John Danaher on Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life

There are a lot of things that we no longer have to do ourselves. Machines now do them for us. Of course right now there is still plenty for us to do, but if the trend continues and the machines we build get more and more intelligent, sophisticated, and powerful, which is likely, then there is a real possibility that it will become less and less necessary for us to do any work ourselves. Automated labour, performed by machines, will then eventually replace all or most manual labour, performed by us. If and when that happens, then we will have reached an age of technological unemployment.
Would that be a good thing? Should we welcome the prospect, or should we dread it?
In an article soon to appear in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics (“Will life be worth living in a world without work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life”),  John Danaher raises the question whether widespread technological unemployment would “threaten or undermine human flourishing and meaning”. He comes to the conclusion that, although there is indeed reason to believe that technological unemployment may pose a threat to our ability to live a meaningful life, this threat can be contained “if we prioritise and develop the right kinds of technology and we relate to these technologies in the right way” (2). This “right” way of relating to technology is an increased integration (of humans) with technology.

On the face of it, technological unemployment is an enticing prospect. In practical terms it would mean that we would no longer have to work to earn a living. We would have everything we need and want without having to spend time on activities that we do not really want to do, because machines would take care of everything. As it stands, many people are unhappy with the kind of work they do. If they could only afford it, they would quit their jobs in a heartbeat. And even if we are lucky enough to do something for a living that we like to do and would do even if we didn’t get paid for it, to get rid of the need to work and sell our labour and skills in some way is surely a good thing. We would then be completely free to choose what to do and what not to do. We would, as Danaher puts it, “be free to pursue our own conception of the good life” (2). In short, technological unemployment would give us back “authorial control” (13) over our lives.

Of course we often derive other than merely economic rewards from the work we do. Typically it is through our work that we achieve “excellence, social contribution, community and social status” (15), and we would not want to do without all that. However, there are other tried and tested ways to reap those rewards, for instance through charitable activities or hobbies. In an age of technological unemployment we could just extend those. Still, technological unemployment is not without its risks. Danaher thinks that we need to take seriously the worry that technological advance may very well undermine human flourishing and our ability to live a meaningful life. Even if we think of meaningfulness in purely subjective terms – as subjective fulfilment and desire satisfaction –, technological unemployment is a reason for concern, for without the pressures and incentives of work we may well end up not doing anything much and living “a life of listless and unsatisfied boredom” (18). Yet according to Danaher this danger can be avoided if we employ “the right kinds of social/technological support for leisure activities” (19). Social networking and gamification apps, for instance, may provide all the pressure and rewards needed for subjective fulfilment.

However, Danaher does not think that a purely subjectivist understanding of meaning is very plausible. He shares the intuition that even if Sisyphus was happy, his life was hardly meaningful. For this reason, Danaher leans towards an objectivist theory of meaning, according to which life is meaningful “to the extent that the individual living it brings about certain objectively good or valuable states of affairs” (16) Technological unemployment would then be problematic because the advanced technology that would liberate us from the need to work would also make it pretty pointless for us to keep doing the things that bring about said valuable states of affairs because the machines we have built are likely to be so much better at it than we are. Think of science and human knowledge generation in general: “Science is increasingly a ‘big data’ enterprise, reliant on algorithmic and other forms of automated assistance, to process large datasets and make useful inferences from those datasets. Humans are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the process of discovery.” (22) Moral problems, too, may be solved more reliably by machines (who may, for instance, calculate the fairest distribution of certain resources, or efficiently organize organ donation).

So what would then be left for us to do? “In the end, the only domain in which humans might be able to meaningfully contribute to objective outcomes would be in the realm of private, ludic or aesthetic activities, e.g. in producing works of art, or pursuing games, hobbies and sports.” (25) The reason for this is that in these aesthetic domains “it is less clear that automating technologies help to produce better outcomes.” Yet even though we may create or connect to something objectively valuable and thus find meaning in the creation of beauty, we would have lost our role in the creation of truth and goodness, so that on the whole this kind of ludic life “certainly looks like a more impoverished form of existence” (25).

