Transgender Martine Aliana Rothblatt (Martine Aliana Rothblatt), is an American lawyer, author, entrepreneur, former transhumanist and current transgender woman, as well as the founder of the famous influential organization “Sirius XM” (an American broadcasting company based in Manhattan, of New York, which provides satellite radio and Internet radio services operating in the United States). Of the 70 years she has been alive, Rothblatt has spent only 30 of them as a woman. Before she changed sex, she had created a family of five, which supported her in redefining her sexual orientation (indeed, her ex-wife remains with her to this day, while her children still call her “Dad”).
Although Rothblatt’s personal history is extremely rare, her idiosyncratic social footprint and entire trajectory make her a distinct case apart. When her youngest daughter was stricken with a progressively developing and worsening severe circulatory disease (pulmonary hypertension), Rothblatt founded a biotechnology company and succeeded in finding a life-saving treatment for the child. Her company today has an annual turnover of more than one billion dollars, while her personal compensation ranks her at the top of the list of the highest paid corporate CEOs in the US and the entire world. He has “predicted” that in the future people will succeed in uploading their minds to the computer.
Rothblatt – who is now also on the Board of Directors of the renowned Mayo Clinic – captures this bio-transition in her digital conclusion to her book From Transgender to Human: A Declaration on the Freedom of Form (2011): “The surgical and pharmaceutical technology enables body modification in a transgender realm….Government Technology has allowed people to immodestly assume the guise of an unlimited variety of sex types and live, work, and play cybernetic lives with these transgender identities. ». In a way, this virtual self is more real than the physical self. And when the body dies, its virtual “shell” will survive into eternity.
Moving beyond human transgender rights, Rothblatt advocates for legal recognition of all forms of synthetic life, from robots and artificial intelligence to transposed human simulations. He explains: “The first step in extending the lessons of transsexuality to transhumanism is to recognize the continuity of life across the range of substratums, just as the continuity of gender across the range of body types. This means that conscious entities, whether flesh, synthetic, or hybrid, must be treated equally and without difference under the law.”
So when entire swarms of the rapidly proliferating chatbots (software applications or web interfaces designed to mimic human conversation through text or voice interactions) claim to be “conscious,” those AIs should have the same voting rights as us—yet and if they rapidly outnumber humans.
It is an action like mass migration, combined with the “non-player characters” in video games (“Non Player Characters” – NPCs), game characters that the player cannot control. Instead, their actions are directed by the software and often act as a reaction to the behavior of the game’s controlled characters. In fact, in role-playing games, NPCs are important to enhance and advance the current plot of the game. The “consciousness” and “rights” of these artificial entities may seem like an extreme and ridiculous argument, but it seems that in recent years it has come to the fore.
Proponents include Australian philosopher Peter Albert David Singer (born 1946, moral philosopher and professor of bioethics at Princeton University), British evolutionary biologist Clinton Richard Dawkins, born 1941, who is also an ethologist, and writers of popular science books. Until 2008 he held the Chair for the Popular Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford) and the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party in 2016, the American Zoltan Istvan Gyurko (Zoltan Istvan Gyurko), born in 1973, transhumanist, entrepreneur, journalist and futurist, degree in philosophy and theology from Columbia University, New York. The latter also argued that gay rights are a fundamental step towards the civil rights of cyborgs / “governmental organizations”.
Unfortunately, one is tempted to equate transsexuality with transhumanism, but of course the world is more complicated than this anti-physical and anti-historical oversimplification. Civilizations branch out in unexpected directions. These are still fringe concepts in the gay community, just like the heterosexual majority. As a school of thought, transhumanism is primarily led by heterosexual (actually or hypocritically) white males. But some transsexuals are also strong critics of transhumanism, such as the journalist, author, historian, philosopher and eschatologist Emile Phil Torres (Emile Phil Torres). However, at the radical end of transhumanism, in a feverish attempt to alter biological rhythms with technique, the ideology of transsexualism ultimately becomes a slippery slope toward the technological oblivion of man.
There is plenty of room for heterosexual transhumanism as well: Returning to natural reproduction, we find that human breeding programs have become commonplace in wealthy nations. For most of our species’ history, choosing a mate and conceiving a child were matters of instinct and faith. Is he strong? Is she nice? Are we ready to bring new life into this world? What does God want? Without technological filters, the stakes of these decisions are quite high. Unfortunately, however, their failure rates are significant. Abortions, infant mortality and birth defects are common in pre-modern societies. But this is changing rapidly.
In today’s Techneion, heterosexual couples who have difficulty conceiving rely on a number of fertility techniques. For same-sex couples, biomedical companies and surrogate mothers for hire offer their .. “additional services”. The technological filter opened its gates for their offspring to pass through. Any parents with inherited disorders now have ways to reduce or eliminate the inherited risk for their children. More ambitious parents are willing to help genetically psych their offspring in order to improve their “bloodline” and make their offspring more competitive.
We are all attached to our maker “genetic hand” that shaped us, but these parents find affordable ways to win the hard game of the struggle for existence. They are ready to beat evolution at its own game.
In the neo-Darwinian view, wild animals are subject to the whims of nature. Random mutations … exchange cards in an organism’s genetic deck, for better or worse final combinations (usually worse). Such a mutation could mean a bigger brain or stronger bones, but more likely it means cancer or skeletal deformity. There is also sexual recombination. Each sperm and egg carries half of each parent’s genes, which are redistributed and reshaped when the gamete is formed. After conception, the male half of these biological rearrangement “playing cards” mixes with the female half. Mutation and recombination are the events from which new characteristics arise.
