LIFE EXTENSION AND ITS ENEMIES.
Quadrant; 12/1/1999; BLACKFORD, RUSSELL
Issues related to the moral ambiguities of improved medical technology are examined, focusing on questions raised by abilities to artificially increase human lifespan. Topics include the great technological advances of the 20th century; and cultural backlash against increasing human lifespan, including thoughts in the book "The Deep Field," by James Bradley and in article by Margaret Wertheim.
WE HAVE REACHED a time in the Western calendar when consideration of probable or possible technological developments can be dismissed as so much millenarian fantasy, equated glibly with the apocalyptic warnings or promises of fundamentalist religion. That, however, is a foolish response to the imminence of a new millennium.
One way of showing this is to develop a thought experiment borrowed from Gregory Benford. If a counterpart to me, some Wellsian character, had been alive a century ago and speculating about the future development of science and technology, how would his contemporaries have reacted if he'd managed to make a series of broadly accurate prophecies? If he speculated about what might happen up to the year 2000, such a person could certainly have been accused of millenarianism.
He might have predicted how communications in the developed world would be revolutionised by the spread of telephones, radio broadcasts, television and the internet. He might have described the emergence of motor cars, aviation, spacecraft, impressive ocean vessels, large-scale engineering techniques, freely available electricity, weapons of awesome destructive power, extraordinarily precise scientific instruments, and biomedical advances in fields such as antibiotics, organ transplants and human contraception.
In 1899, anyone seriously putting forward a vision such as this of developments up to the year 2000 would have risked being scorned as a crackpot, a fraud, or extravagant opportunist -- at best, some kind of utopian dreamer. Yet exactly these innovations and more have come to be. Similarly, it is all too easy to dismiss speculations about twenty-first-century technology and society as dreams or fantasies.
The past was another world. Manning Clark has described the astonishment of onlookers in March 1907 when a man walked down Sydney's Pitt Street without a hat on his head, and policemen wondered whether he was mad or drunk. In the same month, so Clark tells us, a woman outraged propriety by riding a horse while wearing bloomers, eschewing the side-saddle position considered acceptable for her sex. About that time, conservative morals were shocked when mixed bathing became common on the beaches of Sydney. When we are sceptical about changes postulated for the future, we should remember how strange society at the beginning of our own century appears when we try to think ourselves back into it in any detail. To a time traveller from one hundred years ago, life in a Western city at the end of the twentieth century would appear technologically wondrous but extraordinarily decadent. No doubt there are changes in store during the next ten or so decades that will be equally strange to us if we live long enough to see them.
The development of technology will further shape how we (or at least our descendants) live, how we see ourselves, and perhaps our very nature -- all in ways at least as profound as motor vehicles, television, computers, immunisation and the whole gamut of twentieth century innovations.
As a species, we began to transcend our evolutionary biology when we started controlling the workings of our bodies with inventions such as the contraceptive pill. It is reasonable to predict the discovery and application of new biotechnologies based on the continuing exponential development of information technology, synergised with genetic, biophysical and biochemical research. Barring a successful program by governments to suppress technological change, we and our descendants will become more comprehensively transhuman. In particular, it is possible that current research on the causes of human ageing will lead to genuine breakthroughs in maximum life expectancy, not merely average life spans, opening up changes in social organisation and mores far more dramatic than the contraceptive revolution of the 1960s.
THOSE WHO OPPOSE the development of particular technologies that are postulated for the twenty-first century often express scepticism as to whether they are possible. There are, indeed, scientific and philosophical arguments as to why some technologies may not be feasible, at least as they are currently imagined by transhumanists and science fiction writers. In the past, some technologies have been realised in unexpected forms. Despite the swiftness and power of our aircraft, we have never equalled the freedom and beauty of the birds.
A list of postulated technologies as to which some scepticism is reasonable would include strong artificial intelligence (with programmed computers appearing to display consciousness or free will), the "uploading" of human personalities onto advanced computational substrates, and genetic engineering to a level where we can "write in" our children's detailed behavioural propensities.
