El paradigma de lo posthumano

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Reseña del libro Fear of Small Numbers

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Memorias, reescrituras y futurismos

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Copyright 2015, Manuel A. Crespo Rodríguez

Memorias, reescrituras y futurismos by Manuel Alejandro Crespo Rodríguez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The continuous techorg revolution: two million years to become cyborgs and beyond

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        Exponential growth is a real thing. Almost two millions years ago some primates started walking upright. A million years later they discovered fire. Five hundred thousand years later they started making better tools and using more complex symbolism, and 100,000 years later they started to use language, and with it culture was born. Fifty thousand years later started agriculture, and 30,000 years later civilization was born. Every time knowledge was duplicated and now exponential growth is increasing at an alarming rate. We are truly discovering that we are techorgs.

What is a techorg? It is a technological organism. To put it in Jason Silva's analogy, technology is the true skin of this organism. Humans are the first species to be categorized as a techorg.

I differ with Silva in something: we are not cyborgs, or at least not yet. Cyborgs have augmented abilities or cybernetic upgrades inside the organism, while the techorg —I argue—, may have cybernetic upgrades outside of the organism. In this sense a techorg isn't telepathic, it just uses external technologies that enables it to communicate beyond its organic range.

Nevertheless, we can become cyborgs and beyond. There's a law popularized by Ray Kurzweil, the law of accelerating returns, which explains that technological advances duplicate, and now it is duplicating at a notable rate. We may become cyborgs and, when the singularity comes[1] the rate of expansion will go beyond our human comprehension. AGI would then become the next techorgs, the same as we can become cyborgs; human cyborgs would be techorgs, and AGI and superhuman intelligence would be techorgs. This just reverberates some of Nietzsche’s ideas: the Übermensch[2], the Will to Power[3].

We are in a paradigm shift, in an eon where we will understand the true implications of being a techorg. Our grandchildren will have a different culture, for they will experience the singularity. Alarmingly, they could also experience what Hugo de Garis calls gigadeath, the death of billions of people in an hypothetical war called the Artilect War, a war between cosmists (people who want to build artilects, artificial intellects) and terrans (people who oppose the building of such god-like machines). Nevertheless, I’m more optimistic. Technology always gives us more, and for that technology is always good, even if it means that we become the next missing link.

Humanity is, inevitably, a continuous techorg revolution, one that has lasted for two million years and that it will not stop —or at least will not stop for the next couple of million years. Just as Foucault said, humanity is dead... but a more important idea is that humanity never existed, because the continuous techorg revolution never stops: it is always at the boundaries of what it means to be human.

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[1] The singularity is a hypothetical time in history when AGI (artificial general intelligence, also called Strong AI, which is artificial intelligence at human level) surpasses the combination of all human knowledge.

[2] The Übermensch, translated the Overman or Superman, is a desire to overcome the human condition, to better ourselves but not in a metaphysical way, but in a pragmatical way. The Overman is to man as a man is to monkey. Man needs to overcome himself because, according to Nietzsche, man has killed God.

[3] Will to Power is an idea never completely defined, but it is derived from Shopenhauer’s Will to Live. Will to Power is, according to Nietzsche, the core of human desire or ambition. It makes possible Nietzsche’s ideas, such as the Übermensch.

I'm not a cyborg

Lately I've been thinking about transhumanism. It could be thought that we are cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) but we are not. We are techorgs (technological organisms). The difference between me, a techorg, and a cyborg is that the machines I'm using aren't implanted in me, but are external.


If my smartphone was a technology implanted in my brain via nanotechnology, then I would be a cyborg. Hence, the difference between a cyborg and a techorg is minimal. After all, technology is one of the most important characteristic of being human. A techorg and a cyborg are almost the same.

Oda a la ley de rendimientos acelerados