Can we improve humans? Biohacking and Transhumanism. (Patreon)

This is Jan. He had a chip implanted into his hand. Now he can use it to pay and check his account balance.

This is Neil. Neil had an antenna implanted into his skull bone. It allows him to feel and hear colours, including infrared and ultraviolet. He also has a button in a tooth that he can push with his tongue to activate Bluetooth devices.

This is John. John has a radio frequency sender under his skin. He implanted it himself, or “installed” it, as he puts it. He can use it to log into his YouTube channel, isn’t that handy.

This is Brenten. He has a magnet in his finger. He implanted it himself, at home, with the help of a friend.

These young men are biohackers. They see themselves as the beginning of a new era of humanity, the transhumans. What the heck? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Species evolve by natural selection, or so we learned at school. Small genetic mutations give rise to subtle changes of the species’ members, and those who are best adapted to their environment have the best chance of survival.

But this mode of evolution only dominates until the species discovers a way to change itself faster and more successfully than by naturally occurring genetic mutations. We have reached this point.

Indeed we reached this point thousands of years ago. Most of our recent adaptations to the environment didn’t come from genetic changes. They came from our ability to learn from previous generations. We learn to speak, to read, to do arithmetic. We learn what others have discovered about nature, we build streets, vaccinate our children, and leave comments on YouTube. Contrary to what you might have thought, this isn’t in our DNA. It’s social learning.
 
So here we are. But we can go beyond that and use our knowledge about nature to change ourselves, to enhance our own bodies. This is the idea of transhumanism.

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates using technology to enhance physical and cognitive functions of the human body.

The movement is almost exactly a hundred years old. Its origin is often credited to John Haldane’s essay “D(ay)dalus, or, Science and the Future” that was published in 1923. It’s a summary of a lecture he read to the Heretics Society at the University of Cambridge in the UK. This society had appointed itself with the task of questioning traditional authorities in general and religious dogmas in particular.

In his lecture, Haldane speculated on the possibilities of human enhancement and the ways in which science and technology could shape the future of humanity. The topic was likely considered heretical at the time because conservative religious beliefs hold the human body to be God’s creation, so transhumanism suggests that humans can do better than God.

Haldane’s lecture was focused mostly on genetic engineering and artificial reproduction. He discussed the possibility that by breeding individuals with desirable traits, such as intelligence, strength, and health, we could enhance the overall capability and well-being of the human population.

Adolf Hitler thought that was a really good idea. It hasn’t been very popular since, but transhumanists believe it was in principle right, though maybe the Nazi realisation was lacking a bit in ethical consideration what with all the dead people and so on. Still transhumanists tend to be in favour of using technology, including genetic screening and editing, to eliminate hereditary diseases and, in the long run, improve intelligence and health.

This doesn’t sit well with some people, and is why transhumanism has been referred to in recent years as “newgenics” or just “fundamentally wrong”. It didn’t help that Jeffry Epstein, he who really really liked to have underage girls in his company, was a transhumanist, and that the movement is strongly associated with longtermists, who are mostly well educated white men clustered in the Cambridges and Oxfords of the world. We talked about longtermists in an earlier video.

Indeed, most longtermists are also transhumanists. For example, our good friend Nick Bostrom, he who thinks we live in a computer simulation, is a convinced transhumanist and committed fan of genetic engineering. In one of his longwinded essays he explains:

“Genetic engineering holds great potential for alleviating unnecessary human suffering. Every day that the introduction of effective human genetic enhancement is delayed is a day of lost individual and cultural potential, and a day of torment for many unfortunate sufferers of diseases that could have been prevented.”

This unfortunate sentence suffers from what’s known as “relative clause attachment ambiguity”. It could either mean that the diseases could have been prevented, or the sufferers, which in a nutshell is the issue that people have with the idea. It’s also a point that Bostrom doesn’t address in his essay.

Besides, some of the greatest works of art were born out of suffering. Van Gogh for example suffered from depression and psychosis, and Virginia Woolf most likely had bipolar disorder. Quite possibly “they” could have been prevented. We humans are a mixed lot, and we don’t agree at all on what a desirable trait is or what a good future looks like. This is why trying to steer human evolution is so controversial.

