things living inside us as symbiotes or parasites, we can defeat most of
infectious diseases. Despite all this, we are only able to do slightly better than nature in keeping our
body able to function.

321
Farrington, David P. "Age and crime." Crime and justice (1986): 189-250.

130
This lack of progress is especially true concerning one type of ageing: neurodegenerative diseases,
and especially Alzheimer’s disease. Even if we understand these diseases better than ever, our level
of progress in curing these diseases, or even simply to slow them, is still next to nothing. Our brain,
sometimes called the most sophisticated object in the universe, is able to create, repair, and
construct things that were unthinkable only hundred years ago. Yet it is still totally unable to repair
itself against the simple passing of time.

This is even stranger if you compare longevity and other scientific questions. To fly, you had to leave
the ground, to fly fast, and there is the "sound barrier". To go to the moon, you have to "defeat"
gravity and to go in places more hostile than we ever did before. As far as we know, there is no real
barrier for the maximal lifespan. We can even be certain that there is no absolute barrier for a life of
hundred fifty years and more since some animals can already live this long (whales, tortoises,
clams,...).

Developing research for longevity would be easier with more artificial intelligence

They are many approaches to make a longer maximal lifespan possible. Scientists are generally
speaking about research in the following large fields:

 Drugs
 Stem cells
 Gene therapy
 Regeneration
 Nanotechnology

The most important investment concerning longevity at the moment is devoted to products and to
the review of DNA. However, with current technology, the best combination of drugs of the world
would probably not prolong the life of a Jeanne Calment by more than a few months of years, and
there is no gene therapy available yet.

Since in rich countries we now live more than 80 years on average, and since a little bit more than
100 years is still the limit322, to go further we will need big medical changes to win many years of
(healthy) life.

Without more artificial intelligence, we could have to wait many years more before a breakthrough.
This is especially the case in the US and in Europe where the laws protecting the citizens and the
laws concerning animal research make it very difficult to test quickly on real living beings.

Concerning tests on aged people, we can emphasize that people who are going to die of diseases
related to old age soon and who gave a fully informed consent to innovative experimental
treatments are probably luckier than old people dying of old age with only classical drugs to help.

322
Ediev, Dalkhat M. "Life expectancy in developed countries is higher than conventionally estimated.
Implications from improved measurement of human longevity." Journal of population ageing 4.1-2 (2011): 5-
32.

131
We can also emphasize that testing longevity pills and therapies on mice, rats, pigs and dogs is not
intended firstly for the good of animals, but will have as a collateral consequence the fact that pets
will be able to live longer and healthier lives.

However, it will be certainly easier if experiments are first made as much as possible in a computer
or in vitro.

Therefore, it should be a goal of longevitists to use and to improve "intelligent" systems to make
fundamental research concerning ageing.

Artificial intelligence could be dangerous

Specialists of artificial intelligence speak about "weak artificial intelligence" and "strong artificial
intelligence" or "artificial general intelligence” (AGI). The last could be an artificial intelligence
greater than human intelligence in all or most fields of human intelligence. The most well-known and
best tool available nowadays is the computer system IBM Watson. It is probably not strong enough
to be defined as an AGI, but is really strong in answering questions and hopefully will become really
strong in answering medical questions.

At the moment, the software is massively "learning", massively "swallowing" data from patients in
hospital institutions. However, it seems more focused on better use of existing therapies than on
innovative research. In other words, it seems it can be massively useful in raising the average
lifespan, but not in increasing maximal lifespan.

During the last few years, especially in 2015, a growing number of people worry about dangerous
consequences of the development of artificial intelligence. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk
are among the most well-known and respected people who are writing or speaking publicly about
these dangers. They all base their ideas on their knowledge and also on the book "Superintelligence:
Paths, Dangers, Strategies”, by Nick Bostrom. Nick Bostrom is not only a specialist of artificial
intelligence. He is also the most well-known transhumanist living in the UK, expressing many ideas in
favor of technological progress, especially concerning longevity. He wrote the short story "The fable
of the Dragon-tyrant"323 to convince ordinary citizens that longevity is a desirable scientific goal.