As the game of life unfolds, natural selection discards any unsuitable combinations into the Darwinian dustbin. Thus, in the normal state of nature, each generation is a renewal of the bloodline, the lineage. In difficult times, most genetic diseases and deformities are separated and removed. Meanwhile, the fittest are retained.
Eugenics is based on the idea that culture has relaxed this selective pressure. As a result, genetic disorders have piled up in humans, along with unsightly faces and low intelligence quotients (IQs). But this is not a problem that cannot be fixed. For liberal eugenicists, the Techneion provides softer and gentler alternatives to the horrific process of natural selection. Currently, three primary tools are readily available: In vitro fertilization combined with pre-implantation genetic testing and embryo selection.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) started with the first “Test Tube Baby”, Englishwoman Louise Joy Brown, born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1978 Since then this practice has become the norm for infertile couples struggling to conceive. In the US about one in ten couples have fertility problems and millions turn to IVF, with 1 to 2 percent of American parents each year having test tube babies. The woman is given medication to stimulate egg production and the eggs are surgically removed. The man’s sperm is injected into the eggs in a Petri culture dish (Petri) with special nutrients and the growing embryo is placed in a temperature-controlled chamber (incubation oven) for about five days. If the couple wants more options, they can produce ten or more embryos at a time.
The pre-implantation test is the key to the eugenics process. DNA is extracted from each embryo, sequenced in the laboratory and examined for any genetic issues. Embryos are frozen until results are secured. Easily recognizable conditions include chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome, trisomy or Turner syndrome. More detailed genetic analysis can be performed to identify cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, Tay-Sachs disease or gangliosidosis (lipid accumulation and destruction of central nervous system cells), and many other single-gene disorders. Of course, gender selection is immediately available for parents with … idiosyncratic requirements.
If a fetus is identified as defective, “he” or “she” is thrown into the biological waste bin. The result of such procedures is mass abortion before children ever feel the warmth of a womb. It’s a process of elimination, sandwiched between randomness and detailed planning, between a mindless poker tournament and a cold spelling bee. Once a set of desired embryos is determined, the “embryo transfer” follows: He or she is thawed and implanted in the uterus of the mother or in the rented uterus of a surrogate. Assuming the pregnancy is uncomplicated and the fetus is born healthy, the targeted genetic disorder has been removed from the parent’s pedigree. Therefore no natural selection is required.
A classic example of this process is the comparative rate of Down syndrome in Ireland and Iceland. The condition is caused by an extra chromosome, so it is easily recognized by prenatal testing. In Ireland, where religious norms and legal prohibitions have stifled selective abortions, many children are still born with Down syndrome. In Iceland, with its most progressive attitudes towards “liberal eugenics”, there are no more children with Down syndrome. This silent genocide of the disabled is just a snapshot of a much larger transformation to come, with profound consequences for human biology and social life.
“Genomic Prediction” (“Genomic Prediction”) is a biotechnology company in New Jersey, USA, founded by the American physicist and geneticist Steven Dao Hui Hsu (Steven Dao Hui Hsu) and funded by Sam Altman, CEO of the company “Open AI”
[OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the non-profit OpenAI Incorporated (OpenAI Inc.) and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Limited Partnership (OpenAI LP). Note that Elon Musk initially worked with this company on artificial intelligence programs and later left, denouncing OpenAI’s practices and goals].
“Genetic Prediction” offers genetic screening for IVF embryos, a more sophisticated scorecard for this “embryo contest” of evaluation. Advanced artificial intelligence is a secret to their success. For five years, genomic prediction has provided tests for a number of controversial traits. Another potential genetic target is height. Embryos judged to be brachysome are discarded. Another key goal is intelligence. Potential future fools will be condemned as unclaimed.
To be precise, there is no single “intelligence gene”. Although a large number of genes (perhaps a thousand or more) are associated with intelligence – even this is questionable. Geneticists claim to detect conditions such as Huntington’s disease or Down’s syndrome with 99% accuracy. But the variation in IQ? The most certain predictions are about twenty percent. More than twenty thousand proteins are encoded in the human genome. Many of their functions and interactions remain a mystery.
Because of ethical controversies, “Genetic Prediction” only offers results that indicate lower IQ, thus producing negative eugenics. They think they can spot higher IQs for clients, but they won’t. At least not yet. However, once society works out the moral whims, habits and related problems, there will be a large enough market for positive eugenics. A rigorous poll conducted this year in the US revealed that almost half of us adults would use pre-implantation genetic testing to select for high IQ offspring if it meant their child could gain entry into a “from the top 100 Colleges”. Almost a third said they would use direct gene editing to get their child in there.
This poll tracks a 2022 Pew Research Center study on “Artificial Intelligence and Human Augmentation” (Pew R.C. is an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion and demographic trends, information that ultimately shape the United States and the world). Nearly half of Americans said they would like “gene editing to significantly reduce their baby’s risk of serious disease,” and nearly 40 percent said society would be “better off” with such procedures. A further 20% said they would like “computer chip implants in their baby’s brain to achieve much faster/accurate mental processing”.
If customers want pre-engineered babies implanted with brain chips, companies will be happy to provide them for a modest fee. Should the technology prove effective – or just convincing – widespread adoption of the technology is all but certain. Some bloodlines will continue to be removed from our gene pool through birth control and fetal abortion, while others will mutate irrevocably. Chances are high that the genetic landscape of the late twenty-first century will change profoundly, for better or for worse. However, technology “wants” biomedical eugenics.