But once again, this outcome seems by no means inevitable. In Danaher’s analysis, what undermines meaning in life is in fact the severance of the link “between what we do and what happens in the world”. (26) In an age of technological unemployment machines will have taken over and replaced us as the producers of value. They create all the good stuff and make the world a better place, while we are reduced to mere observers and passive beneficiaries, and it “is this externalisation that looks like the major threat to continued meaning and fulfilment.” (26) Accordingly, if we want to prevent a loss of meaning, all we have to do is avoid increased externalisation and, instead, pursue increased integration. Integration means that, instead of merely using technology, we merge with technology and become cyborgs through “increased use of brain-computer interfaces, nanotechnology and various other neuroprosthetic devices” (26). The idea is to directly integrate technology into biological systems. This may not be easy and naturally should be pursued with caution, but be pursued it should.

Intriguingly, Danaher also considers the possibility that “actions in a purely virtual world might suffice for meaning” (28), in which case cutting ourselves off from the real world would not be a problem. If it turns out that “virtual reality is our best hope” to preserve our chance to live a meaningful life, then we should go for it.


Commentary:

Perhaps Danaher is right and we really are about to enter an age of increasing technological unemployment. But I don’t think that would necessarily be a problem, even if we do not become cyborgs. The reason why unemployment is often so devastating to those who experience it is that it usually comes with a loss of a decent income, a loss of social recognition, and an abundance of free time that they have never learned to (or, being now unemployed, have not got the means to) put to good use. If you have little to live on, people look down on you with pity or contempt, and you have no idea how to fill the long hours of the day, then you may be excused for losing an appetite for living. However, per hypothesis, technological unemployment is different: it is assumed that we will not suffer a loss of income or a loss of social recognition (we will, after all, all be in the same situation). We will simply not have to work. Admittedly, we may find that we have too much time on our hands, but surely that is mostly a matter of developing the right mind set. I don’t think there is any evidence that, in our own pre-technological unemployment age, those belonging to the so-called leisure class find their lives any less meaningful than those who actually have to work to make a living. If you are wealthy, you are unlikely to be desperately looking for a job, just to have something to do. If you never had to work, then you won’t miss it. You will know what to do with your time and will not feel what those who have lost their job often feel: the loss of a sense of purpose. You may not live a particularly meaningful life (if meaning be understood as requiring some sort of connection and active pursuit of what is really, “objectively” valuable in life), but then again, those who are in work may not do so either. The point is that the wealthy do not seem to be any more likely to live a meaningless life than anybody else.

Or think of retirement. People retire from work. Some look forward to it, others dread it, but most find a way to deal with it. It may, of course, take a while to get used to the change, especially if you have never known a life without work. Since our whole life is usually organized around work, we tend to define ourselves through it. When we retire, we need to learn to define ourselves differently, change our priorities, develop a different mind-set. Not easy perhaps, but far from impossible. If or when the age of technological unemployment hits us, it will be as if humanity as a whole went into retirement. But that won’t happen overnight. Most likely, we will slowly and gradually slide into it and thus learn to live with the changing circumstances as we go along. 