That said, transhumanists have a point of course. Not only can modern technologies be used improve our lives, they are being used to that end already. And we’re going to see more of this in the future, not less. This is why I want to talk about this today. Both because I wanted to understand what’s happening and because I thought it would be interesting to you too.

Most cutting edge technologies are out of reach for the average person because you need an entire research lab to use them. You’re not going to do your own gene therapy any time soon.But there are other technologies which are on the market, and which can be used already for physical and cognitive enhancements. This is what “biohackers” are after.

Biohackers try to improve their body with various methods, notably electronic devices, supplements, and lifestyle changes. We will look at those one by one starting with the electronic devices.

The young men we met in the introduction are an extreme subgroup of biohackers who call themselves “grinders”. Grinders are a variety of sandwich that’s popular in New England. Sorry, wrong grinder.

A grinder is an investor who makes profits through numerous small trades. Eh, no, I guess that isn’t the right grinder either.Wait, I got it, grinders try to optimize their body with gadgets implanted under the skin. They combine biological with electronical function. Some call themselves cyborgs.

Cyborgs are not new of course. One of the first cyborg devices were cochlear implants that have been in commercial use since the late 1970s. A cochlear implant is a medical device that restores hearing for some types of deafness. It consists of two parts. One is a microphone that’s usually worn behind the ear. It receives sound from the environment and converts it into electrical signals. The other part is implanted into the inner ear. It receives the electrical signals and uses them to directly stimulate the auditory nerve. A cochlear implant basically jumps over a malfunctioning part of the auditory system.

Scientists have been working on similar devices for the visual system for decades. Though they’re not ready to hit the market, they’ve gotten quite close. These scientific advances have inspired others to use similar methods, not to solve an existing problem with their body, but to enhance it.

One of the pioneers was the British engineer Kevin Warwick. In 1998, he had a radio frequency transmitter implanted under his skin. This device allowed him to interact with computer-controlled devices, including doors, lights, and heaters. He didn’t have to touch them, he just had to be near them. He was nicknamed “Captain Cyborg”.

Kind of interesting you might say, but why not just wear a wristband? Why do you have to implant the thing under your skin? Warwick said he wanted to see how the human body would accept a new part of itself. He did a couple of similar things later. For example, he had a neural interface implanted in his left wrist that allowed him to control a robot arm from a distance.

That was 20 years ago, and I think it’s fair to say that the acceptance of implantable devices in the general public has been, erm, a little slow. Can’t think of a reason why.

It’s become kind of popular among artists though. There is for example, the Spanish cyborg artist Manel De Aguas, who also calls himself a transspecies activist. He installed weather sensing fins in his head. This allowed him to monitor atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature changes, and his current altitude.

Or the Canadian artist and biohacker Russ Foxx who has more than 100 implants in his body, including a camera in his eye. He also has magnets, microchips, NFC tags, and silicon implants that glow in the dark.

And then there is Neil Harbisson, also from Spain, and the person with the antenna implanted in his head who we saw in the introduction. He was born colourblind. The implant has been in his head since 2004 and converts colours into vibrations. It’s worth stressing that it connects to the bone, not to the brain. Harbisson is one of the founders of the Cyborg Foundation and the Transspecies Society, who support people with non-human identities. Being transgender is so yesterday.

Those devices used to be custom-built, but some you can now buy online. For example, the biotech startup Grindhouse Wetware has been selling such implants since 2012. There is also the company Dangerous Things which offers a variety of implantable microchips and magnets, and the British Company Walletmor that sells you an implantable device that you can pay with.

Some other companies have picked up on it. In 2017, the US tech firm Three Square Market gave employees the option to get microchip implants that can be used to log into computers, unlock doors, and pay for snacks from vending machines.

Grinders say their work has encouraged the democratisation of science, allowing non-professionals to experiment with new techniques and approaches. What could possibly go wrong? Well for starters you could end up being subject of a paper in a medical journal about how you gave yourself a multiresitant bacterial infection when you shoved a microchip into your hand. I’m also not sure what science is being democratised here. It’s not like anaesthesiologists have made a big secret about how lidocaine works.

More seriously, doctors are understandably reluctant to implant electronics without medical reasons, so the grinder community does it mostly itself. You can find videos of their self-experiments on YouTube. I’ll not show them because I don’t want an age restriction.

