ABOLITIONISM

(See also Designer Babies)

This may be crazy, but what say we end suffering in all sentient beings? David Pearce, an English transhumanist, proposes abolitionism: a new movement to completely end all such sentient misery. And you thought Europeans weren't ambitious anymore.

The primary methodology would be germline engineering of "designer babies" for maximum happiness and minimum pain, in combination with various other advanced technologies for ending scarcity and eliminating physical vulnerabilities in humans.

PEACE AMONG THE ANIMALS

But it doesn't stop there. Pearce, an animal rights enthusiast, figures, Hey, let's make the animals peaceful and happy! "Gene therapy will be targeted both on somatic cells and, with even greater forethought, the germline. If cunningly applied, a combination of the cellular enlargement of the mesolimbic dopamine system, selectively enhanced metabolic function of key intra-cellular sub-types of opioidergic and serotonergic pathways, and the disablement of several countervailing inhibitory feedback processes will put in place the biomolecular architecture for a major transition in human evolution." Quite a mouthful, but if you're trying to end all suffering on Earth, it figures to be a bit complicated.

James Kent: Pearce's intellectual embrace of paradise engineering places him on the cusp of a modern philosophical movement that eschews Darwinian fatalism and looks to a post-Darwinian future where humans are freed from the cynical bonds of genetic expression and natural selection.

David Pearce: Here are some grounds for cautious optimism that transhumanism can eliminate suffering in humans:

1) We Shall Soon Be Able to Choose Our Own Level of Pain Sensitivity

A revolution in reproductive medicine is imminent. Clearly, our emotional response to raw pain is modulated by the products of other genes. But recent research suggests that variants of the SCN9A gene [see "Pain's in the Genes" Science Magazine, March 8, 2010, or take Pearce's word for it] hold the master key. Thus, in a decade or two, preimplantation diagnosis should allow responsible prospective parents to choose which of the SCN9A alleles they want for their future children—leading in turn to severe selection pressure against the SCN9A gene's nastier variants.

At present, we can't envisage safely choosing one of the (extremely rare) nonsense mutations of SCN9A that eliminates physical pain altogether. A future world of nociception without any phenomenal pain at all will depend on advances in neuroprosthetics and artificial intelligence. Yet by selecting benign alleles of SCN9A both for ourselves and our children, the burden of suffering can soon be dramatically diminished.

2) We Can Soon Choose How Rewarding We Want Our Daily Life to Be

The brain is a dauntingly complex organ. Yet the biological roots of mood and emotion are primitive and neurologically ancient. Their metabolic pathways are strongly conserved in the vertebrate line and beyond. A research paper published in Nature in 2007 illustrates how the presence or absence of a single allele may dramatically enrich or impair the quality of one's entire life.

How can we guard against unanticipated side effects from novel gene therapies? What will be the inevitable "unintended consequences" of life-changing innovation? And what will be the societal implications of a population biologically predisposed to enjoy richer and happier lives?

Genetic tweaking to promote richer experience is just a foretaste of posthuman sentience. I predict that our descendants will enjoy gradients of genetically preprogrammed bliss every day of their lives.

ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

(See also Artificial Intelligence, The Singularity)

The original goal of the AI field was the construction of "thinking machines"—that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called "narrow AI"—the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. Common narrow AI applications include the AI linguistics underlying Google and other search engines; the AI planning and scheduling software used throughout the military and industry; the AI fraud detection software underlying modern credit card operations; the AI used by those friendly folks at the NSA to find patterns in your phone calls; and the AI gaming software underlying everything from IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue to the bots in massively multiplayer online games. These are all amazing achievements (albeit the uses can be questionable) that have a common narrowness of scope, which is why Ray Kurzweil has characterized them as "narrow AI."

In recent years, however, more and more...