William James, Nihilism, and Kurzweil

The fundamental philosophical question of the 21st century, according to Kurzweil, is to come to an understanding of what it means to be human. The subtitle of his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, is "when computers exceed human intelligence". Without going into the range of machine capabilities that Kurzweil projects by the end of the century, the main idea is that in time, we are more and more acquiring the means to create a superior species, whether entirely machine, or man-machine hybrid. The Luddites among us will offer the initial resistance, and perhaps successfully block publicly funded research, as we see in the stem cell controversy.

What nags at the back of my mind is that, no matter what kind of sophisticated argument we could mount against human beings modifying their own structure, there seems to be an inevitability that once a capability is created, it will be used. There is something irresistible about it. Add to that the possibility of big private money going into the research in order to get proprietary results, it almost seems like philosophical argument is irrelevant. We will have a brave new world. But why label it such?

There is something to be said for reflecting on the identity of man, and fighting for it. I haven't done enough research to know about the possibilities that Kurzweil has so glowing described in his book. We are indeed beings who grow technologies like turtle grow shells. And come to think of it, maybe even technology, even Clarke's nightmare idea of Living Software hookup to our brains and body parts, is not the issue. Maybe the issue, in this era of world culture, globalization, is what Nietzsche described over a 100 years ago: rise of science and secularism really means God is dead, we have killed him, and there are no replacements for what religious orthodoxies offered us.

This is the problem of nihilism. Nietzsche confronted it. William James confronted it. It exists in the hollowness of our mindless entertainment and consumerist culture. So what if we create a Brave New World? There is no other point to human life except ever expanding consumption, right?

Is this the end of history, then?