Humanoids are apparently human beings, although they are not. With their origins in science fiction, whether as robots, or extra-terrestrials, humanoids may soon better represent the evolution of the human beings species, based on the fusion of the biological and the digital.
In this future time, Humanism and, therefore, human essence itself, will disappear.
From Nature to Culture
Before continuing on this path to the uncertain future, it is worth looking into the past under the anthropological lenses of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). Humanity’s transition from nature to the context of culture is a relevant thematic for the analysis of the different social structures that have molded and continue to mold civilizations.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the prohibition of incest as a universal law is the crucial inflection as the obligatoriness to look for partners in other social groups afforded the necessary conditions for the transition from nature to culture, stimulating conditions that evolved from contact with the diverse. Acting in this way, as also set out by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, man became the only being capable of transposing the three dimensions required for society to appear: from Nature to Culture, from Feeling to Knowledge, from Animality to Humanity.
But Humanity and Humanism did not necessarily walk hand-in-hand on this human journey. On the contrary, such encounters occurred by chance in a few spasms of history.
Humanist Spasms
Humanism has not always been an aspiration of society. It has developed as a philosophy that positions human beings as the central focus in the context, valuing their capacities and dignities in opposition to the theocentric perspective of the world. It is an ode to rationalism that enables reflection, transformation and accomplishment.
One can argue that Humanism appears initially in the distant days of 440 B.C., in Greek society, with Socrates, later accused of corrupting youth, even being condemned to the death due to his opposition to the official pantheon of Greek gods.
Plato and the stoic philosophers had also spread the humanist principles as the center of philosophical thinking. The poet Cicero uttered the celebrated phrase “to humanity, humanity is sacred”. Greek Humanism broke with the mythological perspective.
However, with the destruction of the Greek/Macedonian civilization and the advent of the Roman Empire, the rigid military hierarchy buried the incipient humanist thinking that was developing. Centuries later, the fragmentation of Rome encouraged the European feudalism, where individualism bowed to feudal sovereigns and, primarily, to the Catholic Church. Humanism was defeated by implacable Christianity and its powerful religious order.
The end of the Dark Ages occurred in the distant years of 1.400 A.D. - that means almost two thousand years after the original humanist impetus in Greek lands - with the advent of the Italian and Dutch Renaissances. The return to the Greek classical texts (at least, the few that had survived centuries of oppression and censorship) coexisted with the development of the commerce in the European mercantilist cities where the social order favoured greater individual freedom. The medieval mentality was not capable of providing an understanding of the natural phenomena. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) was the greatest illustrious representative of this period.
Christian dogmas had been destroyed throughout the secularization process that had distanced the Church from the different spheres of social life. Empirical scientific methods had blossomed as the fundamental basis for increasing the credibility of science. The renascent obsession in the return to Greco-Roman antiquity also fostered the anthropocentric perspective of the world, in which the humanity plays the star role in its own trajectory.
Once again, the second humanist spasm was to be a quick one. The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century represented a certain setback when redefining mundane work as a duty that benefits individuals and society as a whole. Thus, the old Catholic belief in spiritual ascension by means of good deeds was transformed into an obligation to work diligently as sign of divine grace. Again, Humanism surrendered to religious beliefs, as in Roman mythology and Christianity in times past.
However, the advent of the Enlightenment (the Age of the Reason) in the 17th century once again redeemed Humanism, which set itself up as the philosophy that defended the use of the reason (light) against the old regimen (darkness) and preached greater economic and political freedom. The Enlightenment promoted important political, economic and social changes, based on the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The popular mass received clarification through education: the encyclopedia appeared, civil constitutions were written which, later on, would be the foundations of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The golden era! The Illuminists fought for the rights of individuals and citizens and believed in cultural and technological progress.
Paradoxically, the combination of the great colonizing navigations of the Enlightenment and the illuminist technological-scientific advances gave rise to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries when the liberal ideal in favor of individual sovereignty would be surpassed by mass society. The alienation of the production process commanded by the great manufacturing plants and their scalable methods of production resulted in the massification of labor. Years later, now in the XX century, the American Way of Life globally determined the contemporary standard of mass consumption that transforms individuals into mere serial consumers of products and services produced on a global scale, with strong inclinations for obesity and its correlated cardiovascular and endocrinologic illnesses.
Humanism has remained, and still is, asleep since the middle of the 16th century.
Movarec Paradox
In times of panacea surrounding Transhumanism as the new desired level for humanity, it is worth questioning the potential space for Humanism in the future as a moral philosophy. The discussion is not necessarily new.
