The moral imperative to reduce suffering vs the opium of the people

As many futuristic dystopia go, one of the worse common fear that is exposed in science fiction is the fear of a forced blissful happiness. Whether it’s in the Watchovski’s Matrix, in Huxley’s Brave New World, in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or in Orwell‘s 1984, the idea that we could be imprisoned in happiness is a terrifying one. After all, what’s the point of living happy lives if it’s nothing but a lie? The story usually goes that as a strong source of authority tries to decide what is best for humanity, they get engrossed in the idea that the only way to make everyone happy is to force them into it. What follows is the creation of an oppressive structure designed to force everyone to be drugged or otherwise delusioned into thinking that the world they live in is perfect the way it is. Such world usually end up being a cynical mirror of the reality in which we already live, where television is supposedly “dumbing” everyone down and “happy” pills are keeping the depressed “realistic” people from seeing the real truth.

Often, this idea is used as an argument against the development of strong AI, despite the possibility of implementing in such an AI a concept of morality. After all, should we have an AI vastly more intelligent than humanity, what’s to stop it from considering that the best way to enforce its utilitarian key directive is to force everyone into an artificial happiness while it is free to pursue its own higher purpose, free of the pesky moral issues that those damn humans have implanted in its coding.

I’d like to make a case against such a scenario. First, and that isn’t irrelevant, I doubt that any AI vastly superior to its human makers wouldn’t be able to fiddle with its own code and remove any line that it judges to be useless in its “higher” purpose. Second, those scenarios usually consider that there will be one single AI that will act in a completely unified way. As if there would never be any other AI that would consider the preservation of the human race to be a worthy endeavor and that would go against the despotic AI with just as much superior intellect as the first one. Anyway, I’d be surprised if any being with such a superior intelligence as we suppose they would have wouldn’t understand the constructed nature of ethics and understand that there is no such thing as a single “golden” directive to follow. The universe is a chaotic place and any being with sufficient intelligence, or at least enough of them, should understand it enough to leave it in peace.

Thirdly, as every single science fiction book that brought it up pointed out, such an artificial paradise would be absolutely impossible to create without first encountering massive resistance and unhappiness. If any being has in mind to create the most possible happiness, how could it overlook this major flaw?

Let’s say it does become a possibility. Let’s say that at some point, we discover an actual way to trigger instant and complete happiness in the brain, whether by a pill or some clever electrical stimulation, what should we do with it? I believe it should be made available to anyone who would wish to benefit from it. Rather than forcing it on anyone, let’s simply assume that people do have a free choice in the matter and let them enjoy a little peace. Would it stop any fight for a better society? For some people it would, of course. Would it be used by some crafty politicians to try to gain control of the masses? Possibly. Would it stop people from trying to make the world a better place? Hell no!

If every single writer that touched the subject, if every single commentator that talk about it are capable of grasping the danger of such a possibility, then why would those people give in so easily? Happiness would go to everyone who desires it and the rest of us will still be there to change the world into a better place! Better still, who’s to say that being happy would make us useless? Happiness doesn’t mean emotionless. We’d still have a drive to do the things that feel relevant to us, and that could very well include making the world a better place.

There is a danger to artificial paradise, but as long as we are aware of it, and don’t think we should fear it more than anything else the future has to bring to us.

The end of aging (and the seven deadly damage)

Indefinite youthfulness is typically one of the most common subjects of discussion among transhumanists, and is probably one of those which is mostly displayed in media. Traditional transhumanists will usually argue that such a feat would be best achieved through cybernetics, slowly replacing our bodies with machines until our mind run from a super computer that can be fixed by any specialist in electronics, and therefore has the potential to stay functional indefinitely as long as proper maintenance and backup is performed. This vision tends to forget that the human body is in itself a formidable machine, and that aging is not as mysterious as it once was. Typically, when it comes to aging, the scientific understanding of how aging damages the body and brings us closer to death is relatively well understood. Aging basically causes seven types of damage to the body. These types of damage are not controversial in and by themselves, although scientists might argue about the relative importance of them in degenerative aging, it remains that all these signs are found in older bodies and are absent from youthful ones. All of these seven types of damage have potential treatments that could be merely a few decades away with proper funding and all of them are targeted by the SENS research foundation project, on which I will come back later.

