‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)
The future stalks us more closely with each passing day. Staggering new achievements in science and technology are transforming the way we live together.
We aren’t ready.
Most of our political ideas were dreamed up to describe a world that no longer exists. We need new ones, and I have tried to supply some in these pages. There may come a time, however, when the world is so utterly transformed by tech that almost none of our ideas make sense any more—even new-fangled ones like those in this book. In these closing pages, and with some caution, it’s worth considering the fate of politics after the digital lifeworld.
Advances in genetic engineering, medicine, robotics, nanotechnology, and AI are set to alter our biology in ways that the theorists of the past could scarcely have imagined.1 The ability to edit our DNA,2 to join together with machines (using implants, prosthetics, and interfaces) and adopt their unhuman power as our own, to manufacture fresh new organs and tissues, to personalize medical treatment for the genetic makeup of each patient—such faculties could forever change what it means to be human. Human enhancement is no longer the stuff of fiction.3 It’s expected that our descendants will be able to enhance their strength and resilience with bionic limbs, organs, and exoskeletons. They’ll radically improve their minds, mood, and memory.4 They’ll be able to diminish the effects of pain and the need for sleep.5 They’ll sharpen their senses, giving them superhuman vision and hearing. They’ll access entirely new worlds of emotion, sensation, and desire.6 They’ll have the capacity to dictate the characteristics of their unborn children.7 They’ll slow or reverse the ageing process, postponing death itself.8
Many of the ethical questions arising out of human enhancement are well-studied. Should enhancement be permitted? On what terms? Should it be a right?9 Should self-enhancement even—as some argue—be seen as a duty to unborn generations and the gene pool itself?10 Perhaps the most immediate political risk with human enhancement, as several authors have pointed out, is that access to it (like access to world-class healthcare today) may only be available to the rich.11 Jaron Lanier imagines the morning on which we discover that the rich neighbours have undergone ‘procedures that would extend their life spans by decades’. ‘That’s the kind of morning’, says Lanier, ‘that could turn almost anyone into a Marxist.’ 12
Whether we consider ourselves to be more free in such a world will depend, in part, on what we count as a constraint on freedom. Hobbes believed that the only constraints that mattered for the purposes of liberty were ‘externall Impediments of motion’.13 But to stretch the language of liberty a little, our own biological limitations could also be said to be constraints on our freedom. I’m not free to run a marathon because my scrawny legs constrain me. I’m not free to write great poetry because my feeble mind won’t let me. If it’s right that gene editing, human enhancement, and physical augmentation will mean that some people will enjoy vastly greater physical and cognitive abilities than others, then some will say that they’re more ‘free’ than those still constrained by the limits of the human body.
If politics is about the collective life of human beings—why we live together, how we order and bind our collective life, and the ways in which we could or should order and bind that collective life differently—then any change in what it means to be a human being is likely to have profound political consequences. A world in which a class of ‘new godlings’14 emerges to live alongside the old homo sapiens is one in which the term politics itself ceases to have a clear or fixed meaning. As David Hume conjectured nearly three centuries ago, a society of more than one unequal species would be almost impossible to sustain:15
Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which . . . were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance . . . the necessary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other.
When we think about politics today, we assume a form of collective life in which the participants are all recognizably human. In the world to come, this assumption may no longer be safe. The difference between classes could look more like the difference between species.
This points to a deeper lesson: that our conception of politics is based on a set of implicit assumptions: that human beings are mortal, that they are vulnerable to pain and disease, that they are divided into at least two biological sexes, and so forth.16 In The Concept of Law (1961) H. L. A. Hart argues that certain ‘elementary truths’ about human nature mean that ‘certain rules of conduct’ will always need to be enshrined in human law or morality. The first of Hart’s ‘truisms’ is human vulnerability: that we are all susceptible to harm. The second is approximate equality: that although we differ in size or strength or intellect, no single person is so naturally powerful that he or she can dominate others alone. Next is limited altruism, the idea that ‘if men are not devils, neither are they angels’. Then there’s limited resources: there’s not always enough to go around. Finally, limited understanding and strength of will.17 Although Hart is talking about law and morality, his argument applies equally to politics. We take these truisms for granted when we speak and think about politics.
Yet if technology eventually allows humans to regenerate their organs, or live forever, then the precept of human vulnerability will plainly lose some of its force. Likewise, cognitive enhancement could diminish our limited understanding and strength of will while expanding the limits of our altruism. And if only the rich can access the technologies of enhancement, then approximate equality can’t be taken for granted. As we saw in chapter eighteen, future generations could enjoy extraordinary economic abundance.18 So much, then, for limited resources.
What would be the meaning of politics in such a world? Would we still seek to live together in the same way?
Now imagine a world in which AI systems achieve superintelligence, that is, an intellect ‘that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest’.19 Serious students of AI consider this a real possibility. Nick Bostrom, a scholar at the University of Oxford, offers the ‘weak conclusion’ that:20
it may be reasonable to believe that human-level machine intelligence has a fairly sizeable chance of being developed by mid-century, and that it has a non-trivial chance of being developed considerably sooner or much later; that it might perhaps fairly soon thereafter result in superintelligence.
It’s hard for us to conceive of such a superintelligence. Bostrom cheerfully suggests it would not be smart in the sense that ‘a scientific genius is smart compared with the average human being,’ but rather ‘smart in the sense that an average human being is smart compared with a beetle or a worm.’ 21 He adds, not very reassuringly, that the advent of a superintelligent AI system could lead to a ‘wide range of outcomes’ including ‘extremely good’ ones but also ‘outcomes that are as bad as human extinction’.22 In such a world, politics would revert to its primordial purpose: to ensure survival in a harsh world.
Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil contend that in the long run, we’re heading toward a technological singularity, that is, a point at which machine intelligence comes to saturate the universe, absorbing all matter and life in its path.23 There would be no place for homo sapiens in such a world, let alone for politics.
I’ve deliberately avoided devoting many pages in this book to how all-powerful AI systems might come to destroy the world—not because such a scenario is impossible, but because it’s already a popular topic of writing and one which can (unhelpfully) obscure the more immediate problems that we’ll have to face in the digital lifeworld. As I stressed in chapter nineteen, many of the political issues awaiting us in the digital lifeworld will stem from the ideas and choices of people like you and me. Before politics disappears or becomes something different altogether, the fates of liberty, democracy, and social justice are in our hands.
I wrote this book because I do not believe that we are destined to the fate of the ‘sorcerer’ described by Marx who was ‘no longer able to control the powers of the nether world’ that he ‘called up by his spells’.24 The future stalks us, but we have more control over it than we realize. At the start of this book, I called for a fundamental change in the way we think about politics. This is truly the work of a generation, but it must begin now, and it will continue even after we are gone. For as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1823, ‘the generation which commences a revolution rarely completes it’.25