With other technologies, scepticism is clearly inappropriate. Human cloning is now achievable in principle, though there is an issue as to whether an adult can be genetically copied without the possibility of undetected malformations or the spectre of premature ageing from telomeric damage. It will be interesting to observe the progress through life of Dolly the cloned sheep, which will give an indication of whether clones produced by the somatic cell nuclear transfer technique must suffer shortened life spans.
As more technologies move from the realm of pure speculation to that of in-principle achievability, mere scepticism will increasingly give way to frightened resistance, with expressions of repugnance and noble-sounding appeals to ethical and pseudo-ethical concepts. Talk of technological dreams, fantasies or "pie in the sky" will be superseded by real apprehension and blatant political opposition. To some extent, a shift to full-blown political struggle is already happening, with resistance to genetically modified foods and to the application of genetic technologies to human beings.
When we consider the powerful groups in society that are likely to call for state coercion, it is predictable that calls for legislative prohibition of radical and supposedly unnatural technologies will become loud and numerous. The oppositional groups Will include environmentalists, many feminists, religious thinkers and self-appointed moral guardians, left-wing intellectuals, and much of the legal profession, which has a tendency to believe that every social concern should be addressed through legislative intervention.
While the moral panic about human cloning and genetic manipulation has been prominent in the last few years, other areas of struggle can be predicted for the early decades of the third millennium. These include resistance to any truly effective technologies that enable one or more of the following: increased longevity; intelligence enhancement; strong artificial intelligence; any attempt at "cyborgisation" of human bodies, such as through direct interfaces between our neurophysiology and advanced computer hardware; and "uploading" of human personalities. I have suggested that some of these may not be feasible. Then again, I may be surprised. Moreover, there may be other technologies, foreseen by nobody as yet, that will come into play and have enormous social consequences and political implications.
RADICAL TECHNOLOGIES to extend human life are already encountering opposition, even though it is too early even to state authoritatively that our maximum life expectancy, as opposed to the average life span, can be increased. Perhaps the necessary technology will require genetic engineering of human germ cells, so that extended longevity will become available only to those unborn at the time the technology is introduced. Even if there are some currently living who may achieve far longer lives by the application of breakthroughs in sophisticated therapies, somatic cell genetic engineering or biomedical nanotechnology, my pessimistic hunch is that current adults are more likely to turn out to be the last generation of mortals than the first generation of immortals.
Yet, some scientists well qualified in the relevant fields speak freely of the possibility that ageing can be defeated, and this has already caused a backlash. It is surprisingly difficult to find support from the cultural elites for the superficially attractive prospect that human beings may be able to live longer and do more with their lives. On the contrary, writers, intellectuals and journalists display a pessimism that often shades into horror or disgust. A good example in the Australian context is James Bradley's otherwise admirable novel, The Deep Field, a science fiction work that has attained mainstream credibility. This book's main action is framed by the story of a narrator over three hundred years from now trying to make sense of the lives of her adoptive parents in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
The Deep Field seems to suggest that life is a burden. The narrator is herself about three hundred years old and is able to live seemingly forever, but she regards this as an unnatural and psychologically destructive prospect. Writing in the June issue of the Australian's Review of Books, Drusilla Modjeska praised The Deep Field for exactly this pessimism about the prospect of radical life extension. Modjeska's article quotes with approval, but no attempt at analysis, the following passage from the narrator's self-pitying account:
This is not a life, this creeping death, my body primped and prodded,
filtered and scrubbed, my organs sliced out, replaced with vat-grown meat,
tiny machines let loose to claw their way through my capillaries. Synthetic
skin, blood, hair.
Clearly, Bradley is well acquainted with some of the postulated life extension technologies, though he does not refer here to attempts that might be made to switch off or reverse the genetic bases of ageing. Nonetheless, he alludes to at least the following: advanced transplantation methods using cultured organs ("vat-grown meat"); "cyborgisation" of the body by introducing synthetic materials (for "skin, blood, hair"); and the possibility of nanotechnological devices to combat degeneration and disease ("tiny machines let loose to claw their way through my capillaries"). Bradley's narrator perceives all this as a "creeping death", but it is not clear why she should think that way.
Such technologies may sound outlandish even to someone born as recently as the 1960s, such as Bradley. However, Bradley's narrator is depicted as being born well into the twenty-first century and has grown up with the futuristic technologies that the novel depicts; she should be familiar with such advances and accept them as readily as we accept contraception, organ transplants and immunisation. Just as the past was another world, so the future will be, and Bradley has failed at this point in his attempt to imagine it.
