“What do you mean, posthuman stuff?” A vague term, I admit, but understand it to mean all that rapture-of-the-nerds speculative technology that people who describe themselves as transhumanists and Singulatarians get all excited at the prospect of: life extension technology and Friendly AI and hedonic engineering and mind-uploading and virtual reality paradises and so forth.
My general sense is that antinatalists, even those with philanthropic motivation, regard the posthuman stuff with some disdain (consider this example) or Thomas Ligotti’s dismissive commentary on transhumanism. And it seems to me that to some extent this disdain is well motivated. If existence is intrinsically problematic, then you’re not likely to be impressed by the prospect of much longer existence with much fancier technology. There’s at least some reason to think that problems that transhumanists think are solvable actually might not be. And as with so many other things, transhumanism competes with antinatalism for energy and attention: antinatalists might with some justice see transhumanism as a false path, a timewaster, and a distraction.
But let’s pause and think for a moment about best possible human futures on antinatalist terms. It admittedly looks like the program of abolishing human reproduction has a long way to go at the moment. But we can’t infer from that that it will never go anywhere. The program of abolishing chattel slavery probably looked pretty hopeless in, say, the mid-eighteenth century but it has pretty much triumphed today. So it’s not crazy to at least think about what happens when human beings finally swear off having children.
If they ever do, there will be a last generation. What should become of them? Well, their lives will matter, just as our matter. And some of the posthuman stuff might be good for them.
For example, how long should people in the last generation live? Not for the rest of their natural lives, that seems sure. Perhaps they should commit suicide and spare their own future selves from coming into existence. But it is also possible that their optimum lifetimes might be much longer than natural. If that’s the case, then we might actually care about things like life extensions technologies.
Likewise, various human enhancements or fun technologies should matter. The lives of the last generation will contain suffering just as ours do. Indeed, arguably their suffering will be worse than ours, ceteris paribus, because in their generation, unlike in ours, there will be a lot of melancholy. Many people actually want children and enjoy them (at least, so it seems) and the absence of them will be a lack in their lives, even if they understand and accept that it is a necessary lack. And we should care about palliating that suffering.
And I’ll bet that a virtual reality paradise to plug into would palliate a whole lot…
5 Responses to “Should antinatalists care about posthuman stuff?”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Most of my real-life friends lean in this direction. Transhumanism to me means drugs (mostly not-approved-for-human-consumption but not-especially-regulated-yet) that improve mental and physical function, a sense of meaning for meat-brained monkeys, and self-chosen, nontraditional sexual arrangements.
If transhuman (quasi)immortality is achieved, a prohibition on birth will become necessary, as the Earth’s resources are finite and cannot sustain an ever increasing population. Hence, antinatalism follows from transhumanism anyway. Why not start at the end?
My sympathies are more in line with you than with transhumanists, but, for the sake of argument:
There are about 10^10 people in the world. Let’s say we’re an order of magnitude above the carrying capacity, even with superior technology.
A tiny portion of the resources an individual consumes is necessary to power experience. Let’s say that for every individual, that same energy could be used to run 10^3 simulations as rich in experience as “real” experience.[1]
If we can create simulations that produce 10^2 Unbreakables for every person in the world, that’s 10^12 (a trillion) beings enjoying a difficult-to-impossible-to-imagine amount of utility without a shred of disutility.
Many transhumanists think we’re likely to get to this point not too many generations from now. So it’s a question of whether you think having tens of billions more pre-transhumans is worth getting to the point where we can have trillions of unbreakable transhumans.
And these transhumanists would argue that since anti-natalists are unlikely to persuade humans to stop reproducing before we reach the point of trillions of unbreakables, then anti-natalist might as well do what they can to bring that point closer.
—-
[1] I suspect the energy requirements are actually considerably less than 0.1% of our current per capita energy use, but let’s just go with 0.1% for now.
I like Kurt Vonnegut’s take on this in his story 2 B R 0 2 B. Even if we can support an extremely high number of immortal individuals, there is still a limit looming somewhere in the future, as long as sentience is in any way linked to resource use.
Sure, there’s a limit, from the Second Law if from nothing else, but the limit may be several orders of magnitude larger than the number of individuals who will live and die before we get to being able to have a world of trillions of unbreakables. And the question of whether there’s a limit matters only if the positive value of an unbreakable is vanishingly small compared to the negative value of a normal person, rather than zero, since limitless * zero still equals zero, while limitless * vanishingly small may be huge or tiny depending on what exactly the quantities are.