Author's Note: This unpublished essay was originally written for 21.C Magazine in early 1997.

These errors obscure the roots of the human mind in a biologically complex but fragile, finite, and unique organism; they obscure the tragedy implicit in the knowledge of that fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And where humans fail to see the inherent tragedy of conscious existence, they feel far less called upon to do something about minimising it, and may have less respect for the value of life . . . Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And this is of course the most difficult job, is it not: while preserving its dignity and importance: to recognise its humble origins and vulnerability, yet still call upon its guidance.
~~ Antonio Damasio

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute Professor Hans Moravec has expressed - like Charles Darwin - a dangerous idea that has the potential to radically alter the course of both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human evolution, fulfilling the age-old Faustian promise of reverse engineering divinity. Attempts to transcend the existentialist human condition date back to Egyptian and Grecian theocracies, but his speculations raise startling implications because they may be realisable through future technological innovations.

A widely respected robotics pioneer, Hans Moravec's influential book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1998) exploded cultural assumptions regarding the future of human identity, creating a social space that has allowed new philosophies and Visions to Come into Being. The Extropian and Transhumanist movements' re-vision humanity beyond dead-end imaginings and cultural stasis. Their alterable matrix of evolutionary possibilities range from cyborg hybrids to biotechnological innovations like Human Genome manipulation.

Moravec's controversial thesis that disembodied human minds could be uploaded into a computer network or simulation body, and later downloaded back into the real world. Liberated natural human minds would symbiotically fuse with artificial machines in future co-evolutionary trajectories. Moravec's imagination stretches beyond even these scenarios to embrace a future in which he depicts humanity being superseded by conscious AI robots who colonise the galaxy and permanently dethrone the Blind Watchmaker by harnessing and hyper-accelerating biological evolution's plodding place.

Underlying these movements are mutations of earlier Faustian memetic scripts. Indicated by the working title Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Moravec updates the techno-romanticism of neo-biological philosopher Oswald Spengler, who in Man and Technics (New York: Knopf, 1932) wrote: "This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilisation and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten . . . The history of technics is drawing to its inevitable close. It will be eaten up from within, like the grand forms of any and every culture . . . Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice."

Human = Obsolete?

Moravec likewise believes that humanity will be superseded, not by Spengler's superior Nature, but by his conscious robots. "It will matter little in the long run whether or not humans are an intimate part of evolving artificial intelligences," he writes in Mind Children. "We have very little choice, if our culture is to remain viable. Societies and economics are surely as subject to competitive evolutionary processes as are biological organisms."

In his Wired interview with Charles Platt (Super-humanism), Moravec concludes that humanity's built-in-obsolescence is excusable because our evolutionary successors will have both the power and desire to remember us through world simulations. This perspective is riddled with debatable assumptions regarding human consciousness and culture, managing complexity and the values of future robotic civilisations.

Sex Is Violence

Central to Moravec's Vision is the visceral cyberpunk desire to escape the confines of the body and its accompanying messy sexuality (despite Rudy Rucker's assertion that teledildonics and artificial companions are future growth industries). Humanists suggest that Moravec disdains the mortal, transient body. Max Dublin, author of Futurehype: The Tyranny of Prophecy (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), and an Institute Fellow of Toronto University's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, quotes a conversation between Moravec and American futurologist Grant Fjermedal in 1987, about the fate of human bodies after a successful uploading session. "You just don't bother waking it up again if the copying went successfully . . . It's so messy. Humans have got so many problems that you might just want to have it retired. You don't take out your junker car out if you've got a new one."

Exchanges like this mean that Moravec's prophetic futurism is a humanist's worst nightmare.

Cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener foresaw the Faustian dangers of these technologies in his book God and Golem Inc: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), and would hardly be surprised at the quasi-religious fervour surrounding Moravec's disembodied mind uploading meme.

"The arrogance of this vision is extraordinary," Dublin contends in Futurehype. "Consider some of the enormous assumptions behind this quest: first, that the mind or 'soul' is actually located in the brain and only in that part of the body; and second, that the structure of the brain, if it could indeed be thoroughly analysed, would be similar to and compatible with computer logic and circuitry, and could therefore be assimilated to it."

Selling Snake Oil?

This split separating AI and the cognitive/neurosciences has been exposed by a host of critics including MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum and UCSB Professor John Searle. There is a sub-genre of books that critique AI, from Professor Hubert Dreyfus's dissection What Computers Still Can't Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), which was an enduring thorn in the side of early AI proponents, to Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York: Doubleday Books, 1995).

Damasio's Code Correction

Accumulating evidence from the neurosciences suggests that modular brain processing structures differ to computer equivalents, according to internationally renowned neuro-physiologist and Alzheimer's disease researcher Antonio Damasio (M.W. Van Allen Professor of Neurology and Neurology Department Head at Iowa City's University of Iowa College of Medicine).