Peter Thiel's Transhumanism and the Fear of Human Finitude

The Wire

2 days ago

Saroj Giri
Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring.
A sort of controversy recently made news following Peter Thiel's long and winding interview with the New York Times. Thiel who is a direct backer of J.D. Vance and very close to Donald Trump, is regarded as a highly niche brain among the Silicon Valley tech gurus – one of those supposedly super-intelligent humans for whom every major advance in technology and AI is too little and too late, a sign of a deep-rooted inertia.
Thiel pitches his work and vision at the level of epoch-making disruptions that would end human finitude and usher in eternal immortality. Thiel and others like Marc Andreessen talk as though they are offering liberation to humankind.
The guy who gave the world PayPal payments system and the Palantir surveillance system working closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is also offering the path of human liberation. Palantir's creation myth has it that the firm helped track Osama Bin Laden. Now they are closely aligned with Trump's very own deep state, as Palantir gets an even deeper foothold.
How can we not notice them?
Liberation and human finitude
For a broad contextualisation of what is going on, think of the many promises of liberation the world has seen from the time of the great saints and prophets.
Buddha showed humanity the way to liberation. And so did many other great saints and prophets from Lord Mahavira, Lord Jesus to Prophet Mohammed. No matter how one estimates these great endeavours, we can agree about the following.
In each case, the liberation of humans remained true to the character of humans as finite, limited and suffering beings. Liberation was not about humans striving to be what they are not, humans aspiring to be Gods, humans replacing Gods. Hubris could not be admitted here.
The Buddha shunned such hubris. For him liberation was all about hard ardent work (meditation) on the finite self and body, this little five-foot long body. While rejecting attachment and desire, the Buddha still regarded our earthly existence as who we really are, as fundamental to us.
Liberation was to occur from within the human condition. The human condition was no limit, no disability, no handicap, but the condition to take us to transcendent levels. The finite is the enabling condition for the infinite.
Indeed, closer to our time, Jacques Derrida gave a famous interpretation of Descartes's well known, 'I think therefore I am'. Derrida showed that Descartes here wanted to highlight our mortality and finitude as precisely what enabled us to soar higher, that is, engage in limitless thought. The latter 'I' in 'I am', which is the living being subject to death, lives on beyond death as thought, as 'I think'. Hence, 'I think therefore I am'.
Not just that. Our finiteness and mortality is integral to us as human beings. It is as mortal beings that we could, as thought, transcend and become universal.
Will humans endure?
But today there are many who seek to achieve liberation not by transcending the limited, finite character of humans but by denying it. They want to somehow exit the human condition and directly devolve into a sovereign and autonomous machinic intelligence, forever immortal and perhaps timeless.
In this approach, humans must cease for immortality to appear. And hence intelligence must be outsourced so that it is no longer subject to the finitude and mortality of humans.
In the interview with the New York Times, Peter Thiel proposed that the trans-in transexual or transgender should be stretched all the way to trans-human or trans-humanism. He proposed transcending the human condition, into immortality.
'The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body'.
Ross Douthat, the interviewer, asked, do you think humans will endure? Thiel paused looking rather blank. Douthat seemed restless and jumped right in, gleefully exclaiming, 'This is a long hesitation', clearly feeling vindicated. Here was something sensational, a viral gotcha moment, a scoop, for the NYT. As intended, cheap theatrics followed.
Soon word went around that Thiel does not want humans to endure and wants big tech to take over the world.
Critics of Thiel would see in his vision the Doomsday dystopia where humans would be slave to machine intelligence – conveniently forgetting that precisely this formulation is flipped around by Thiel and presented as the promise of immortality. 'Humans shall not endure' then does not as such put Thiel and his cohorts on the defensive, for this is precisely see a promise of immortality for the new humans or rather humanoids.
Also, not to forget: this long path towards this tech-driven immortality is already a lived experience for much of the world today as it translates into immediate plans. Large tracts of land in the fields of California and the coasts of Honduras are dedicated to the project to build new city-states funded by Peter Thiel among others. The reports title says it all, From Praxis to Prospera, Silicon Valley longs to break free. We know of Freedom cities dreamed of by Trump not in his MAGA moment but in his Peter Thiel moment.
We also know of Trump's backing of blockchain and crypto that are supposed to take care of all decisions as no one, no authority or even elected representative will have to decide anything. In a clearly libertarian mode, they propose the model of zero governance, ushering in frictionless efficiency.