It is not possible to give an overview of all the possible dangers associated with general artificial
intelligence. This is impossible not only because this is a short article, but also because by definition
an artificial intelligence would be for some aspects at least cleverer than human beings, with the
opportunity to create (risky) actions that we cannot even imagine.

However, below, you will find an enumeration of some risks we can imagine:

 Starting a war by mistake: A fully automated system, if it had existed since the 1960s, would
have most likely already triggered a world war.
 Risks related to weapons and connectivity. An organization owning "intelligent" weapons
must prevent the opponent from taking control of weapons which means almost total
inaccessibility of these weapons. The risk that intelligent weapons start to kill without the
possibility to stop it is huge.

323
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

132
  Unintended consequences of a primary goal decided by humans. A classic example is an
artificial intelligence designed to create as many paper clips as possible, that uses the entire
carbon on earth and destroys human beings in the process
 Consequences of goals "decided" by the artificial intelligence. It could be "sub goals" to fulfill
a general goal made by humans. For example in order to better create paper clips, it's easier
without humans or with humans maintained unconscious. Another example: to maximize
the happiness of people, you have to make unhappy people unconscious. It could be also a
new general goal "invented" by the artificial intelligence.

For many people, transhumanists included, these hypotheses may look like science-fiction. We have
to remind ourselves, however, that already today when you "google" a few letters, we are often
totally surprised that the system already "knows" what we want. If you had seen this twenty years
ago, you would probably not have believed that it was made by a computer.

Artificial intelligence oriented towards life extension would be less dangerous

We still do not know exactly what intelligence is. We still do not know exactly what consciousness is.
However the fact that we do not know how to create something doesn't mean that we cannot do it.
We could create artificial intelligence and even maybe artificial consciousness without (fully)
understanding it. Almost by definition, science advances by trials and errors. Many important
discoveries were made by serendipity, without really searching.

Many transhumanists, and more generally, techno-optimists are convinced that the probability to
have general artificial intelligence let's say within at most 50 years is high and that the risks related
to this creation are also high.

In general, they propose various ways to minimize the risks. Actually, we can summarize the ideas in
one sentence: We must carefully ensure that all possible consequences of the acts and omissions
made by an artificial intelligence cannot be harmful for human beings and for the humanity in
general. It means among other things

 Create rules to make harmful decisions impossible

 Create final goals to make intermediary harmful decisions impossible
 Prevent the A.I. to do anything without a human authorization
 Prevent the A.I. to do anything (in a "prison")

It would take far too long to examine the pros and cons of these possible solutions. As already
mentioned, we are speaking about an artificial intelligence potentially far exceeding our intelligence.
We could be as unable to stop it from destroying us as a colony of ants would be unable to prevent
the destruction of their nest by humans. Also, we could even be as unable to understand why the
A.I. is destroying us as this colony of ants would be unable to understand that the human beings
simply want to build a road (and destroy their nest in the process).

However, the ants and we have a common ancestor. We still obey some common "rules": to
reproduce, to eat, to breathe, to protect our relatives, ... There are reasons to think that creating an
A.I. with "good" rules and goals will result in smaller risks.

133
It will be more the case if these goals are especially oriented towards everything making it possible
for humans made of flesh and blood to live longer and healthier lives.

Let's take here an imperfect metaphor. We are at the top of a very high mountain with a very
sophisticated and automated sled. Once we get in it, it could be impossible to stop. However, at the
moment, we can still choose in which direction we are heading to.

That is the reason I think that the first of Asimov’s very famous “three laws of Robotics” (written in
1942, but supposedly from the Handbook of Robotics, 2058)

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to
harm.

Would be improved if it became the following:

An artificial intelligence may not injure a human being and must do whatever it can to
improve the health and longevity of all human beings.

Given the extraordinary difficulty of prolonging the maximal lifespan of human beings, focusing as
much Artificial General Intelligence as possible on longevity could be the most useful goal of all at
the beginning of the 21st century.

If successful, giving the opportunity to live longer lives could be among other things a very important
factor in decreasing the violent trends present in each and every of us.

