From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.
The Revolt Against Humanity is a fascinating exploration of the idea that humanity’s end is nigh, and that that’s not a bad thing. Compiling the recent history of this idea as written about by poets, scientists, philosophers, and novelists, columnist/editor/poet Adam Kirsch divides our impending extinction into two schools of thought: The Anthropocene Antihumanists (who believe that we are killing the Earth to the point that it can’t sustain us; and good riddance) and Transhumanists (who believe that we are approaching the “Singularity”; the point at which we will create the AI that replaces us as Earth’s so-called apex creation). At heart a philosophical treatise, Kirsch repeatedly makes it clear (through the writing of others) that there really is no point to the continuance of the human race: we are bad for the environment, bad to each other, not particularly happy as individuals, and there’s nothing inherently valuable in the way our species has evolved to interact with reality. I was surprised and provoked by many of the statements in this book, but I didn’t actually find it bleak: the events predicted by the assembled experts will either happen or they won’t, but there is value in contemplating how to find meaning in the present (at both personal and societal levels) if humanity doesn’t have a long future. I think that Kirsch definitely met his brief with this and I can’t give fewer than five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so. The attempt to imagine and embrace a world without us is the thread that connects the figures discussed in this book.
I highlighted so many passages and ideas, and they are for the most part self-explanatory, so I’m just going to assemble some lightly edited copy/paste bullet points without commentary:
• Antihumanists reject any claim humanity might once have had to admiration and solidarity. Instead, they invest their admiration in the non-human: animals, plants, rocks, water, air. Any of these entities is superior to humanity, for the simple reason that it doesn’t destroy all the others.
• Patricia MacCormack, whose book The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020), calls for “an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.” The second part of this demand is to be met by “the deceleration of human life through cessation of reproduction” and by “advocating for suicide [and] euthanasia.”
• David Benatar appeals to our compassion for humans yet unborn, arguing that the best thing we could do for them is to make sure they stay that way. The title of Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (2006) captures the paradox at the heart of his argument…When it comes to pain and pleasure, he argues, our duties are not symmetrical : “While there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being.” But according to Benatar, there is no such thing as a life that contains more happiness than suffering. In the final account, every life runs into the red; “there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.”
• In Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019 ), Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson write that a child born today will reach middle age in a world that is “cleaner, safer, quieter. The oceans will start to heal and the atmosphere cool — or at least stop heating.” The combination of population decline with advances in green technology means that E. O. Wilson’s half-Earth proposal might come true even without deliberate action. By 2100, we might be using less than half as much energy and land as we do today.
I was surprised to read that the declining birthrate might so quickly lead to environmental renewal, but even so:
• A study of 600 people of childbearing age published in the journal Climatic Change in 2020 found that 92 percent believed that the future would be worse than the present, while less than 1 percent said it would be better.
The only thing that makes humanity unique, transhumanists believe, is our ability to compensate for our biological weaknesses with the power of technology. Slower than horses, weaker than elephants, less versatile than roaches, humans dominate them all because we are able to change ourselves, while they are stuck with the abilities nature gave them. It’s not recent technologies like pacemakers that make us cyborg-like; we have always been cyborgs, because technology has always been a fundamental part of human being.
• French thinker Julien Offray de la Mettrie, whose 1748 pamphlet “Man Is a Machine” made a witty but serious case that “the human body is a machine that winds its own springs.” There is no metaphysical gulf between human and animal, or between animate and inanimate matter; the only difference has to do with how matter is organized. As La Mettrie puts it, “Nature has only one and the same dough for all, she has only varied the amount of yeast.”
• In 2008, English longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey posited that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old had already been born.
• For transhumanists, the singularity serves the same imaginative purposes that the perpetual motion machine did for generations of engineers: it promises to give us something for nothing. Scientific problems that are currently beyond our ability to solve, such as mind uploading and interstellar travel, can be adjourned until the singularity, when a superintelligent AI will solve them for us. So it is tempting to conclude that, like perpetual motion, the singularity is an impossible fantasy. But AI violates no law of physics, and the best-informed researchers seem confident that it can and will be achieved.
• David Bostrom observes, “the expected arrival date for AI ‘has been receding at a rate of one year per year’ ever since it was first predicted”. But he describes his work as “philosophy with a deadline”: at some point, he is certain the question of how to coexist with nonhuman minds will have to be answered. What will become of humanity when we have to relinquish our position as the planet’s protagonist — when history is no longer identical with human history?
• For physicist Michio Kaku, a SIM (Substrate Independent Mind) translated into photons is what will enable us to conquer the immense distances of outer space. “One day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel,” he writes in The Future of Humanity. “I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.”
Incidentally, Kirsch sums up the position of each side through recent fiction (of particular interest to me as I’ve read both novels). On the antihumanist side, Kirsch relates events from Richard Powers’ award-winning ecofiction The Overstory (and in particular, a scene in which a scientist drinks poison “as a demonstration of how human beings can best advance the cause of nature”). By contrast, Kirsch examines Ian McEwan’s transhumanist novel Machines Like Me (in which early AI robots choose to turn themselves off once they learn the ugliness at the hearts of the humans they are programmed to emulate, “There’s nothing in all their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.”) If the idea that humanity is facing extinction (and that that is a good thing) is a thoroughly twenty-first century concept, it’s unsurprising to read that it’s the novelists who are tolling the bell.
If rational thought leads to the conclusion that a world without human beings in it is superior to one where we exist, then doing away with humanity might be the consummation of humanism. There may be no choice but to accept the paradoxical promise that Franz Kafka made a century ago: “There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”
