New Humans, New Rights?

New Humans, New Rights?

Zachary Sutcliffe

“What is a person?” It’s a question that hasn’t been relevant for all that much of our time in this world. A person is a human, and a human is some meat and bones in a particular shape with some special meat that grants the human consciousness – a soul, if you’re so inclined. But now things are getting a little more complex. We are starting to understand more about where consciousness comes from, if not what it is. And with that discovery, we’re starting to discover that in terms of consciousness, humans aren’t actually all that unique. This poses a great deal of questions regarding animal rights.
But this isn’t animal rights month. It’s human rights month, and so I think it’s fitting that I try to confront the very definition of humanity. Because we live in an era where the questions surrounding that definition are becoming strikingly relevant – from so-called “designer babies” to mechanical limbs that you can control with your nerves, we’re confusing the already-hazy definition of humanity further every day. There’s a name for it: Transhumanism, ideal of upgrading or replacing your own body. At some point, we’re going to have to start reconsidering our human rights with this idea in mind – a point for which we are collectively not at all prepared.

(Young)

As technology improves, artificial limbs are starting to mirror their natural counterparts.

Image: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

Let’s start with the physical ability-related side of transhumanism: mechanical limbs, robotic exoskeletons, cybernetic organs. At the moment, prosthetic limbs are crude – while you can get mechanical arms, they’re generally controlled by you flexing other muscles, which is unintuitive. Furthermore, their sense of touch, assuming that particular model has a sense of touch, leaves a lot to be desired. But new technology might change that quickly – in fact, prosthetics controlled directly by nerves in the spinal cord have already been developed. When these eventually reach mass market, it’s entirely possible they’ll start to outdo regular human arms.

Sounds good, right? But even a fun cliche like super-powered robot limbs carries some dangerous implications. Machines have already taken over from human labour in many places, and robotic limbs might be the only way for human workers to stay relevant, at least in terms of manual labour. Which, again, sounds good – except it begs the question: who owns the limbs? Well, obviously, the people who wear them. But what if you can’t afford a set of arms, and you take out a loan to buy them? What if you work at a factory, and your choice is either to get fired or to have your arms cut off and replaced with stronger mechanical versions that allow you to do more work? And then what if you can’t pay back the loan, or you get laid off from the factory anyway? Who gets to keep the arms?

This might sound silly, but it does beg the question: to what extent do you own parts of your own body? Going even further, what if it becomes possible to replace almost all of yourself with mechanical parts? What if some lines of work require you to do so in order to give you a specialised body, and the moment you leave that job your body is taken away and you’re left as a proverbial “brain in a jar”? Or even just a digital copy? It might have been your decision to take the job and give up your old body, but does that entirely forfeit your rights to a physical form?

The idea of uploading your mind, in and of itself, poses even more questions. It sounds far-fetched, but technological immortality-seekers like

Russian tech mogul Dmitry Itskov think it can be done. What then? What rights does an uploaded human mind have? Digital data can be copied indefinitely. If your mind is data, then you can replicate your own mind as much as you want. If I copy-paste my mind onto a computer, what rights does that copy-paste get? At that point, many of our current human rights become irrelevant. A computer-based consciousness doesn’t need food or water. But if it needs power to survive, surely that becomes one of its human rights?

This isn’t just technology outrunning morality: this is technology being a quarter of the way into its first lap by the time morality has even figured out which direction it’s supposed to run.

For these uploaded beings, a hard drive and a power supply might take the place of housing and food – things which are theoretically guaranteed under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though obviously not in practice. But our current legal systems would most likely not recognise that – given that we are having trouble even guaranteeing basic liberties like “the right to not thrown into a nightmarish overseas prison camp by the government because you’re a bit shifty-looking”, we’re probably not going to be great with nuanced issues like transhuman rights.

When people discuss this concept, they often describe it as “technology outpacing morality”. I find that description a little weak. Because this isn’t just technology outrunning morality: this is technology being a quarter of the way into its first lap by the time morality has even figured out which direction it’s supposed to run.

Of course, every moral conundrum has a solution. In fact, every moral conundrum has several different solutions, often completely opposed to one another. Transhumanism, indeed, will almost certainly be one of the most controversial problems of its sort, and the debate around it will probably not be sorted out until long after the worst, most permanent damage has already been done.

But that isn’t to say we shouldn’t start to work on a solution. Although the time of transhumanism, proper transhumanism, is still far away, although we can’t truly know how that time will look, we can still create a few guiding principles based on our vague ideas of what the future may hold.

FIVE PRINCIPLES OF TRANSHUMAN RIGHTS:

Any originally human, or sufficiently human-like, consciousness, should be considered a person.
If such a consciousness is replicated, then it deserves the same rights as its original copy, and should then be considered independent of its original. The individual responsible for having the consciousness replicated, if they can, is expected to provide for the new person as would be expected of a parent and their child.
All people have the fundamental right to decide what happens to their own bodies – be they natural-born, modified, or completely replaced.
Any vessel housing a human consciousness, whether natural or artificial, should be considered to be that person’s body.
Intentional damage to, or destruction of, that body in such a way as to threaten that person’s consciousness should be considered as assault or murder.

Of course, these principles are just conjecture at this stage. When the time comes for them to be put into action, we may well discover that new technological, psychological or social developments may have rendered them irrelevant. Perhaps, nasty though the idea may be, we simply won’t care by that point. But it is my hope that by following rules such as these, our descendants may finally be able to break the hideous cycle that has plagued human history, and treat their newfound minorities with some modicum of the respect they deserve.