If we are to believe transhumanists, people who bill themselves as champions of superlongevity and artificial human enhancement, 2045 should be a very good year. According to one of the movement’s leading figures, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, that’s when humans will achieve immortality through a blend of genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Transhumanists point to exciting technological trends — such as those showing how computer chips are growing smaller, cheaper, and faster — as evidence that Kurzweil’s breakthrough moment, called the singularity, is near. All that most of us need to do, transhumanists say, is wait. But the message is not sitting well with at least one transhumanist, Joseph Jackson, who warns the singularity will not get closer to reality if it depends on a biotechnology industry that runs away from risk and is more interested in increasing revenues. At Humanity+, a transhumanist conference held at Harvard in June, Jackson slammed the biotech industry for having “burned through more than $40 billion since its inception, before finally turning a profit in 2009.’’ So far, transhumanists seem to be listening to Jackson’s pitch for open science and citizen science.
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