The end of the individual
YOU have your own mind, right? You have your own thoughts and you experience the world in your own unique way. In short, you’re an individual. Maybe future generations won’t enjoy the same privilege.
If you believe some futurists, technology will make telepaths of us all. We will live every day in a vast network of brains that communicate directly via sensors and implants. This “noosphere” could enable true global consciousness – but it might also obliterate the individual, transforming our existential landscape forever.
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have already demonstrated a human brain-to-brain interface. wore a sensor-studded cap to measure his brain’s electrical activity, while Andrea Stocco sported a device that stimulates brain regions using targeted magnetic fields. By imagining moving his hand, Rao was able to send a signal to Stocco’s brain, causing him to move his finger.
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at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues have gone further with rats and monkeys. Last year, they connected the brains of three monkeys, showing that the primates could synchronise brain activity to control a virtual arm.
But the leap from monkey brains coordinating an action to a global shared consciousness is massive. “You cannot transfer minds, emotions, memories,” says Nicolelis. We don’t know how to measure and encode such higher-order brain functions.
at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, UK, says that even if we could establish connections with the required fidelity, we will have a translation problem. “My mind doesn’t work like your mind,” he says. Creating software that can translate different mental representations of various concepts might be as challenging as creating human-level artificial intelligence.
There may be a workaround. The brain’s plasticity allows it to incorporate and interpret new sensory information. Sandberg thinks that with the right technology we might train our neocortices, the regions of our brains responsible for consciousness, to adapt to more complex signals coming from other brains, rather than from simple sensors.
What might life in the hive mind be like? Acting as part of a group can be joyous and fulfilling, and the larger the group, the greater the benefit. So joining a global noosphere could be a profound and ecstatic experience. We might all share the joy of holding a newborn baby, multiplied by the 350,000 born around the world every day, say, or marvel at how quickly billions of coordinated hands can fix the environment.
“Global shared consciousness could be a profound, joyful experience“
But there is a dark side. “If technology makes it easy for the good ideas to spread, it can also make it easy for the stupid ideas,” says Sandberg. False accusations, for instance, could rage through our shared consciousness like wildfire, supercharging the worst that mob rule has to offer.
Advanced neural filters that automatically block the most dangerous thoughts might prevent the worst-case scenarios, says Sandberg. The same goes for securing our minds against brain-hackers seeking to influence or even directly control our thoughts and desires. But such filters would have to assess the content of neural signals to understand human thought, a staggeringly complex task to say the least.
If all such hurdles are overcome, the hive mind might operate at different scales, says Sandberg. Our local individual experience would still be ours, as long as the security measures hold up, but we might choose to switch viewpoints, as in a video game. And we might modulate signals coming from higher levels – family, city, regional and global – so that we experience them as our own preferences or even gut feelings.
However, as in the early days of the internet, you will probably have to get used to buffering. Nerve impulses move more slowly than the signals between computers. Multiply the inevitable lag by billions of brains, and the hive mind might feel positively indecisive.
Even in the deepest future, the speed of light will impose limits on what a hive mind can do, says Sandberg. “A universe-scale hive mind might take billions of years to think a single thought.” MacGregor Campbell
The end of disease
THE ultimate goal for medicine is a world without disease. It sounds ideal, but should we be careful what we wish for?
Wiping out infectious killers is still a remote prospect, not least because new foes like SARS, HIV, Ebola and Zika are emerging all the time. But let’s assume for the moment that we are up to the task. Let’s imagine, too, that gene editing comes good, putting an end to genetic disease.
Many of us would live longer than we do now. But everyone has to die of something. Autopsies on supercentenarians, people who made it past their 110th birthday, have revealed that a build-up of plaque-like substances in organs such as the heart was the cause of death in more than 70 per cent of cases. This still counts as disease even if we choose to describe it as “natural causes”, says at the SENS Research Foundation in Mountain View, California, a charity devoted to combating ageing.