However, the reason why Danaher expects a crisis of meaning from technological unemployment is not really the fact that we will no longer have to work and that we may then not know what do with ourselves. For Danaher, this is not about having or not having the right mind-set. It is about the alleged absence or destruction of real opportunities to do something meaningful with our lives. The problem is not merely that we may then no longer know what to do with so much time on our hands: the problem is that there might really be nothing left for us to do. Machines will be taking care of the true and the good, so even if we still had an interest in things that may conceivably make the world a better place in some way, we would have no way to pursue this interest since it’s all been taken care of already. But is that really so? Machines may certainly one day be more efficient at solving certain problems, such as how to cure cancer, or how to organize the distribution of donated organs (which, by the way, is not a moral problem, as Danaher suggests, but a purely organizational one). And maybe it makes us feel good about ourselves and our lives if we manage to do stuff like curing cancer or developing a brand new and more efficient system of distributing organs. But surely meaning in life does not depend on our success in finding solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems. If it did, few of us would live a meaningful life. Surely it is possible for us to live a meaningful life without making substantial contributions to the continued production of “objectively good or valuable states of affairs”, whatever that means. And even if we do want to insist that in order to have a meaningful life we need to contribute in some way to the ‘true’, the ‘good’, and the ‘beautiful’, or at least partake in it, there is surely more to the true and the good than whatever a machine can provide or achieve (just as there is more to the beautiful). The acquisition of knowledge and understanding that we value, the kind that may make our life meaningful, does not consist in mere calculation and the correct and efficient processing of information. And if I merge with a machine that does that kind of thing so much better than I would ever be able to (namely in my unenhanced, pre-cyborgian state), so that I become myself a super-duper calculating and information-processing machine, then the truth that my operations will generate is unlikely to be the kind of truth that (or the orientation towards which) makes our lives meaningful. I agree with Danaher that if we could “get computers to create music and visual art” (25), this is unlikely to add to the aesthetic value in the world. But it seems to me that, equally, if we could get computers to identify morally good outcomes, this would not add to the moral value in the world, nor would computers that are able to reveal some hitherto unknown facts to us be adding to (if that’s the right word to use) epistemic value of the world.

Furthermore, Danaher’s argument in favour of an integrationist approach to technology rests on the assumption that what most threatens to undermine meaning in life is the disruption of the link “between what we do and what can be achieved” (26). In other words, in order to get meaning out of a supposedly objectively good outcome, I need to be the one whose actions have effected that outcome. If you find a way to cure cancer, then I may congratulate you on your success and enjoy the benefits of it, but it is only you whose life becomes more meaningful as a consequence. Meanwhile, my own life remains unchanged. And if you write a wonderful book or compose a marvellous symphony, then this may make your life more meaningful, but it certainly does not make mine more meaningful. We are, after all, separate entities. In an age of technological unemployment the machines would do all the interesting things, all that is potentially meaning-generating for the agent, i.e. the one who does them, while we humans would be reduced to mere onlookers – like children at a funfair who cannot afford any of the rides and who can only watch in frustration how others do all the fun stuff. Yet I don’t think that this is how it works, or at least not how it should work, and certainly not how it has to work. If you write that wonderful book, this can make not only your life, but also my life more meaningful, simply because I am now, thanks to your achievement, able to read it. Meaning is not the prerogative of agents. Merely observing and experiencing the world and what is going on in it can be immensely rewarding too. I can find meaning in reading your book, studying your painting, and listening to your music. I can find meaning wandering through a landscape that I have not designed, and swimming in a sea that I have not created. If that is correct, then I don’t see any good reason why we should not be able to find meaning in the achievements of the machines we have built.

With the right mind-set, human-machine integration is not needed. Continued separation will do just fine.

Erik Parens on Binocularity

Erik Parens just published a wonderful new book on human enhancement and related issues. It is called Shaping Our Selves. On Technology, Flourishing and a Habit of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015) and I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone working in the field, and indeed everyone who is interested in ethics in the broadest sense, that is all serious reflection on what it means to live a life well.