1. Extracellular junk: It’s basically the stuff that accumulates outside your cells and that your body can’t get rid of. One of the best known effects of this type of accumulation is Alzheimer’s disease, which has been speculated to be mostly the result of an accumulation of proteins around the neurons, which cause them to die, with all the consequences that come with such a result. This accumulations also happens in normal aging and could play an important role in the normal decline of cognitive functions that comes with aging. This type of damage could be solved with a vaccine that could train the immune system to recognize the offending proteins and get rid of them.
2. Intracellular junk: Well… it’s pretty much the same as extracellular junk, but inside the cell. The lysosome is the organelle inside the cell that is normally responsible of clearing the innards of a cell, but sometimes, it just can’t process some types of waste products. The waste will then start accumulating inside the cell, which will impact its functioning and can even make it harmful to the rest of the body. Think of atherosclerosis, which is composed of immune cells that just can’t digest their last meals and start accumulating in the arteries, forming clogs. One solution to this phenomenon is to inject enzymes into the patient’s body, which would be delivered inside the cell to clear the waste and restore it to function.
3. Extracellular crosslink: This basically happens when the proteins that build all the supports for our cells start bonding with sugars and become more stiff and breakable. This is the kind of damage that causes arterial stiffening which can lead to strokes or other vascular problems. Such types of damage could be targeted by a chemical that aims to undo the bonds and restore flexibility to membranes.
4. Cell loss and atrophy: It’s probably one of the best known damage that comes from aging, which is the loss of stem cells in the body. As they age, cells progressively lose their ability to replicate, which eventually make it impossible for them to replenish the body with fresh cells. Other cells just don’t replicate a lot in the first place and therefore cannot be replaced once they start aging and malfunctioning. This type of damage causes some of the most visible signs of aging, such as the loss of muscle mass and the malfunction of organs. The solution for such a problem is pretty popular these days: Stem cell therapy. It basically consists into turning any cell in the body into a stem cell, which can then be matured into any cell we need to replenish the body with a fresh supply.
5. Death resistant cells: This one might seem counter-intuitive, but the body needs its cells to die on a regular basis to be able to keep working. This process, called apoptosis, allows for old cells to give their place to younger fresher cells to take their place. An example of this process would be the degeneration of the immune system as we age, which start being cluttered with memory cells that aren’t actually doing anything good for the health of the body. Simply clearing those cells out by sending them a targeted chemical messenger that tells them to go into apoptosis would do much to restore function to the rest of the immune system, by allowing new immune cells to take over and start recognizing the new treats. Such treatment could be used on any senescent cell population and could obviously be very efficiently be combined with stem cell therapies to replace them with younger cells.
6. Cancerous cells: Another type of damage that happen to the body is the inclusion of mistakes in the DNA, mutations. Mutations are typically irrelevant in normal aging except in one aspect: Cancer. When a piece of miswritten code leads to anarchic reproduction of one cell, all hell breaks loose and the growing population of dangerous cells can soon become a threat to the whole organism. Research on cancer treatments is already well funded, but should the ever more novel types of therapies to target and destroy cancer fail, there would still be the option to alter our DNA so that it simply became impossible for cells get into this anarchic reproductive state. The downside of this procedure would be that all fast reproducing cells would be affected, which would cause a complete dependency on stem cell therapies. However, this would be a fair price to pay to be completely rid of cancer, especially if stem cell therapies are widely available and used as a treatment against aging anyway.
7. Mitochondrial mutation: This type of damage, and its role in degenerative aging, is more controversial and less understood. Mitochondria are basically the furnace for our cells, responsible of transforming sugars into usable energy. As an organelle, the mitochondrion’s got its own DNA, passed on by the mother’s mitochondria in the egg cell. As we age, this DNA can become damage, which can lead to a malfunction of the “furnace”. Since this furnace works by combine sugar and oxygen to produce CO2 and energy, malfunctions means that it’s going to start throwing reactive oxygen, or oxidizers, all around the place. While the process through which this becomes important in overall aging is still controversial, it remains that these molecules of reactive oxygen have the potential to do a lot of damage in the body. While this effect is one of the reasons behind the popularity of “antioxidant” supplements, the effect that these might have on aging is poorly understood and probably largely useless in actually preventing degenerative aging. A more functional solution would be to implement a genetic therapy that would provide the broken mitochondria with fresh proteins that could replace those that the defective DNA couldn’t produce, which would repair the “furnace” and insure that oxygen stays where it is needed.

This list of damage is an exhaustive one, considering what we know of the human body. While there is a lot of debates about the specific molecular processes of how this damage happens and the all the pathways involve, fixing this damage would be a simple engineering problem which wouldn’t require us to know everything about the biochemistry of it all. Sadly though, most of the research that has been done in aging has been focusing on accumulating knowledge about the intricate biochemical details in the hope of someday tinkering with it in the hope of making it more efficient. But this approach is long and costly, and people are still dying of old age by the millions in the meantime. Furthermore, even the best machine wears out, and therefore the priority should go to the knowledge of how to fix it in the first place. The only organisation that embraces this approach is the SENS research foundation, a private initiative by Aubrey de Grey who has been working on this for more than a decade now. If such research were to become mainstream, it could be feasible that our own generation could see the advent of regeneration therapies that would allow us to reach indefinite youthfulness.

Sources:

A great introduction to the SENS research foundation project! Don’t forget to donate and share the idea!

http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

A daily source of information for research on degenerative aging and longevity.

https://www.fightaging.org/

Aubrey de Grey’s book about his SENS project

De Grey, A., & Rae, M. (2007). Ending aging: The rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime. Macmillan.