My evening with Britain’s most radical political party
On Monday I attended a meeting of what I’m quite confident is the most revolutionary political party in Britain. In an anti-establishment age, with just about every political faction vowing to take the fight to some hated elite, this is quite the claim. But it is, I believe, one that can be justified. This party doesn’t simply want to transform human society, as so many movements do, but biology itself. What they promise is nothing less than the most revolutionary change in human society since our species first emerged some 300,000 years ago.
Transhumanism is not a new political movement, but it is gaining prominence fast. Back in 2004, when knowledge of its existence barely extended beyond academic circles, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama described it as “the world’s most dangerous idea”. For better or worse it is certainly one of the most exciting. Now, 15 years on, transhumanist parties are popping up across the western world — and some have started contesting elections.
The core of transhumanist thinking is that we can and should use technology to artificially augment human capabilities. Not immediately, as most of the necessary scientific breakthroughs have yet to take place, but certainly over the coming decades. Commonly cited objectives include the abolition of natural death, greatly increased human intellect and, perhaps most controversially, the toning down of certain human characteristics, such as our propensity towards tribalism and violence, deemed undesirable. To achieve these, transhumanists are prepared to see a partial merger of human and artificial intelligence, fundamentally changing what it means to be a member of our species, and perhaps even initiating a new post-human era.
This brings me back to Monday night and a dimly lit room in technophile Shoreditch. Futurists had gathered to hear David Wood, co-leader of the Transhumanist Party UK (TPUK), outline 16 policies objectives which he hopes will form the heart of the party’s manifesto for the year 2035. In an era dominated by shifting Brexit deadlines, usually measured in months, it felt both strange and refreshing to hear political debate measured in decades.
Wood is, on the face of it, an unusual revolutionary. A mild-mannered Cambridge graduate, who spent 25 years helping to design mobile phones, he has the mannerisms and appearance of a university lecturer. Yet his politics are nothing if not incendiary. The core of his argument, he explained, is that “human nature can and must change to ensure a better society can arise”.
This is at the heart of the transhumanist belief system. Humans, forged through the process of evolution, have a number of innate characteristics that have become deeply damaging if not outright dangerous. Our technology and civilisation, they argue, has massively outpaced the snails crawl of evolution, providing a species which has changed little in 300,000 years with the power to destroy its home planet several times over. Human aggression and tribalism, doubtless useful in the small hunter-gatherer societies from which we emerged, have become an existential threat to our species when combined with nuclear weapons. Only by altering aspects of human biology can we ensure our long-term survival and flourishing.
A party with such a radical central belief system was never going to have a boring policy programme, and the TPUK certainly does not disappoint. Some of its 16 proposed policies, admittedly, are relatively uncontroversial. The party believes technology can be used to eliminate homelessness and cut crime in Britain by 90 per cent by the year 2035. Others policy objectives for the same year will likely produce a stronger reaction.
The TPUK believes that in 2035 there should be “no need to work for income” thanks to automation, with all essential human needs being guaranteed by state subsidy. Cryonic suspension, where the dead are frozen at below -130 degrees celsius to preserve their bodies in case future technology can resuscitate them, should become available on the NHS. A new “House of AI” will be added to Parliament as a revising chamber, where artificial intelligence can “provide useful analysis and validation of proposed changes in legislation”.
Transhumanism remains a fringe philosophy but many of its most prominent advocates are on a determined march towards the mainstream. In particular, US tech billionaires, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are taking a serious interest and pumping money into the sort of research transhumanists advocate. Ray Kurzewil, the intellectual grandfather of the transhumanist movement, is now a director of engineering at Google where he heads a team working on machine learning. In Britain the TPUK is an officially registered political party, and is seriously considering standing candidates in elections. Woods told me he also wants to see transhumanist associations develop within each of the main political parties.
I fully appreciate that, when informed about transhumanism, the first reaction of many people is to laugh. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen a month ahead in British politics, never mind nearly two decades. But, though I’m unconvinced by the timescale and general positivity, I do think the transhumanists are asking a lot of the right questions.
The impact of greatly increased artificial intelligence and how it interacts with, and potentially even merges with, humankind will surely cause some of the most contentious political divides as we head through the 21st century. As a revolutionary moment, its potential impacts will be far greater than, for example, the industrial revolution or the reformation. I suspect it will spark wars and revolutions, terror and euphoria. It is surely only a good thing if people begin discussing these questions, especially while the stakes remain relatively low.
