Health beyond the carbon barrier

摘要

Silicon Valley donors have been investing heavily in a range of transhumanist longevity and immortality ventures. Theirs is a particular, culturally embedded endeavor, shaped by specific histories, ideologies, and futures that present new posthuman views of life, death, and survival. These projects aim for a future world in which the fundamental ontological categories of mind, life, and nonlife will have finally collapsed into one another thanks to the intercession of silicon-based digital or informatic technologies. The key term that denotes such a project is ‘convergence’ – used as much by transhumanists as by mainstream scientists and policymakers. Here I critically explore the ‘project of convergence’, tracing its history in the United States, and examining some of the projects and activities that have coalesced around it. These specifically include artificial intelligence, in which human persons are to be transferred from carbon-based to silicon-based substrates, and nanotechnology, in which work at the nano resolution aims at the reconstitution of the carbon-based or biochemical body. Although the concept of convergence emerges out of a transhumanist imaginary, the ideas and plans behind it have gained increasing traction in mainstream technoscientific projects. In contrast to some other health concepts that have been recently expanded to incorporate the organic nonhuman environment, these projects expand notions of health via robotic and computational formations in ways that, I argue, are moving health beyond the carbon barrier, pushing us toward an era in which intelligent existence deserving of care will not be understood as exclusive to carbon-based life forms.