One of several drivers for my stepping towards ministry (and thus also at least partly away from my higher education career in engineering and communications) is my growing sense that technology is going to present increasing social and psychological issues, and that the rate of change is faster than most of us can manage to track. Some futurists refer to this increasing rate of change as leading to a technological “singularity”. And I wish to speak to that in a balanced and life affirming way. As an avid science fiction reader since childhood, and having had a strongly technologically based career, I do of course feel very excited about some of the things that we might be able to do in the (perhaps not too distant) future. Technology can be a wonderful enabler. However this excitement has to be balanced by other factors. The first for me is intensely personal and I have to navigate around this psychological issue so that I do not occasionally have kneejerk anti-technology reactions. Specifically, no amount of critical and informed reading of the Bible, helpful though it is, has been able to completely remove the crude and fearful residue of my teenage exposure to apocalyptically oriented Christianity. This has led to me being highly sensitive to the prospect of any technological and/or social system that might lead to controlling whether we might “buy or sell” (as per Revelation 13:17). Yet we move ever closer to this territory with advances in mobile communications technology and bio-electronic interfacing (coupled with the likely desire of elites to exert such control) and sometimes I feel that, if it happens incrementally enough, even my wariness may be bypassed. I do not, by the way, regard this wariness as entirely negative – there are many genuine arguments that can be made in this territory without recourse to Revelation or even the Bible, of course. No, I am simply owning my own baggage. Aside from this personal issue there are, of course, significant balancing philosophical and ethical considerations. I have expressed these recently elsewhere, mainly as questions, and so I include below the text of my short article* from the Unitarian publication The Inquirer (The Inquirer, no. 7882, 16 January 2016, p. 11 inquirer@btinternet.com ):

My gratitude to the Rev Dr Maria Curtis for her article “Is ‘Artificial Intelligence’ an oxymoron?” (Inquirer, 21 November 2015). I appreciate her defence of humanity in the face of simulations that might superficially represent humanity and/or intelligence. I will not add to the arguments on this front but instead point out that, whilst robots and AI represent an extreme case that can be identified and dismissed in the way Maria does, in due course we will face something much more ambiguous, namely significantly augmented humans. Augmentation may be through electronic hardware, software and/or biological systems and, with such people increasingly being termed transhuman, we might wonder if they will remain human at core.

This is the stuff of science fiction increasingly being made real. It represents enormous opportunity but also significant problems. Philosophically how much of our bodies (and body processes) can be engineered/replaced while we remain human? Already use of smartphones is changing how we think. As we increasingly hand over our thinking an intrinsic part of what seems to be our person will actually be our augmentations at work. Will the beating human heart (if not replaced…) become a much less significant aspect of who we are? Furthermore access to augmentation is likely to be highly unequal. The world’s mega-rich may covet such augmentation but how likely is it to be made available to humanity as a whole? How long before humanity experiences a technologically mediated bifurcation? And further yet, at what point will it become impossible to not have the government mandated augmentations that permit control and access to life’s necessities?

I may sound fatalistic – I strongly suspect that we will “progress” in this way, i.e. if augmentation can be done we will be unable (and maybe unwilling) to make an opposing case sufficiently clear to prevent someone somewhere following through on our collective curiosity and species wide actualization urge.

So what’s a Unitarian to do? Well we can at least campaign for equality of resource distribution and access. We might also begin to consider how we could campaign for protection of homo sapiens 1.0 without denying the urge to upgrade and the love for the transhuman. So our love and reason are required, including what James Luther Adams called “epochal thinking”. Arguably we are collectively just dipping our toes in the water in this area with the increased visibility and acceptance of transgender individuals (not that the humanity of transgender individuals is in any way in question but identity issues are clearly at stake) but this may seem quite straightforward compared to what could lie ahead!

*The article has been headlined “More to fear than Artificial Intelligence” as it referred to a previous article on that subject. However I wish to reiterate that I have a balanced attitude between openness to technology’s opportunity and reservation about risks and problems.