Parens is uncomfortable with the label that is usually attached to people like him, namely that of a bioethicist, because bioethicists are often seen (and indeed behave) as if they had all the answers. If you don’t know what’s right or wrong in a tricky moral situation, ask a bioethicist and they will tell you. At least that is what we have learned to expect from the profession. But ethics, including bioethics, is not really about what is right or wrong, permissible or impermissible, what we are obligated to do and what we are obligated not to do. Instead, the questions that we actually ask when we engage in ethical reflection are much bigger and less simple (or simple-minded) than that. What the inquiry is really about is “the meaning of being human and about how we ought to live: questions about the nature of persons and what makes them truly flourish, about the nature of the various means we use to pursue our flourishing, about what if anything we owe our fellow citizens when we seek our flourishing, and so forth.” (3-4)

In other words, it’s complicated. There’s a lot to consider, and there are no simple, straightforward answers that can claim to capture the truth of the matter. There are always other sides to the issue, other perspectives to be considered, and only if we do that can we hope to get an adequate understanding of what is at stake when decisions have to be made that concern life and death and generally the well-being of people.

This is also true for human enhancement. The nature of the (academic) game often entices us to make a clear stand for or against enhancement, or for or against a particular kind of enhancement, although we actually know very well that it is hardly ever so easy. Our position usually reflects some true insight, but so does the position of our opponents, and it is important to be aware of the lop-sidedness of our own view, the fact that it roots in our personal experience and our character, which determines our individual perspective on life, and that we have no privileged access to the truth. Even though our own view might strike us as perfectly rational (and as the only truly rational view on the matter), it never is. There’s always something important to be learned from listening to the other and trying to understand where they come from and what is right and true about their way of seeing things. This is why we should learn to embrace what Parens calls binocularity, which he defines as “a habit of remembering that my insights are partial, both in the sense that they are always incomplete and in the sense that they reflect a stance toward the world that feels congenial to me.” (10)

Adopting this habit of thinking might even help us to discover that we and our opponents are actually not so far away from each other as we thought. We may find that we actually “share the same fundamental moral ideal but see it from such different stances and through such different lenses” (50) that our agreement on a deeper level is easy to overlook. Thus both those who think that human enhancement is generally a good idea (the “enthusiasts”) and those who are rather suspicious of it (the “critics”) seem to share the same moral ideal of authenticity. They just interpret it in different ways because the former are more inclined to see human nature as essentially transformative and progressive (thus adopting what we may call a “creativity stance”), whereas the latter feel more inclined to emphasise the essential goodness of what we have and are (thus adopting what we may call a “gratitude stance”). Accordingly, staying ‘true to ourselves’ can mean very different things to us, neither of which – and that is the important point to remember – is truer or more appropriate than the other. Creativity and gratitude both have their place in a well-lived life, and it would suit us well to remain aware of that.

The truth is that we are always biased towards one thing or another. Enhancement critics have been accused of suffering from a “status quo bias”, which may well be true, but the enthusiasts suffer from their very own status quo bias because “they tend to be biased in favor of accepting more of the same, where ever-expanding technological intervention into our selves and the rest of the natural world is the status quo.” (90) Bias comes natural to us, and complete objectivity is impossible to achieve. All we can hope to achieve is a viewpoint that is informed by the knowledge that we are biased and that the biases that other people have often represent genuine insights that are likely to complement (rather than refute) our own. 

That is certainly a lesson worth learning.

Compulsory Scientific Service for the Fully Alive

Like many other transhumanists, the American sociologist Steve Fuller who currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK, doesn’t think much of the precautionary principle (Steve Fuller, Towards a Proactionary Welfare State). All it does is hamper progress by unnecessarily restricting our choices. Basically, it turns us all into cowards, and this cowardice deprives us of all the great goods that we would be likely to achieve if we weren’t so damned careful all the time. We should therefore discard the principle and live instead by the proactionary principle, which encourages us to take (even considerable) risks if the expected gain is large enough. And this should of course be reflected in the law, which currently is far too restrictive. Of course there will be victims, people who are going to be “violated in the process”, but that is a price worth paying. We can also find ways to compensate those victims for their noble sacrifice (undertaken in the name of science and the progress of humanity), presumably by progressing ourselves and thus benefiting from their bravery. The value of our individual lives is overrated anyway. We should realise that our own personal survival is of little importance, given what is at stake here. “This is the largest and most difficult lesson because it calls on people to consider everything they value as negotiable, including their own lives. A proactionary welfare state would remove the taboo that locates the value of life primarily in the body of one’s birth. The legacy of decisions taken in one’s life would play a larger role, as risk-takers are rewarded in ways that keep their spirit alive even if their material existence undergoes radical transformation.”