And this is all very interesting, but I’m not sure what it has to do with physical enhancement. To me it looks more like a variant of tattoos and piercings.

Let’s then talk about supplements known as nootropics.

The word “nootropics” derives from the Greek words for “mind” and “change.” The term was coined in the early 1970s by the Romanian psychologist Corneliu Giurgea. He defined nootropics as substances that can enhance cognitive function without significant side effects.

It’s a fairly vague term that includes caffeine and theanine and a lot of dietary supplements that someone has claimed improve cognitive function, like fish oil and stuff like that. As you have probably noticed yourself though, for the most part dietary supplements don’t do anything other than emptying your bank account.

Particularly popular among biohackers are the supplements piracetam and aniracetam, which are marketed as cognitive enhancers and sold over the counter in the US. Those substances do, something. However, the evidence that they actually work as cognitive enhancers in people without pre-existing conditions is weak to inconclusive. Side effects include but are not limited to anxiety insomnia, irritability, headaches, and agitation.

There are a lot of other substances that are sold as nootropics, especially in the United States where drugs only seem to get properly regulated when sufficiently many people have died. While they’re called “nootropics,” the vendors seem to have left out that part of the definition which said something about not having side-effects.

At the moment, the US Food and Drug Administration is more or less constantly warning customers to be wary of products sold as nootropics, and is sending letters to companies, telling them to stop marketing drugs that “are not generally recognized as safe and effective”.

As they say, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, so choose wisely.

In the past decade, the phrase “biohacking” has become so widely used that it’s pretty much lost meaning. For example, any monitoring device is now marketed as biohacking. Tracking your sleep, glucose levels, calories? Yeah, that now counts as biohacking. Indeed, you could claim that back braces which improve your posture by making it uncomfortable to slump over are “biohacking” of sorts.

When I did research for this video, I came across a lot of “biohacking” devices with what I would like to politely call very sketchy scientific evidence. For example you could shine light into your ears. Or zip microcurrents through your muscles. Or you could spend a ten thousand dollars on a device that’ll treat water so that it helps your body fold proteins.

I’d like to argue that watching science videos on YouTube is also biohacking because it enhances your cognitive function, so there you go.

I guess you’ve noticed that I think most of this biohacking trend is complete bullshit. But it does have a scientific part with real promise, so let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Scientists have experimented with implanting electrodes into the brain for more than 50 years. It’s called deep brain stimulation and works by delivering electrical impulses to specific regions of the brain. It’s been used successfully to treat pain, depression, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and a few other conditions. In some cases, the results have been quite remarkable, helping people who could not be helped by medication. It’s arguably a very invasive procedure and kind of a last-ditch effort but it does work.

It’s also a very active research area. The electrodes are getting smaller and less invasive. Scientists now know better what areas of the brain to target. They’re using artificial intelligence to tune the signals to maximal use. They are trying to figure out whether it’s useful to treat other conditions, such as obesity or addictions. And they are trying different methods of brain stimulation, for example ultrasound.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink project aims at communication in particular, but I think that long before this people will use brain implants to get conscious control of unconscious processes. That includes anything from sleep to attention to emotional control. Forget nootropics. A lot of this your brain can do itself, you just don’t know how to consciously do it. That’s where I think the most likely and promising near-term application of biohacking is, to get conscious control of unconscious brain processes.

You may have found some of the examples of transhumanism a little, shall we say, underwhelming. But transhumanists have big plans. That includes the abandonment of gender, artificial wombs, immortality and “technogaianism”, that’s the idea that technology can help us fix the planet.  

Despite my somewhat sarcastic take on the topic, which I hope you excuse, I think that if we manage to not go extinct in the near future, transhumanism is nearly certain to come. Genetic screening is already a reality. Genetic editing will follow soon. I’m not enthusiastic about merging biological tissue with metal device. But it’s possible to build circuits from organic ingredients which will be more compatible with the human body. I think that’s the direction into which humanity will evolve.

It is also likely that not everyone will be on board. We already see this now, that some share of people just does not want technological progress. They have other values, and I think those must be respected. It’s therefore quite possible that humanity will split into one party that’ll use technology for physical enhancement, and another that won’t.

So transhumanism will almost certainly come. Though maybe we’ll stop calling it this. Which camp are you in? Transhumanist or not? Let me know in the comments.