Even these problems might be eliminated if stem-cell therapies and tissue engineering live up to their promise. But doing so could create fresh challenges – not least that of our finite planet having to sustain an exploding number of death-defying ancients.
It may not have to. on Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of Chicago has modelled what would happen if age-related disease disappeared in Sweden. Assuming that mortality rates would cease rising once people reach 60, the median lifespan would then be 134 years for men and 180 for women. It would also mean that in , Sweden’s population would grow from 9.1 million to 11 million, an increase of just 22 per cent.
The trouble is that these calculations are based on two assumptions: that couples have fewer than two children and that women stop reproducing before the age of 50. The first isn’t true for much of the world, and donor eggs and IVF are already undermining the second (See “The End of Sex“). So it’s possible that the population of a disease-free world will spiral out of control after all.
“Would you swap the right to children for access to life-extending technologies?“
Then radical solutions might have to be considered. Suicide and euthanasia might become more acceptable. Or maybe people would have to sacrifice the right to children in exchange for life-extending technologies. Hopefully, we wouldn’t end up with generational cleansing as in the 1976 film Logan’s Run, in which an exploding population was kept in check by the “young” killing anyone who reached the ripe old age of 30.
But if that horrifying scenario were ever to come to pass, it’s just as likely to be the old killing the young, says , director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, UK: the old tend to hold the positions of power.
The good news is that the end of disease is unlikely to be sudden, which gives us time to adapt. Besides, think of the benefits. Before an effective vaccine was developed, smallpox killed millions of people each year. Tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS and cancer continue to kill many millions more. Then there is the economic side: if people in the poorest countries lived into adulthood and stayed healthy, it might go a long way to alleviating the worst extremes of poverty.
“If you think of all the misery and suffering that disease and premature death causes, how could you not say that it would be a wonderful thing to eliminate it,” says Harris. “But it would be a wonderful thing that we’d have to learn to manage.” Linda Geddes
The end of sex
RUMOURS of the end of sex are probably premature. It has served us well so far, and besides, we are biologically programmed to want it. But when it comes to making babies, it is no longer the only option – and reproduction without sex looks set to become increasingly common.
Last year, . Ethical concerns stopped the researchers from coaxing those cells into fully functional sperm and eggs, but the feat seems to have been achieved in mice: a team in China has .
What would happen if the trick could be safely repeated in humans? That would be a genuine cure for infertility, says reproductive biologist at the University of Sheffield, UK. It would also mean same-sex couples could conceive without the help of donors.
It even raises the prospect of individuals procreating alone, if we could make sperm from a woman’s stem cells and eggs from a man’s stem cells. The offspring wouldn’t be clones of the person concerned, since DNA is shuffled every time you create a sex cell. Even so, it’s not a good idea, says Pacey – self-fertilisation is tantamount to inbreeding, because it halves the genetic diversity available to the child.
Sexless reproduction might also appeal to people who can conceive naturally, because the random shuffling of DNA when sex cells are made can lead to problems. Every year millions of babies are born with a disability caused by genetic defects, and many more inherit gene variants that predispose them to serious illness.
Parents-to-be can already have embryos, created in vitro, screened for genetic abnormalities before they are implanted in the uterus. Using stem cells would make it easier to produce lots of eggs, which in turn makes pre-implantation checks a more viable option.
But will this application ever be allowed? Pacey suspects not, given the strength of opposition to destroying embryos.
, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, California, and author of The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, begs to differ. He anticipates that stem cells will first be used to help people who are unable to make eggs or sperm. Once this is approved, he says, other applications are likely to follow – particularly in the US, where “off-label use” of any approved medical product is allowed.
Peer pressure might even persuade people that natural conception is irresponsible, leading fertility clinics to capitalise by imploring us to “have the best child you can”.
“This is going to change humanity,” says Greely, “so it’s something people need to pay attention to.” Daniel Cossins
Read more about how everything you care about will end – and what comes after
This article appeared in print under the headlines “The end of the individual”, “The end of disease” and “The end of sex”