Successful or unsuccessful, giving the absolute priority to artificial intelligence to protect and to
improve human beings will decrease the risk of artificial intelligence destroying or hurting us.

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 11. Prolegomena to any future transhumanist politics
Can transhumanism avoid becoming the Marxism of the 21st century?

By Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick

Revisiting Marx and Bismarck

In ancient Greek tragedy, the term hamartia referred to a distinctive feature of the protagonist’s
character that is the source of both his success and his failure, typically because the protagonist
lacks sufficient judgement to keep this feature of his character in check. (Original Sin is the
comparable Biblical conception, if Adam is seen as having overreached his divine entitlement.) The
propensity for projecting the future, often with specific dates attached (as in the arrival of the
Kurzweillian ‘singularity’), is transhumanism’s hamartia. But transhumanism is only the latest self-
avowed ‘progressive’ movement to suffer from this potentially fatal flaw.

Karl Marx notoriously predicted that the proletarian revolution would occur in Germany because its
rapid industrialisation made it the most dynamic economy in Europe in the second half of the 19th
century, housing the continent’s largest and most organized labour movement. However, the
widespread publicity of this quite plausible prediction -- starting with The Communist Manifesto --
led Bismarck less than two generations later to establish the first welfare state, which exploited
Marx’s assumption that the state would always support capital over labour, thereby increasing
wealth disparities until society reached the breakpoint. Bismarck effectively refuted Marx by treating
his prediction as a vaccine that enabled the political establishment to regroup itself – effectively
developing immunity -- through a tolerable tax-based redistribution of income from rich to poor that
provided a modest but palpable sense of social security from cradle to grave. On the side of the
poor, Bismarck capitalized on the tendency for people to discount risky future prospects (i.e. a
Communist utopia) when given a sure thing upfront (i.e. social security provision).

Thus, the Marxist revolution was averted – at least in Germany. Of course, like foreign bio-agents
(viruses, bacteria, etc.) that over time generate more virulent strains capable of overcoming the
target organism’s immunity, Marxism developed a more militantly revolutionary strain, which
refused to work with the ‘social democrats’, as the Bismarck-appeased leftists came to called. It
triumphed in Russia, courtesy of Lenin. To be sure, it involved various Realpolitik compromises (e.g.
the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany) that established a zone free of external interference to
enable the desired regime to acquire some traction in a turbulent Russia. But once the Soviet Union
was in place, Marxism developed a still more virulent strain, courtesy of Trotsky, which presumed
that Marxism would not completely succeed until the whole world was re-made in the image and
likeness of Marx, even if that means making sacrifices at home and exporting the revolution abroad.

Now, when faced with a choice between the sort of Communist utopia that Marx envisaged and
Bismarck’s welfare state, many – if not most – people still feel that the latter was indeed the better
path for history to have chosen. Of course, this judgement is based on a greater familiarity with
actual welfare states than actual Communist societies. Or, more to the point, it is easier to assess an
unrealized Communism in relation to the realized welfare state than vice versa – despite the vivid
imaginations of the most fervent Marxists. Bismarck’s revenge on Marx’s much-hyped prediction
amounted to controlling the spin made of the subsequent history – not least by Bismarck’s English-

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speaking followers on the left, the British Fabians and American Progressives of the early 20th
century. I believe that something similar is bound to happen to transhumanism. To put my thesis in a
nutshell: Transhumanism is the Marxism of the 21st century: Like its 19th century precursor, it comes
burdened with hype – it sets the direction of political travel, while remaining an easy target for
opponents. So let’s think through the political implications.