I’m not entirely sure what that is supposed to mean, but in the given context we must assume that the radical transformation Fuller talks about includes what is commonly called the death of the individual. But Fuller is not content to demand that people be free to take great personal risks in order to speed up scientific progress, should they be willing to do so. He also believes that, if they prove unwilling, we (that is the law of the state) should actually compel them to offer their services to science and thus (at least potentially) sacrifice their own health and well-being, perhaps even their lives, for the greater good of humanity’s progress to posthuman glories. Just like the precautionary principle and the value of individual, embodied life, or life as we know it, Fuller argues that patient choice is much overrated (Steve Fuller, Suspended Ethics). It is in fact an absurd idea. Why do we have to be nearly dead to make it permissible for us to be subjected to risky and largely untested medical procedures? Why do we not use the “fully alive”?

Fuller appears to be puzzled by this “absurdity”, despite the fact that the answer is pretty obvious: because the nearly dead don’t have much to lose. If the procedure kills them, then they are not really worse off than they would have been if it had not been tried on them. Yet if you’re fully alive and healthy, then one should think that the prospect of being seriously harmed or killed as a result of the experiment (whose purpose remains obscure in Fuller’s article, but presumably would be some kind of enhancement) provides you with an excellent reason not to take part in it – unless of course you don’t put much value on your own health and survival. Not putting much value on our health and survival is of course exactly what Fuller expects us to do, but as far as I can see he doesn’t provide any good argument for it. I can only imagine that it is some murky notion of the common good that is meant to justify the demanded revision of our attitude towards our own lives. But just in case we remain unwilling to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good, the law should see to it that we do anyway. Although it would certainly be best if people made that sacrifice knowingly and willingly, the safest course of action is to make sure that they do by introducing a compulsory “scientific service”: “I see this very much on the model of compulsory national military service. Just as people are expected to bear arms when their lives are threatened (a la US Constitution 2nd amendment), they should also be compelled to participate in military service, if only to understand better all that is involved and at stake in maintaining one's life. Indeed, I would welcome compulsory ‘scientific service’ replacing compulsory military service in the long term.”

For me, this is the stuff of dystopian nightmares, and I am rather worried about the ease and nonchalance with which essentially totalitarian ideas like these are being accepted and promoted by academics and public intellectuals who really should know better.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Agar’s Identity and Moral Status Objections, and the Posthuman Condition

It had been a long time since I last read Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, which tells the story of a man called Gregor Samsa, who one morning finds himself transformed into a giant roach-like insect. Now that I’ve read the story again, I was struck by its possible relevance for the discussion of the relationship that is likely to arise between radically enhanced humans or post-humans on the one hand and “normal”, unenhanced humans on the other (always assuming there will be any of them left).

Nicholas Agar, in his latest book, Truly Human Enhancement, argues that posthumans will be so radically different from us that they will soon forget what it was like to be us. They will also have very different interests and values. For this reason, Agar believes, we have nothing to gain by becoming posthuman, even if being posthuman were intrinsically and instrumentally good. Radical enhancement may be good for the posthuman, but it isn’t good for us, simply because they will no longer be us. As long as we only enhance ourselves modestly, we will remain the same person, but once we have undergone radical enhancement we will have become something else entirely.

Another reason why we shouldn’t pursue radical enhancement is that, according to Agar, it is likely to result in an erosion of moral status for those who remain unenhanced (i.e., us). Just as we have a higher moral status now than animals, which gives us the right to sacrifice them for our well-being, posthumans may well have a higher moral status than we, so that they will then be justified in sacrificing us for their well-being. Personally, I don’t find Agar’s moral status argument particularly convincing, but I have voiced my criticisms elsewhere and do not want to repeat myself here. If you are interested, here’s a link to my response to Agar, The Moral Status of Post-Persons.