In the middle of the 1980's, Hans Movarec – a scientist in the Institute of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University - demonstrated that logical complexes were open to computational resolution while apparently simple motor sensory actions are essentially human beings. To replicate the human standards of rationality requires a limited amount of computational resources, when compared to the simple replication of motor and sensorial functions that require a lot of computational power. Therefore, much more computational effort is required to interpret speeches, walk, smell or take decisions based on subjective aspects - something that a human being does easily.
This paradox resides in the simple evolutionist confirmation of our human species, in which such motor sensory capacities were acquired millions of years ago and which, today, are intrinsic to humanity, but incomprehensible to robotic humanoids.
The desire to eliminate this gap still challenges moral philosophical thinking, perhaps impelled by the human unconscious desire to surpass once for all divine intentions and to totally overcome natural phenomena. The consequences, notwithstanding, are still intelligible. Not only Humanism, but the human species itself can find itself in check.
Intrinsic, Idiosyncratic and Unusual
The expression Artificial Intelligence seems absurd. After all, what do we gain in usefulness and what do we lose in humanity, when the benchmark ceases to be technology and becomes artificial intelligence?
Human intelligence differs a lot from so-called artificial intelligence. The intrinsic, idiosyncratic, and unusual are exclusive only to human nature, having evolved in the biological scope during millions of years. Human capacities such as abstraction, self-awareness, art, culture and freewill are still (and, probably, will continue to be) human. Humanoids will not be equipped to perform at the same level of human sophistication, neither will algorithms with all their quantum computation power.
On the other hand, singularity – the moment when storage in digital format will exceed all the codes and information from prehistoric times to the analogical age - could result in a wild spiral of technological growth in favour of artificial superintelligence, with irreversible and unexpected changes in human civilization. In this futurist context, as already widely portrayed in scientific fiction literature, the unchecked actions of an updatable intelligent agent capable of self-perfection would increasingly generate rapid machines endowed with a powerful superintelligence that, qualitatively, would exceed all human intelligence. At this moment, the creature (machine) would surpass the creator (human).
Singularity and Transhumanism
We are, therefore, ahead of the probable appearance of a new Matrix dominated by transhumans as a new biotechnological species (referred to by us as CYBERNETIC UNIVERSUM) capable of replacing the current biological species, HOMO SAPIENS.
As already observed in the evolutionary trajectory of the planet over the last billions of years, the potential symbiosis between different species in transition periods also implies inevitable competition via natural selection. There are still scenarios where HOMO SAPIENS reigns supreme in the event such biological and digital fusion produces programmable superorganisms employed in a low-conflict division of labor undertaking informative, operational and repeated tasks.
At any rate, even before this evolutionary climax, now in our present daily lives we perceive the acceleration of social time with two consequences that modify our equilibrium. On one hand, we live in a state of anxiety, with the feeling of “EVERYTHING RIGHT AWAY”: the perception of simultaneity and coexistence in time and space - afforded by the advent of the Internet and new medias - makes it difficult to exercise he systemic view and the long-term reflection that enables us to put facts in perspective. On the other hand, we are experiencing the agony of “STAYING AFLOAT”, in the origin of the anguish of simultaneously experiencing the profusion of innovations and belief of no longer having the necessary skills to work. We are missing the times of neural breathing and mental reflection, keeping our brains overheated with a continuous flow of stimulations related to the hyper connexion - we need to increasingly search for our cerebral cooling, so necessary to the balance.
Struts and Brakes
Humanism got lost in the history of Humanity. Initially faced with the divine mythologies ever-present in the civilizations all over the planet all the time, Humanism lost the path of history exactly for not having followed the speed and the extent of its own inventions - both technological and social.
The acceleration of time observed in the last few decades has placed humanity at the biological center of the planet - we are living for sure in the Anthropocene Age in which humanity’s impact on the path of nature can already be seen in global warming, in large-scale devastations, in the disappearance of hundreds of other fauna and flora and in the change of behavior of animals and plants as an evolutionist response.
Such geologic protagonism has not found similarity in the Humanist protagonist agenda in the context of the humanity. Mass consumption, the alienation of labor, urban oppression, populist, and authoritarian political arrangements and and the digitalization of time are some of the things responsible for the dehumanization of human beings.
For the first time in the history of the humanity, we are facing a cataclysmic possibility: the very extermination of the biological species in favor of a new biotechnological species. Humanity gives way to Transhumanity, with the probability that the Humanist agenda loses once for all its relevance as a philosophical possibility.
To conclude, just a warning: never in the history of ethical and moral Humanity have there been sufficient barriers to technological evolution. Such dogma of faith does not appear to be at risk.
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Daniel Augusto Motta, PhD, MSc
Founder & CEO BMI Blue Management Institute
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