The first point is to recall Bismarck’s maxim that politics is the art of the possible. The very idea that
one can make an art of the possible presupposes a sense of constraints – if not necessity – within
which possibilities can be played out. These constraints are provided by what is presumed to be law-
like in operation, such as Marx’s historical materialism. However, as Leibniz famously noted, even
the laws of nature are hypothetical imperatives from God’s standpoint. In other words, certain
consequences necessarily follow – but only if the initial conditions are met. If politics exists in
Heaven, then there is everything to play for in terms of trying to persuade God which possibilities
should be fixed and which should remain fluid. When Henri Poincaré spoke of the axioms of
mathematics and physics as ‘conventional’, he was trying to secularize just this point of view.
Applied to the present case: By suspending one of Marx’s axioms – that the state will always remain
weak and compliant in the face of expanding capital – Bismarck opened up an entirely different
political universe: What Marxists had presumed to be a foregone conclusion yielded a realm of new
possibilities. The result is the political universe broadly defined as ‘social democracy’, originally the
name of the manageable left-leaning parliamentary opponents of Bismarck’s own conservative
party.

Contemporary transhumanism

Now shift the focus to contemporary transhumanism. Two tendencies are noticeable. On the one
hand, there are bold, even millenarian predictions that within a generation our computational
and/or biotechnological capacities will radically transform the material conditions of being human.
These are analogous to Marx’s prediction that the German labour movement would launch the first
Communist Revolution. On the other, there is a steady stream of mainly dystopic science fiction
novels and films that generate an equally hyperbolic level of fear. The Bismarckian move in the face
of this dialectical tension is the precedent set by the US National Science Foundation’s 2002
‘Converging Technologies’ agenda, which established a programme of anticipatory governance,
whereby social researchers would attempt to gauge the likely public response to the realization of
these predictions. The tools of anticipatory governance are drawn from market research but raised
to a new level, since the products in question remain speculative – albeit vividly conceived and
frequently articulated. However, the effect of such research is to create a demand for broadly
‘transhumanist’ products while neutralizing the worst fears surrounding them.

So, even if the current transhumanist projects do not turn out as planned, a culture is being nurtured
that wants them to be true and hence is willing to support their continued funding. In this respect,
the founder of self-actualization psychology, Abraham Maslow, counts as an intellectual godfather of
transhumanist politics with his conception of ‘Theory Z’ as a marketing strategy for the emerging
group of consumers he called ‘transcenders’. These people, first identified in the late 1960s, had
sufficiently large disposable incomes to easily satisfy their material needs, but they were disinclined
to make further material investments in, say, property or stocks. Rather, they were open to products
that promised positive self-transformation even if their material composition was not so different

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from the versions they had previously bought. Think ‘ecologically friendly’ or ‘socially responsible’
consumer goods.

A transhumanist descendant of this mentality may be found in the various shows and commercials
fronted by Jason Silva, most notably his series ‘Shots of Awe’ and his exciting infomercial for Russian
Standard Vodka, which manages in a little over three minutes to show how to get from Dimitri
Mendeleyev, who formulated the periodic table of elements, to the transhumanist vistas that this
particular mainstream brand of spirits opens your mind to. More to the point, Singularity University
in California has become the mecca for cultivating this sense of ‘visioneering’, which, at least in the
first instance, is a kind of Marketing 2.0 for Humanity 2.0. The unasked business plan question
lurking in all this is how long are these ‘transcenders’ willing to wait before their symbolically driven
purchases come to be redeemed by serious material improvements in, say, their quality of life and
productivity. A Bismarckian move to short-circuit the transhumanist narrative might involve, say,
channelling the modest advances made across the relevant sciences and technologies into
mainstream healthcare, education, production systems, etc. – while cutting off funding for the more
visionary projects. After all, even such modest advances amplified across the entire economy might
result in a step change in the standard of living that might cause people to forget about the
Singularity, especially if it does not involve a massive disruption of lifestyles already seen as desirable
(e.g. the difference between extending lifespan 20 and 200 years).

Recommendations

So, is there any politically tractable strategy for transhumanism to avoid the Bismarckian move,
which ultimately curtails the capacity of basic research to explore and challenge the fundamental
limits of our being? My answer is as follows: Transhumanists need to take a more positive attitude
towards the military.