But it is not just about the new forms of organising society and economy, but of a new biologically superior breed of super-humans, as we know from this report in the Washington Post, 'Inside the Silicon Valley push to breed super-babies'.
Inhuman superintelligence
In other words, for Thiel, machinic intelligence and algorithmic reasoning are not similar (or homological) to human philosophical thought. Thiel would reject any such homology or isomorphism. This allows billionaire tech bros to present what is essentially a social process of technological advancement as their own exceptional creation, innovation or invention.
No wonder Thiel, Musk, Marc Andreessen are touted as super-intelligent billionaires, those working so hard to take us beyond our finite, limited suffering condition and rocket us into immortality. We are supposed to think of them as something like the Nietzschean Ubermensch of the digital nomadic age, striving to raise humanity out of their self-imposed mediocrity and slave morality!
What we get is immortality through superintelligence monetised into billions and billions of dollars. The equivalence between this supposed super-intelligence and tremendous concentration of wealth is established in a way which looks increasingly unassailable to the usual discourses about inequality and income disparities.
At one level, this retailing of immortality does look no different than the medieval Church offering redemption and forgiveness by selling well-priced indulgences that the rich could buy. For now Silicon Valley seeks to sell immortality through machinic intelligence and by stealing data from citizens. The difference is of course that now it is about being a higher superior non-human, rather than trying to address a specifically human issue, the problem of suffering or sin.
The corruption of the Church selling indulgences was very human, while the intended clean break with the human that machine intelligence promises, is inhuman – and in fact phony, misleading. Now it is a relation of the inhuman (rather than superhuman) with the human, a higher intelligence lording over humans. Thus we already hear of the rise of a 'cognitive elite', what Yuval Noah Harari calls a superior biological caste.
But when immortality gets tied to super intelligence or to a particular purportedly all-powerful mind then it does becomes pertinent to ask: which mind? The collective, social mind or the mind of the avant-garde higher caste elite lording over humans?
Transhumanism and Marx
We must here take a pause here and broaden our view.
For we soon realise that at one level, indeed at a more fundamental level, there is no problem with transhumaniam as such. For when have humans not been about transformation, change, revolution and disruption?
Humans have always transformed nature and in that process transformed themselves. Such were the views that Karl Marx expressed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The cooperative powers of humans produce an intelligence which is homological to the social dimension. In this view, intelligence cannot be privately appropriated and presented as the super-intelligence which produces billionaires. But this is what capitalism does.
Marx understood and explained that capitalism is really like an incubator of a new kind of intelligence, based on private appropriation of social intelligence. Such are his views in his 1858 Fragment on Machines. Capital, in its outer limits, constantly tends towards what Marx called 'general intellect'. Capital exploits labour-power but ideally it would dream of generating value without labour-power. Marx notes capital's tendency to 'reduce labour time to a minimum'.
He writes: 'capital itself is a moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth'.
There is an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. The desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour-power once and for all so that, from then on, value can be created freely in perpetuity. Think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. You want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever!
Exploitation of labour-power generates a tendency towards finding an apparatus, a paraphernalia, productive assets or GPUs and servers, to freeze and preserve the capacity and the intelligence. This historical tendency of capital is so clearly seen in machine learning which is at at the very basis of machine intelligence and AI. Humans train machines, and the point is to train them such that human intelligence is congealed in them such that they will now function autonomously, as the new sovereigns.
Capitalist exploitation of labour would appear as the pre-history to the emergence of capital as now completely free of its dependence on labour. Labour would have eventually outsourced its real qualities and capacities. That is part of the impossible capitalist utopia which Marx is well aware of in the late 19th century. That this will also be suggested as the path of liberation is perhaps a more recent development.
Future in the present: Terminator
But look at the crucial difference in the way Marx saw the role and function of this utopia and promised liberation, and the way in which this is presented by the tech bros and others today.
The transhumanist narrative is such that it wants us to be preoccupied with incremental tech advances that are supposed to be 'revolutionary' even as they are all always already obsolete. Each moment is only an anticipation of whats next. This constant state of incitement means that there is never a Now-time, the time of the now, never a present we can really talk about. Every moment is borrowed time, in a disorienting swirl, where the present is always mortgaged to the future.
