Why Does Silicon Valley Want to Reengineer Humans?

Human beings are not the problem. We are the solution.

To many developers and investors in Silicon Valley, humans are not to be emulated or celebrated, but transcended or, at the very least, reengineered. These technologists are so dominated by the values of the digital revolution that they see anything or anyone with different priorities as an impediment. This is a distinctly antihuman position, and it’s driving the development philosophy of the most capitalized companies on the planet.

In their view, evolution is less the story of life than of data. Information has been striving for greater complexity since the beginning of time. Atoms became molecules; molecules became proteins; proteins became cells, organisms, and, eventually, humans. Each stage represents a leap in the ability to store and express information.

Now that we humans have developed computers and networks, we are supposed to accept the fact that we’ve made something capable of greater complexity than ourselves. Information’s journey to higher levels of dimensionality must carry on beyond biology and humans to silicon and computers. And once that happens, once digital networks become the home for reality’s most complex structures, then human beings will really be needed only insofar as we can keep the lights on for the machines. Once our digital progeny can care for themselves, we may as well exit the picture.

This is the true meaning of the “singularity”: It’s the moment when computers make humans obsolete. At that point, we humans will face a stark choice: Either we enhance ourselves with chips, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering to keep up with our digital superiors, or we upload our brains to the network. If we go the enhancement route, we must accept that whatever it means to be human is itself a moving target. We must also believe that the companies providing us with these upgrades will be our trustworthy partners — that they wouldn’t remotely modify equipment we’ve installed into ourselves, or change the terms of service, or engineer incompatibility with other companies’ enhancements or planned obsolescence. Given the track record of today’s tech companies, that’s not a good bet. Plus, once we accept that every new technology has a set of values that goes along with it, we understand that we can’t incorporate something into ourselves without also installing its affordances. In the current environment, that means implanting extractive, growth-based capitalism into our bloodstreams and nervous systems.

If we go with uploading, we’d have to bring ourselves to believe that our consciousness somehow survives the migration from our bodies to the network. Life extension of this sort is a tempting proposition: Simply create a computer as capable of complexity as the brain, and then transfer our consciousness — if we can identify it — to its new silicon home. Eventually, the computer hosting our awareness will fit inside a robot, and that robot can even look like a person if we want to walk around that way in our new, eternal life. It may be a long shot, but it’s a chance to keep going.

Others are hoping that even if our consciousness does die with our body, technologists will figure out how to copy who we are and how we think into an A.I. After that, our digital clone could develop an awareness of its own. It’s not as good as living on, perhaps, but at least there’s an instance of “you” or “me” somewhere out there. If only there were any evidence at all that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, or that it is replicable in a computer simulation. The only way to bring oneself to that sort of conclusion is to presume that our reality is itself a computer simulation — also a highly popular worldview in Silicon Valley.

Whether we upload our brains to silicon or simply replace our brains with digital enhancements one synapse at a time, how do we know if the resulting beings are still alive and aware? The famous Turing test for computer consciousness determines only whether a computer can convince us that it’s human. This doesn’t mean that it’s actually human or conscious.

The day when computers pass the Turing test may have less to do with how smart computers have gotten than with how bad we humans have gotten at telling the difference between them and us.

This was section 57 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.