A strong libertarian strain within transhumanism sees military spending as a waste of taxpayers’
money to fight wars over which they had little say, instead of spending it on, say, life-extending
treatments that would directly benefit individuals. However, this is a myopic view of the military,
which hints at an isolationist mentality that goes against transhumanism’s natural cosmopolitanism.
(After all, aren’t transhumanists the ones interested in space colonization and searching for
extraterrestrial life?) More to the point, such a myopic attitude neglects the very positive role that
blue skies military-based research (e.g. DARPA in the US) has played in advancing much of what we
now regard as a transhumanist agenda, not least the Silicon Valley revolution that took off with
redeployment of military-funded research for civilian purposes as the Cold War drew to a close. This
pattern of techno-commercial bonanza on the back of sustained military focus has been common at
least since the Franco-Prussian War.

The reasons for the military’s potential centrality to the transhumanist agenda are easy to
understand: It is an institution that is by definition focussed on liminal possibilities – matters of life
and death -- at the largest scale and over the longest time periods. Its organization is fit for purpose:
well-trained, risk-oriented yet subject to clear channels of communication and control – and, not
least, subject to considerable trust from those on the outside to be able handle its own messes when
they arise. The military suffers neither from the short-term ‘quick win’ mentality of most businesses

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nor the tendency of more democratic institutions to compromise their own values to appease
powerful interests.

One way to make the connection between the military and transhumanism tighter would be by
casting the transhumanist biomedical agenda as a matter of national security – a kind of long-term
insurance against foreign rivals who might outproduce us, outflourish us, etc. Many mass medical
innovations – from public hygiene reform to vaccinations – were introduced with this sense of
‘civilian preparedness’, with the likes of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch emerging as ‘national heroes’
of their respective countries in the Franco-Prussian War. In more general historical terms, major
public funding for adventurous research has typically been done against the backdrop of a sustained
external threat or ‘permanent state of emergency’ (think of the US v. USSR in the Cold War). A
political party that says living 200 years is an inherently nice idea is not as persuasive as one arguing
that living 200 years is necessary to maintain our position in the world. The activities of China’s
Beijing Genomics Institute can help focus the mind on this issue. This public-private partnership aims
to sequence the genomes of thousands of high-IQ people to find interesting transferable molecular
patterns. Whether or not it succeeds in its ambitions, it is certainly assuming that the goal posts for
‘normal’ and ‘successful’ human existence are changing, which in turn requires substantial
investment in basic research that aims at long-term human capital development.

Moreover, the focus on the military would help shift tenor of transhumanist political discourse from
one of personal freedom to one of geopolitical necessity – but, at the same time, a discourse with a
much more positive spin from that of Nick Bostrom at Oxford and Cambridge’s Centre for the Study
of Existential Risk. Whereas they are largely in the business of preventing worst possible outcomes
(e.g. our unwitting destruction at the hands of superintelligent machines of our own creation), I am
suggesting a spirit more in line with ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, namely, that each
potential threat is an opportunity in disguise, a moment for further distinguishing the chaff of our
evolutionary heritage from the wheat that we wish to take forward, be it in terms that are purely
carbon-based, silicon-based or some combination of the two. Even highly probable long term
changes to the Earth’s climate can be seen in this fashion: namely, as invitations for us to undertake
now -- prior to any actual global catastrophe – a systematic revaluation of our existential priorities,
especially in terms of energy provision. In this respect, transhumanists can ally with a proactionary
‘ecomodernism’, which specifically targets energy as a locus for innovation, encouraging a general
shift away from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of energy and a more generally planned global
environment, with a door open to more substantial space exploration, not only as an escape route in
case of ecological meltdown but also as a means of enhancing life on Earth.

Further reading

Fuller, S. (2011). Humanity 2.0: What It Means To Be Human Past, Present and Future324. London:
Palgrave.

Fuller, S. (2012). Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0325. London: Palgrave.

324
http://www.amazon.com/Humanity-2-0-Means-Present-Future/dp/0230233430/
325
http://www.amazon.com/Preparing-Life-Humanity-Palgrave-Pivot/dp/1137277068/

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 Fuller, S. and Lipinska, V. (2014). The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism326.
London: Palgrave.

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http://www.amazon.com/Proactionary-Imperative-Foundation-Transhumanism/dp/1137433094/

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