Furthermore, there is no real substance to Bradley's -- or his narrator's -- rhetoric. Any high-tech medical procedure can be made to sound repulsive by describing its bodily components of "meat" and blood in a sinister-seeming juxtaposition with artificiality and "machines". Images of Frankenstein's monster are never far away from such evocative combinations of words. Why are the tiny nanobotic machines described as "clawing" their way through the narrator's capillaries? Why is it more disgusting for "sliced-out" organs to be replaced by "vat-grown" ones, presumably cultured from the narrator's own stem cells to ensure compatibility, rather than by those of some unfortunate donor? This passage calls on irrational fears of the body and disquiet about interfering with the "natural" order of things. A rigorous critic would judge that Bradley has been distracted by the easy rhetorical possibilities in his material.
Far from making such a point, Modjeska uses the passage as if it somehow validated, her own cliched observations about the emptiness of an extended life. She quotes from Bradley immediately after making a waspish reference to a television program that she saw in 1998, in which assertions were evidently made about a technological "cure" for death. Then she adds, rather pathetically:
Nothing that was said about the prospect of more and more years devoted to
shopping and sex convinced me that there was anything to be said for this
deathless existence.
How sad! I have no idea why a successful author such as Modjeska should find her life so futile that the prospect of living longer strikes her in this way. It does not seem to occur to her that she might be able to do far more than is possible within the current maximum span of life.
Unlike Modjeska, Bradley himself is at least dealing with a specific and understandable problem, the possible difficulty for long-living transhumans of maintaining connection with their pasts. In a greatly extended life, memory may not be able to handle all that has been experienced. As a result of this, the narrator of The Deep Field suffers from a dissolving identity, conveyed through an impressionistic prose style that evokes deep and elusive feelings in a manner reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence. The real-world extent of the problem is far from clear, however, since we know so little about the neurophysiological workings of memory.
Even if people with extended life spans could not have vivid and immediate memories of their entire lives, it is not obvious that this would be terrible or drastically different from everyday experience even now. I can remember little of my life before the age of five and I find that memories even of critical experiences become unexpectedly vaguer as I grow older. However, that does not mean that I fail to recognise how I have been shaped by them. Nor has my past lost its interest to me. If we live much longer, our experience of our own identity may change, but that does not mean that our lives will be empty, discontinuous or without fascinating internal connections. Changed conceptions of personal identity may open up possibilities for growth, rather than being a burden such as Bradley describes. What strikes me about this element of Bradley's book is its reliance on the crutch of fashionable pessimism rather than the energy of the author's own imagination.
Yet, in the current intellectual climate, it has become almost impossible to express optimism about the possibility of extended lives. Moreover, there is every sign that the backlash at this level could be translated into a widespread political struggle to ban life-extending technology or even the scientific research underpinning it. The current reaction to genetic technologies provides a precedent for this. Whenever there is disquiet about new technologies that can be characterised as "unnatural", it should be assumed that the ravens of politics will gather.
A RECENT Margaret Wertheim article shows how easily intellectual distaste is translated into calls for political suppression. In "Who Wants to Live Forever and a Day? (The Extropians, That's Who)", published in the Sunday Age on 12th September 1999, Wertheim launches an extended attack on Max More, the philosophical leader of the extropian movement. Extropianism is a transhumanist philosophy. More precisely, it is a purely scientific materialist worldview whose adherents wish to transcend human biological limits, not through religious experience or New Age magic, but by means of advanced technology. Extropians have diverse views on questions of detail, but they are techno-libertarian in outlook, supporting radical research programs, and distrusting state power.
Wertheim's article is a response to a paper presented by More at a University of California conference, in which he strongly advocated human life extension. Although she makes various scoffing comments about More's views, including a remark to the effect that the technical hurdles to life extension may be too great, Wertheim's main tack is not the sceptical one but a direct challenge to the desirability of our being allowed to live longer. She makes it clear that she is not merely disinclined to use an effective life extension technology herself, should it become available. She wishes to live in a society where it is not available to anyone.
