Why politicians need to stop hindering technological progress – OpEd – Eurasia Review

By Ben Murnane

I was born with a rare genetic disease called Fanconi anemia (FA), which kills many people at a very young age. Life expectancy when I was a child in the 1990s was 22 years. With AF, your bone marrow fails and your body cannot produce new blood cells to keep you alive. A bone marrow transplant can give you a new chance at life, but it does not eliminate all of the limiting risks associated with the disease.

In 2001, I became the first person in Ireland to undergo a new type of bone marrow transplant involving the immunosuppressant drug fludarabine. I was 16 years old. My early years of living with a low life expectancy – and being saved by modern technology and medical science – gave me an abiding interest in how we extend life expectancy more broadly and in innovation.

Innovation is the fuel that powers new life-saving medicines and new technologies that make everyone’s lives better. Unfortunately, today, politicians, both left and right, are more interested in restricting and controlling innovation than encouraging its potential.

We have a left that demands “net zero,” even if it means ending air travel and bringing living standards back in time. The left is skeptical of technologies that show promise in mitigating climate change without the need for massive human sacrifice, even though technological solutions are exactly what the public wants and how they think climate change should be addressed.

At the same time, the political right tells us that we cannot have lab-grown meat, as elected leaders seek to protect established industries like meat processing.

These points may seem completely separate from medical innovations and life-saving interventions, but they are not. They speak of a political culture that has come to view innovation as something to be restricted and its direction controlled, rather than allowing human minds to be free.

Case in point: When an incredible new technology like AI emerges – with all its potential to improve education, make the legal process more efficient, and save lives through better healthcare – politicians’ main concern is how to regulate it. .

I believe it is very important for voices in politics to champion the power of innovation to radically improve human lives, even if those voices come from far outside the political mainstream.

I take this issue so seriously that this month I’m publishing a book five years in the making about a political activist whose central message is innovation. Is called Transhuman Citizen, and it’s about the wild political world of Zoltan Istvan, one of the world’s best-known transhumanists. He ran for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020 and was also a Libertarian Party-endorsed candidate for governor of California in 2018.

Istvan defines transhumanism as the most extreme 10% of all science or innovation. It is basically a movement that defends the right of humans to “transition” into a much stronger species; perhaps even a new species someday. He argues for a radically longer life expectancy – perhaps, in the coming decades, the option of living forever – through genetic research and cybernetics. Includes “mad science” like cryonics and age-reversal therapies. It also includes interventions such as exoskeleton suits for paralyzed people to walk and robotic eyes for the blind to see. Elon Musk’s Neuralink implants, which enable brain-computer interface, can be considered a transhumanist technology.

Transhumanism is certainly far-fetched compared to the politics of the leading candidates, but as I detail in my new book, Istvan’s quest to make “living forever” an available life choice represents at least a singularly bold vision of where this technological moment lies. can take us. , which can inspire the transformative innovations of the future. His campaigns have coincided with tens of billions of dollars from people like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel flowing into start-ups seeking to realize the “transhuman” vision.

Advanced technology is an immutable fact of human existence today. And yet, outside of the tech industries themselves, few people seem to champion it or celebrate the way it has improved our lives, or where it could take us in the future.

More likely, the media conversation focuses on mitigating the harms of technology – for example, the mental health crisis caused by social media or the jobs that will be lost to AI.

Istvan and other members of the transhumanist movement, at least, have fought to put science and innovation at the center of political debate. We are asked to imagine radical new forms of freedom that can only exist in a world where we have more advanced technology, which gives us more choices about how we live our lives.

As someone who grew up wondering if I’d be alive next year, and is still alive today thanks to modern technology, I’m grateful that there’s a movement out there that wants to talk about how advanced technology could extend all of our lives — and wants us to consider possible futures that we may never have considered before.