Monthly Archives: October 2013

Becoming Less Human

vitruvianOn this week’s podcast we talked about disturbing futures — future worlds that aren’t necessarily dystopias, but that nonetheless don’t look terribly appealing to us back here in the past. I focused mainly on futures in which the population has abandoned some traditional aspect of the human experience.

It isn’t always a bad idea to depart from things we have had for a long time. Slavery and blood feuds  have a long pedigree in human history and pre-history, but few would take seriously an argument that we should still have them around — even though, tragically, they do persist even into the 21st century.

But slavery and blood feuds, along with honor killings, genital mutilation, and even cannibalism, are ultimately social practices. We can pick and choose among social practices without bringing our humanity into question — until we get to the core ones around personal relationships and families. For example, a future without marriage, or family relationships, or friendship would look, from where we sit, like a distinctly less human world than the one we currently occupy.

On the show I talked about suggestions that in the future we might do away with eating or sex (not just the act, but the whole psychological, cultural, and physiological shebang) or emotions. Technology will soon give us greater control over our physical and psychological makeup than can be easily imagined today. Each of those characteristics may, in fact, become optional.

People might forgo eating in favor of ingesting regular doses of soylent or some other nutritious sustaining glop. They might design bodies for themselves without sexual organs or secondary sexual characteristics and rewire their brains to remove notions of sex or gender from their own identities.  They might edit their neural architecture in such a way that nothing frightens or angers them — or even makes them happy.

On the issue of sex, one of the listeners pointed out that 1 in 100 people are asexual — am I saying that they’re less human than the rest of us? No. They are part of a mix that includes people who are highly sexual and people who are mildly sexual. Human society includes nuns, nerds, accountants, soccer moms, Kardashians, Clooneys, drag queens, bull dykes, and Anthony Weiner — to name just a few from the huge range of possibilities. If everyone became asexual — or if even a lot of us did — it would be a very different world. A less human world.

Likewise there are people who can’t digest food and have to be on an IV. Of course they’re human. And there are people with psychological and neurological disorders who lack some (or all) emotions. Sure, they’re human, too. But note that they are described as having a disorder. 

Is that just prejudice? I don’t think so.

Going forward we have a lot to figure out. We are carrying a tremendous cultural and evolutionary baggage that we might be better off without. But there are some essentials in there, too, some of which may be packed very tightly — perhaps inextricably — with things that we would prefer to think of as optional. We will need to proceed cautiously.

(Image by Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be)

 

How Long Is the World’s Longest Book?

bookshelvesOur new book project, a collection of ideas for making the world a better place entitled The World Transformed, has been going by the nickname “the World’s Longest Book.” I want to be quick to point out that the proposed Abridged Edition of the The World Transformed will not be anything remotely approaching the world’s longest book. With 100 authors contributing not more than 1500 words each, the book will be hard pressed to make it even to 200,000 words (what with introductions, authors’ bios, etc.) and less than 500 pages.

At best you could describe a book with those characteristics as One of the World’s Many Somewhat Longish Books, or even the World’s Most Average Book. Either way, not something to get terribly excited about.

However, our plan is to give away at least 10,000 copies of the Abridged Edition, asking each recipient to submit a chapter to the full online version of the book and to invite others to do the same. If they all submit a chapter, or if some of them do, and invite others to do the same, who invite still others, and so on, and we end up with 10,000 chapters the full Online Edition of The World Transformed will be roughly 100 times as long as the Abridged Edition.

Would that make it the longest book in the world?

Sadly, no.

It would make the book significantly longer than the world’s longest novel, as certified by the good folks at Guiness. But our book is nonfiction and it seems likely that the real longest book in the world is probably a work of nonfiction. For example, I just learned today that the US tax code runs some 74,000 pages in length — no idea how many volumes that is. The 10,000-authored Online Edition of The World Transformed would, at most, only run about 50,000 pages — just two thirds as long as the tax code.

Of course, the plan is not to stop at 10,000 authors. 100,000 sounds a lot better, but not nearly as good as a million. A book with a million authors and a million chapters — now that’s a project worth getting excited about. A million authors will give us a book that will run somewhere between 3 and 5 million pages in length. Call it 50 times the length of the tax code.

At that point, I think we can safely say that we have produced the world’s longest book. Some will no doubt argue that it won’t be as long as Wikipedia, and that’s true. Even with a million chapters, The World Transformed will be only about a quarter the size of Wikipedia. But let’s not forget something very important, here.

Wikipedia is not a book.

The world Transformed, on the other hand, is a book, with a first chapter and a last chapter. It will be formatted such that you can download it to your favorite book-reading device, should you have the capacity on your device to support that (and the uncontrollable desire to do something so utterly pointless.) Or if you prefer to rock it old school, we’ll make it possible to do a one-off printing of all (approximately) 10,000 volumes of the finished book.

Pricing TBD.