Recall how in the James Cameron movie of the same name, the Terminator (1984) is from the future – in fact, it necessary had to be from the future. The Terminator survived the nuclear holocaust which took place in the future yet to come. Viewers will remember how the lead female actor (Sarah Connor) is all bewildered by this presence of the future yet-to-come. The present is 'complete' only with this all important artefact from the future. The present is held in place by the future.
Your present, your time-of-the-now dissipates into nothingness when you realise that the present is already mortgaged to the future, that the present is a bizarre extension of the future. Isn't this our experience when we read a story like this: that we are about to reach the point of technological advancement which will make it possible to cryogenically preserve the super-intelligent after death, or send those like Elon Musk into outer space where they will eternally live and attain immortality?
Even though such a 'technological advancement' is mostly non-actionable, perhaps such a news item, for most of us, it casts a shadow on your inner psychic life or the unconscious.
You will perhaps be reminded of best-sellers like Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. Such self-help spiritual guides only create that extra pressure on individuals who start blaming themselves for not harnessing the 'power of the mind'.
I had written earlier that the now-time is really crucial for making sense of what is going on, not however to create your own little island of peace and calm (as Eckhart Tolle pushes us towards), but precisely to contend with all the forces of past and future that constantly define the present, to be aware as to what presses on us from all sides.
Thus it is easy to buy into Doomsday or apocalyptic narratives that are as abstract – which is precisely what the NYT ended up doing by sensationalising Thiel's worldview. Critique here seems to work only on the back of the sensational and the viral.
However Marx shows that the promised utopia and liberation of the General Intellect works in a different way.
He shows that the promised Utopia of capitalist freedom is not tied to this or that particular technological discovery or breakthrough which pushes further the tendency to 'reduce labour-time to a minimum'. It is always already at work right since the very inception of capital.
This utopia is what is necessary for the mundane, everyday capitalism to work. In fact this utopia lives on nowhere else but as embodied in everyday normal capitalism, in our ordinary material ritualistic practices. It doesn't exist as belief for we do not need to believe in them, but as what Slavoj Zizek calls objectified belief.
If you hold that capital was already formed in say the 19th century or at least much before the present day technological advances, then that promise, the utopia of an Intelligence freed from human finitude was always at work, much before the rise of the digital mode. Some scholars seem to identify the beginnings of this utopia at the time of the transition from tools to the machine in the Industrial Revolution.
Once energy could be stored, once information about a series of mechanical movements to be performed could be uploaded, a small slice of future work was already freed from its dependence on living labour. James Watt's steam engine is already such a machine, way back in the late 18th century. Intelligence gets a tad bit dissociated from living labour, from the human being. Shall we say then that the steam engine is that machine whose apogee is AI today?
Marx's notion of the general intellect then allows us to 'think forwards' about machine intelligence, algorithmic reason as well as 'backwards' with respect to the steam engine. That would be about 250-year history of capitalism which we can traverse in terms of its essential logic. We can then properly understand that philosophically speaking the tech advancements are following a long-forecast script. Conversely, we can then also decipher what is new.
Cult of life
Silicon Valley's attempt to technologically eliminate human finitude in search of a supposed immortality is both phony and philosophically boring. The attempt to replace or downgrade philosophical reason and thought by machinic intelligence is not just out-of-sync with the human condition as a given fixed a-historical species-being – it is in fact a symptom of a faux dynamism, a stagnancy in the midst of all the hype around futuristic accelerationism.
In effect, immortality is here reduced to a drab cult of life, or maybe a more edgy vision of eugenics to produce a superior caste of humans. A cognitive elite is prepared to rule the world, a new caste order. Cult of life entails a fear of death and a clinging to life which is rendered lifeless. I am reminded of what Georges Bataille said of art in relation to life and death.
He was dismissive of art for a good reason: 'art, which puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death'. The cult of life is ravishment without death, a ravished life which tries to outsource the power that death can bring to life.
Steeped deep in the cult of life, a kind of libertarian celebration of competition and anti-altruism, it might look like tending towards the Nietzschean ubermensch, particularly if you look at the so-called doomsday survivalist community Peter Thiel wants to build somewhere in New Zealand – but no, it has nothing to do with the Nietzschean vitality of life and tends more towards a postmodern neofeudal order of a new aristocracy, midwifed by liberalism and social democracy.
Saroj Giri teaches politics at the University of Delhi.
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