Earlier this year, Michael Cockerell’s documentary series ‘Inside the Commons’ lifted the neo-Gothic lid on Westminster, revealing many of the arcane practices that have settled like a film of dust within. Among many surprises was the fact that the building was still struggling to install a stable Wi-Fi connection.
The notion that in 2015 the seat of representative power isn’t sufficiently cushioned with the kind of technology that has come to be seen as something of a utility is for some a genuine concern.
Dr. Alexander Karran, a cognitive neuroscience expert, asserts that “too few politicians understand the implications, and the potential, of science and technology”. For Karran, his despair at this perceived lack of competence or foresight on the part of the political establishment has led him to co-found the Transhumanist Party. On May 7th, he stood as the first ever transhumanist candidate in a British election, in the Labour safe-seat of Liverpool Walton.
Transhumanism is built around the core principle that ‘technology can and should be used to overcome human limitation in all its forms’. These limitations span psychology, with the increased capacity for engineered intelligence, as well as biology, through the symbiosis between body and machine.
The likes of Stephen Hawking may decry Artificial Intelligence as threatening to “spell the end of the human race” but, as far as advocates are concerned, humans becoming cyborgs is, far from being the end of humanity, just the inevitable next step for the evolution of our species.
Far-fetched though it may seem, transhumanism has bloomed from the fertile ground of the vastly expansive tech industry in Silicon Valley, led by the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple, who in terms of innovation, turnover and social influence are almost unrivalled in stature. Meanwhile firms such as Cisco Systems and IBM have estimated that 50 billion devices (from driverless cars to kitchen appliances) could be interconnected by 2020 as part of what is termed the ‘Internet of Things’, with the intelligent collection and sharing of data as its lifeblood.
In many ways we live in an artificially intelligent transhuman world already; with drones, 3D printing, wearable tech, medical bioengineering, developments into surgical robotics and ectogenesis (artificial wombs), not to mention software predicated on an array of ever more complex algorithms that continue to automate our everyday lives.
It’s nothing new for politicians to face derision for being seen as out-of-touch and sheltered from the lives of ordinary people, but Karran points to the fact that “only 1 MP out of 650 in Westminster has had a career as a software engineer” as evidence for how ill-prepared the political elite is for exploiting the enormous gains, as well as mitigating the risks, that could develop from science and technology.
Across Europe there are several transhumanist groups gaining political momentum and beginning to weave a loose web of shared ideals and principles. But it is in America that the movement has generated the most mainstream attention, with the writer Zoltan Istvan recently announcing his intention to run in the 2016 Presidential election.
Anchored in sci-fi though it may seem, it would be wise not to completely dismiss the movement as another fringe intrigue too soon. For Karran, his electoral candidacy on May 7th was only the first step in what he hopes is the long journey that will carry the Transhumanist Party to the forefront of British politics, the landscape of which is now more fragmentary and uncertain than it has been for decades.
Accordingly, the first and subsequent generations of ‘digital natives’ may well seek representatives who reflect their own experiences and appeal to their concerns, rather than holding tight to fading ideologies of the left and right.
Indeed, from the intensifying sophistication of cybercrime, the pervasive data surveillance of the security state, the uncertain currency of BitCoin, and the ominous underworld of the Dark Net, the technological threats of the present and near future are real and genuine. So much so that British political society could become steadily transformed by an electorate who may prove to be persuaded, less by the merits of Oxbridge PPE graduates, and more by the rising tide of the transhumanists.
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