At one point, Wertheim condemns More for a remark that resistance to the introduction of life extension technology is futile:
The arrogance of [More's] remark stuns me. Especially since extropians
embrace a hard-line libertarian philosophy -- one which extols maximum
choice as a core ideal. But those of us who would rather not live in a
society with radical life extension apparently do not have a choice at all.
What is at stake here is far from trivial.
It certainly is far from trivial, for what is at stake here is whether guns and police should be used suppress knowledge, technology and life choices of which Wertheim happens to disapprove. If it was meant without irony, More's own remark may well be misguided, since the political forces that will be ranged against any effective life extension technology could easily win out -- at least for a time. On the other hand, Wertheim's comments about libertarianism constitute a completely inept attempt at political philosophising.
Libertarians assign the state only a limited range of areas in which it can legitimately interfere with the choices of individuals. They emphasise the "negative rights" of individuals to be free from coercion in making decisions about what kind of lives they will lead. Genuine issues surround the viability of this as a rigorous political philosophy, rather than just an impulse to support small government and individual freedoms, but Wertheim does not reflect on such abstractions. Instead, she imagines that it is a libertarian position to want to live in a society in which no-one else does things that you disapprove of. This is a "positive rights" claim of a frightening kind.
Wertheim wants the "choice" of a society in which she is not only free to decline the use of radical life extension technology, but in which everyone else is prevented from doing so, even if they want to. I cannot give any meaning to this except that she favours political suppression, that she wants to see laws passed to stop the availability of life extension to others.
To present this as a libertarian position is to display an ignorance of political philosophy. Certainly, Wertheim has failed to demonstrate that More is being inconsistent. However, these niceties may be irrelevant to the realpolitik of the issue. Political groups on both the right and the left will lend support to her anti-libertarian position. The religious right freely advocates the coercive use of state power to control private behaviour, while the left has largely abandoned its historical concern for individual liberty. Many left-wing intellectuals and political actors believe that it is legitimate to enact legislative prohibitions against any practice that they don't like and which is sufficiently unpopular to be suppressed without an electoral backlash. They see the political arena as one where power is to be seized and used to impose their own visions of the good. Wertheim will not be alone on the left in wishing to invoke guns and police to suppress any radical life extension technology that begins to look feasible.
That said, it should be added that individual liberty is not a moral absolute. Many state actions whose legitimacy is almost unquestioned have some effect on the liberty of individuals to do whatever they like. However, the starting point in a liberal society is that individual liberty should be preserved, and very good reasons need to be given to depart from this point. What reasons does Wertheim have?
WERTHEM actually makes quite a good fist of the anti-libertarian case. She is opposed to life extension fundamentally because she sees it as selfish. The obvious problem with this, however, is that selfishness alone is not usually a reason for conduct to attract legal prohibition. It is normally assumed that we should be free to pursue self-regarding interests as long as we don't interfere violently or unreasonably with the bodies or property of our fellows. Our freedom to pursue self-regarding interests is especially sacrosanct in areas such as decisions we make about how we can live longer and healthier lives. Feminists speak of people's rights to control their own bodies, and most of us find this rhetoric attractive. Talk of selfishness goes nowhere near to justifying prohibition. The issue is whether our self-regarding behaviour in trying to live longer needs to be controlled by the government, for reasons that are acceptable in a liberal state.
But Wertheim has an argument that is not obviously ridiculous. She posits the following dilemma. If the technology is developed, it will either be restricted to a wealthy elite or become widely available. If it is closely confined to the wealthy, this will increase the gap between rich and poor. If-it is spread widely, particularly if this applies globally, the outcome will be environmentally disastrous. Here is at least an argument of the right kind, appealing to what may be legitimate issues of social co-ordination, rather than directly to "yuck factor" responses. Indeed, Wertheim has touched an important issue as to how beneficial technology should be distributed.
We do not normally suppress goods and services because they may be disproportionally available to the rich. The whole point of legitimately acquired wealth is that it becomes possible to buy things that are unavailable without it. However, Wertheim could strengthen her case by arguing that access to much longer life would be so important that it would have to be accessible to everyone. It is one thing to live in a society where some people possess many times the material wealth of others. The problems are an order of magnitude greater in a society where the wealthy have gone transhuman, leaving others behind and creating a qualitative difference in interests formerly unimaginable, even in the regimes of imperial despots. By analogy it could also be argued that, once the technology became freely available in one society, it could not legitimately be withheld from others.