In this context, we can now read Kafka’s story as an allegory of the transformation of a human into a posthuman. (And if had been written now rather than almost exactly 100 years ago, it would be almost inevitable that we read it as such – compare Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). Of course, the giant roach into which Gregor finds himself transformed is rather unlike the radically enhanced posthuman as we tend to imagine them. But the point is that is definitely a sudden radical transformation of a human being into something that is (in some, though not all respects) very different from what it used to be. The transformation does not only affect Gregor’s body, but also his interests, appetites, sensibilities, and needs. At one point in the story he realises that he finds it increasingly difficult to remember his life prior to his transformation and how it was to be human, and to still care for what he cared for while he was still human. And that is perfectly plausible: the world of a giant cockroach, even one that used to be human, is so different from that of a human that we can understand how everything human must fade away very quickly in such a creature’s mind. A cockroach’s body demands (and creates) a cockroach’s mind. So if the transformation of a human into a radically enhanced human or posthuman is anything like Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect, then we should indeed expect, as Agar argues, that they will very soon no longer remember much, or anything at all, of their human life. The question is if that is indeed a good reason not to pursue such a transformation. I suspect that the reason why we would not want to find ourselves in the same predicament as Gregor Samsa is not that he forgets his humanity, but rather that he has turned into an animal that we tend to find disgusting and that is not known for its superior intellect. Perhaps we wouldn’t mind much losing connection to our previous self if what we gain in exchange for it is a richer and (intrinsically and extrinsically) more rewarding life.

Yet Kafka’s story also highlights another aspect of the relationship between the enhanced and the unenhanced. It is usually assumed that if the future will see society divided in two groups or classes, the enhanced and the unenhanced (or, if you like, the radically enhanced and the only moderately enhanced), then this is likely to cause problems for the unenhanced. They may be denied equal rights, or equal opportunities; they might be treated like inferior creatures, or like slaves; they might even be harmed or killed if that benefits the enhanced. Agar goes so far as to claim that the radically enhanced might even be morally justified (due to their higher moral status) to use the unenhanced in all these ways and to generally treat them as inferior. In such scenarios it is always assumed that the enhanced will be more powerful than the unenhanced, that it is in their power to grant or deny the unenhanced (us?) rights. But that is not necessarily the case. It will depend on the kind of enhancement that they have undergone, and also on how many of them will be enhanced and how many unenhanced. It is quite possible that the enhanced will be regarded and treated as freaks by normal, unenhanced humans, as monsters rather than gods. And then it will be the unenhanced that are likely to oppress and enslave the enhanced, or simply cast out of the human community, just as Gregor Samsa is cast out of his when his family decides that they no longer want anything to do with him.

Günther Anders on Promethean Shame (Part 2)

We used to think that we humans were free and the machines we constructed determined and unfree. But this is no longer so. Today, in a curious contortion, we are the ones who appear unfree, and the machines enjoy the freedom that we lack. Increasingly, we think of ourselves as being shackled by our own nature, which, we believe, has not changed very much, if at all, since the stone age. (And aren’t we indeed constantly being told by proponents of human enhancement that the forces of evolution have shaped us for a world that no longer exists and that in order to catch up with the world we have created we need to recreate ourselves?) It is our physical body that, in our own perception, makes us unfree, that ties us to the past and makes us unfit for the future (and indeed the present). From the perspective of the machines, human nature is nothing but a nuisance: “conservative, unprogressive, antiquated, irrevisable, a dead weight in the rise of the machines”. We could achieve so much more if it weren’t for us and our defective nature. We see ourselves, as Anders puts it, as the saboteurs of our own achievements, and we are no longer willing to put up with this. So something needs to be done: we have to find a way to become more machine-like, to mould ourselves as we now mould things to assimilate them to our needs and wants. Our Promethean shame makes us embrace and promote the idea of “human engineering”, which now appears as something that we owe both to our machines and to ourselves. After all, we wouldn’t want to be judged a disappointment by our betters. In relation to our machines we are like children, and growing up, in this new interpretation of Schiller’s “education of humankind”, means leaving behind our being human. (Compare Nick Bostrom’s “Why I Want to be Posthuman When I Grow Up”).

