Reflection on John Harris’s “Enhancement Are a Moral Obligation”
I’ve gotten my hands on a new copy of Human Enhancement, edited by Julian Avulescu and Nick Bostrom, and the first article I chose to delve into was titled: “Enhancements…
What does it mean to “care” about something?
In order to care about the future, it’ll help for us to open by discussing an event from the recent past.
Situation – Eastman Kodak Company (1989): By the late 1980s, Kodak was number 18 on the Fortune 500, and had been the giant of photography for nearly 100 years.
Looming Changes: They had conducted research that showed that digital cameras would likely overtake film photography – whether they liked it or not.
As the digital era approached, Kodak leadership basically had two options:
Option 1: Ignore or deny the looming changes
Option 2: Take the changes in the world seriously
On Politeness: It would have been so impolite to be the person in the Kodak boardroom asking to think about the future without film at all. So, the leaders collectively chose the polite failure of their business, rather than the impolite hard discussions that were necessary to give themselves a chance to transform and embody a further form of what they once stood for.
(Note: For a vastly expanded exploration of business survival logic and its correlate to the survival of life itself, see the longer article on this topic: The Business of Value Itself.)
And as soon as they picked option 1, they sealed their fate. Within a single generation, film photography went from global domination, to being far less than 1% of all photographs taken globally – a total victory for digital technology.
Philosophers like Epicurus or Lao Tzu (or Emerson) would say that in a long enough time horizon, all forms eventually fade away or transform – and in today’s fast-moving world of business and technology, most of us just sort of understand this intuitively.
In a changing world, stasis isn’t an option – unless you want to share Kodak’s fate, you have to embrace that transformation is necessary, and define and move towards a positive transformation.
If Kodak leadership had taken option 2 and asked “What do we value about it that we want to survive, even if its form doesn’t stay the same?”, they might have come up with some useful and inspired answers:
With any of these valued principles or ideas, Kodak could have conceived of a future beyond film where their most important values were carried forward, allowing Kodak to continue being useful in the world. Of course, their strategic direction might have been incorrect, but the most incorrect business decision was denying the necessity of change (a surefire path to destruction in a changing world).
In fairness to Kodak’s leadership, they had reason to defend film, they were vested in it. It was their entire business for a whole century, thinking about change was very hard.
In addition, many of us smart modern people have benefitted from seeing more waves of creative destruction than the Kodak execs would have, we’ve seen the transition to the internet, to to mobile, now towards AI.
To attempt to preserve the form of something is inferior to promoting the flourishing of that same something.
Most of us modern smart people just sort of know that:
“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation
There are many contexts where we understand this intuitively:
In the physical sciences, basically everything that is discovered is understood to be only a current best consensus, established and fortified explicitly for the purposes of being build upon or understood in a more profound and exacting way (like our transition from Neutonian physics to relativity, or our static model of the universe to the hypothesis of the big bang, etc).
Whenever humans don’t apply this definition of caring, it’s a kind of coping. It’s a kind of wilfull denial of reality, and an attempt to escape into a static and familiar fantasy.
Kodak saw film as sacred and so didn’t want to change it – and we know how that turned out for them.
We could probably agree that if something sacred – or especially if something is sacred – we should care for it by taking seriously its necessary positive transformation.
And you’re probably consider humanity to be sacred, right?
Situation – Humans (2025) – In 2025, humans are the very top food chain, the very pinnacle of volition and power among earth-life, and have been clearly dominant for ten thousand years.
Looming Changes: Many humans agree that many forces are pressing on us now that could easily bring about our destruction or transformation (see: Short Human Timelines) – whether we like it or not:
As a tremendous number of forces of change press on us, and as the AGI era approaches, humanity has two choices:
Option 1: Ignore or deny the looming changes
Option 2: Take the changes in the world seriously
On Politeness: It is quite impolite to a human being who asks ardently about how value could be carried forward into the multiverse, even if humans are not the one to carry it. So, humanity might collectively chose the polite sink into attenuation and destruction, rather than the impolite hard discussions that are necessary to give ourselves a chance at transforming and becoming something more.
Now the crossroad gets much more dire, and the consequences much larger than when we were merely talking about one photography business. It’s even bigger than our species. We’re talking about implications for the total light cone of sentient life into the future, and the continuation of all that we know to be valuable.
We must face this choice squarely with the wisdom we already know:
“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation
Clearly, option 1 would be coping, and would not be the kind of “care” is warranted for something as sacred as humanity.
So what would option 2 (taking looming changes seriously) look like?
If we want to avoid Kodak’s fate, we can decide to do what Kodak’s leadership refused to do, namely:
While its remarkably uncouth to openly discuss the transition to posthumanity (and to grapple with the inevitable attenuation of humanity), many leading thinkers have shared their ideas on this topic in the Worthy Successor interview series (see the full playlist on YouTube here).
Across my many Worthy Successor interviews with Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer, Richard Sutton, Michael Levin, and many others, there have been two qualities most commonly states as “must haves” for a desirable posthuman intelligence: (1) consciousness, and (2) autopoiesis (the capacity to continually expand potentia, as we have seen in nature from the “bubbling up” of new powers and form from single cells to humans beings). There may be other traits and qualities we could define, but these two are a great start, and discovering how to replicate and expand those important traits is one of our most important final imperatives.
I don’t expect we’ll have very much agreement on those three bullets points above.
But agreement isn’t what we should be aiming for.
If Kodak leadership could go back in time and find a way to give themselves a chance and transformation and survival, they wouldn’t have gone back in order to “agree.”
Remember, their failure (so common to those who try in vain to deny reality) was in being too polite, in not being willing to say the uncouth and hard things, to get the hard issues on the table to be hashed out to build a positive pathway forward.
Agreement isn’t the point. The point is to (as we mentioned above) look squarely at the situation and trends, determine what is valuable, and determine how to move forward.
Ask yourself:
The navigating of hard, consequential choices in response to hard realities is not comfortable or serene, and for this reason – people often settle for “stasis”, which is really settling for destruction and failure.
The purpose is not to generate “impoliteness,” the purpose is to get at the hard facts and make hard decisions, and if that involves bringing up uncouth topics, so be it. The greater good demands bypassing such stupid pleasantries, there’s work to be done.
“Caring” – when it takes the form of ensuring something’s positive transformation – will by its very nature sometimes be uncomfortable.
We’re mature enough to understand this in every other domain of life – and we must be mature enough to accept it in the domain of the trajectory of earth-life.
Given how precious this sentient life on earth is, and how amazing its powers and abilities as it has bloomed and climbed from worm to man… and as we face a present moment where we are charged with stewarding that flame of life forward… we absolutely cannot forget that:
“Caring” means preparing something for a necessary positive transformation
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