There is some force in this. It is certainly arguable that every attempt should be made to offer the choice of genuinely transhuman technologies such as radical life extension as widely as possible, as quickly as possible. But this confronts us with the other horn of Wertheim's dilemma.
She relies on the undoubted fact that the earth has a limited carrying capacity for human beings, which would be tested all the more severely if life expectancy increased. Part of More's response to such arguments is that improvements in biomedical technology do not happen in a vacuum. Other changes would take place that would increase the global carrying capacity. At this point, Wertheim chooses to scoff, but More must be correct.
Widely effective use of nanotechnology for biomedical purposes would exist only in a society that had perfected nanotechnological manipulation for many other purposes, such as new kinds of manufacturing. Powerful technologies for augmenting the human life span by attacking the genetic bases of ageing would exist only in a society with high levels of genetic expertise for other uses, such as improved nutrition -- though these would also encounter political resistance. No effective technology for radical life extension will become available while work in other fields stays still. A high-tech society in which radical life extension is freely available will have vastly greater resources than ours.
Moreover, there is a tendency for populations in developed countries actually to shrink unless growth is encouraged by the state through migration programs and other means. Affluent and educated people turn away from having large numbers of children in order to concentrate on other domains of their lives. If high levels of technology including, but not limited to, radical life extension became available globally, it should not be assumed that long-living transhumans would breed at the rates that have predominated in past centuries under quite different social and economic arrangements. Wertheim appears to accept that global population would stabilise even if radical life extension became available, though she suggests (without explaining her demographic modelling) that doubling life expectancy would double the stable population.
A society of the very long-lived might appear strange to us, but it would not necessarily have a devastating effect on global resources. Yet, what if it did?
No-one has ever suggested that such ecological considerations provide a legitimate argument against sanitation, immunisation, safe roads and other measures for public health and safety, though average life expectancies could be reduced drastically if these were abandoned. This suggests that we don't normally think of the demographic, and hence environmental, impact of increasing longevity as a reason to discourage longer lives. Outside of second-rate science fiction and the loony websites of some deep ecologists, it is never suggested that we should kill ourselves at a certain age to ensure that we only ever use a limited proportion of the earth's resources in our lives. In Western societies, laws to restrict the number of children a woman might have would be considered intolerable, and any interference by the state with people's control of their own bodies is surely a last-ditch resort for dealing with population problems.
I do not see how that consideration can be overcome by Wertheim and other opponents of life extension without smuggling in an irrational distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" (though effective) means of attempting to improve our bodies and live longer. It is this move that will enable those who would suppress radical life extension to call upon all kinds of illiberal and anti-rationalist sentiments in the community.
Yet the struggle will not be all one way. It is one thing to ban a technology such as human cloning, which is likely to have attractions for relatively few people. It is quite another to suppress a technology that opens up the possibility of extended life for everyone. Whatever the view of the cultural elite, support will be found for any effective life extension technology. The stage will then be set for a major political struggle, fought with passion and massive resources on both sides.
RADICAL LIFE EXTENSION provides one likely site for battles over future technologies. This is not the only one. Another example is the predictable backlash against any effective technology to enhance human intelligence, whether through genetic engineering, some kind of cybernetic integration with the brain, or direct modification of our neurophysiology.
In any such case where a controversial new technology is developed, we can imagine plausible arguments as to why it should be suppressed, often involving an appeal against fragmenting the human species into more and less advanced forms. In some instances, there may even be good arguments to ban or control these technologies, though my intuitions are generally to the contrary. What is clearer is that the enemies of change will be able to call on a deep reservoir of "yuck factor" responses in the community.
In certain cases, where what is resisted appeals only to a minority, this may be sufficient to procure legislative bans. In other cases, the new technology will have wider attraction -- more like that of Viagra than that of human cloning. In any case where the benefits are relevant to many people but it is easy to use rhetoric about playing God or interfering With nature, the millennium offers the bleak prospect of political warfare.
Russell Blackford's book Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (co-authored with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen) has recently been published in the USA.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc.