Machines are our heroes. We yearn to be like them. We see ourselves as “scandalous non-machines”. Yet machines always have a certain purpose. They are highly specialised. Human engineering aims at making the human more specialised, at perfecting a particular ability or capacity to which the human is a mere appendix, at best tolerated, but no longer of central importance. Thus the superhuman that human engineering is meant to create is at the same time a subhuman.

This sounds familiar. Similar concerns have been raised by Leon Kass. Yet Anders denies that he is what today we are used to call a bioconservative (he uses the term “metaphysical conservative”). The point is not that everything that is, is good simply because it is (or that human nature is good and should remain what it is simply because it is our nature) – which would be an untenable position –, but rather that we are willing to change ourselves for the sake of our machines, that we measure ourselves by their standards, instead of our own, and that, in doing this, we limit or even relinquish our own freedom. The aspiring human engineer may well suffer from hubris (as a common objection has it), but he also suffers from misplaced humility, which is not a contradiction. “The ‘human engineer is in fact both: arrogant and self-deprecating, hubristic and humble. His attitude is arrogated self-abasement and hubristic humility.”

So when we compare ourselves to machines, in what way exactly do we find ourselves wanting? One of the gravest defects seems to be our perishability. We grow old, we die. In comparison, the things that we create seem to be immortal, at least potentially so, because very often when they are not it is because we want them to stop working after a certain period of time (so that more products can be sold). But even those things are immortal in the sense that they can always be duplicated and replaced. Our products partake in a new version of immortality: “industrial re-incarnation”. They have a serial existence. This light bulb or washing machine may give up its ghost after a few years, but then we can easily get a new one that is exactly like the old one, or at least one that does exactly the same job, if not a better one. Their very reproducibility and replaceability guarantees their immortality. How lucky they are! We on the other hand, their creators, go bad very quickly and we cannot be replaced. How shameful that is, how unbearable! Again, something needs to be done. We feel that it cannot, it should not stay like this. (And indeed, isn’t that what some life extension enthusiasts imagine we will achieve in the future? Mind-uploading, for instance, to a computer or to a new body, is the achievement of immortality by making the body replaceable. Others envisage a periodical cleansing of the mind of all memories to prevent mental ageing and the boredom of an overly prolonged existence, which creates a different kind of serial existence.)

Anders’s great insight is that the human enhancement project is motivated by shame. We are ashamed of our body, our physical nature, our mere-humanness, our vulnerability and perishability, and not despite the fact that none of this is our fault, but precisely because it is (or has been for a long time) beyond our control and not the result of a conscious decision. It is the very givenness of our nature that we resent (which explains why Michael Sandel’s argument from giftedness is so often ridiculed and received with so much hostility by proponents of radical human enhancement.) It is the fact that we cannot do anything about it that we are ashamed of. It belies our claims of autonomy, freedom and control. That is also the reason why we tend to be ashamed of our sexuality. Sex is a “pudendum” precisely because it makes us lose control and voices our dependency. It shows us in the grip of nature, of that which lies beyond and before us, and reminds us that the “I” (the individual in control of herself) is a rather fragile construction on the back of a powerful “It” (the nature that controls the doings of the self). And we don’t like that one bit. So what we are trying to do is regain control over ourselves, and that means to gain control also, and perhaps even primarily, over our sexuality, without realising that the only thing we can hope to achieve by this is that we manage to replace one It by another: the natural It of the body by the artificial It of the machine.