Humanity: The Remix

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Getting mainstream liberals excited enough to join is perhaps complicated by the fact that there's a little too much excitement among those already on board. Chats about curing cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and mental illness can quickly become fantasies about millennial life spans, eternally youthful bodies, and average intelligence levels that push Stephen Hawking into the bottom 10 percent. There's a grain of truth to Mark Dery's quip in his 1996 book Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove) that transhumanists view their bodies as loathsome "meat puppets" to be shed in their bid to become immortal. The movement's eccentric subchapters include the body-modification transhumanists, who have implanted silicon-based magnets under their skin to create a computer-human chimera effect. The Singularitarians believe we're heading for a genetic point of no return -- the Singularity -- when change in the species will be so great as to make us virtual gods.

Nevertheless, the WTA keeps growing. Hughes says it has 3,000 members worldwide and welcomes about 80 new members a month. One possible reason why: Transhumanism's pet technologies have begun crossing over from sci-fi to the lab.

Nanotechnology -- manipulating matter on the atomic level -- was far-out stuff back in 1986 when Eric Drexler made it the crucial tool in his cryonics manifesto, Engines of Creation (Anchor).While nobody's using it to "reanimate" frozen heads and bodies just yet, nanotech is now real enough to be used in various products (even as super-tiny particles raise unexpected health concerns). Researchers have engineered mice that are super strong and fast, and live so long that a human equivalent would be at least 200. In Portugal, scientists have implanted cameras connected to electrodes in the brains of blind people. The result? Not only could the subjects see, but they could beam images to each other's minds. In 1998 a neurosurgeon implanted a device into the brain of a "locked-in" patient who couldn't eat, drink, or talk on his own. Before the surgery, the patient could communicate only by blinking his eyes; afterward he could send messages via a computer simply by thinking them out.

Over the past decade, the startling advances in nanoscience, bioengineering, information technology, and cognitive science -- referred to collectively as NBIC -- have mainstream researchers sounding more and more like Singularitarians themselves. In 2002 the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce released a massive report that said, in effect, these converging technologies "for improving human performance" were both inevitable and beneficial. Hughes says the so-called NBIC papers "are essentially, though not explicitly, transhuman documents."

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