Transhumanism and The Journal of Evolution and Technology

This piece was first published over on the IEET site. It sets out briefly what The Journal of Evolution and Technology is all about, for those who might be interested.

I’ve had the honor of serving as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology (henceforth “JET”) since January 2008 – so it’s now approaching seven years! Where did the time go? Having been invited by Kris Notaro to write something about an aspect of transhumanism as it involves me professionally, I’m taking the opportunity to reflect briefly on JET and its mission. We have a great story to tell, and perhaps we should tell it more often.

JET was founded in 1998 as The Journal of Transhumanism, and was originally published by the World Transhumanist Association. In November 2004, it moved under the umbrella of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which, of course, seeks to contribute to understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and societies. This year, then, we are celebrating the first decade of the journal’s publication by the IEET.

My four predecessors in the editorial chair – Nick Bostrom, Robin Hanson, Mark Walker, and James Hughes – have each contributed in distinguished ways to the transhumanist movement and transhumanist thought. They developed the journal as a leading forum for discussion of the future of the human species and whatever might come after it.

JET is now one of the IEET’s flagship operations. It maintains standards of scholarship, originality, intellectual rigor, and peer review similar to those of well-established academic journals. It differs in its willingness to publish material that comparable journals might consider too radical or speculative. The editors welcome high-quality submissions on a wide range of relevant topics and from almost any academic discipline or interdisciplinary standpoint.

We have a publication schedule that assigns one volume to each year, with an irregular number of issues per volume. Each issue contains a mix of articles, reviews, and sometimes other forms such as symposia and peer commentaries. We publish both regular issues – based on submissions received from time to time – and special issues. The latter may, for example, take the form of edited conference proceedings, or they may result from calls for papers on a designated topics.

Recent special issues have covered such topics as Nietzsche and European posthumanisms, machine intelligence, and basic income guarantee schemes in the context of technological change.

Generally speaking, we publish individual articles as they are received, peer-reviewed, and edited, which allows a quick turnaround from acceptance to publication. With our relatively modest resources and the challenges inherent in a journal with such a wide interdisciplinary agenda, we are sometimes slower than we’d wish in making initial decisions to accept or reject, but we strive to overcome those problems and we give careful attention at all stages to each submission that we receive. We work closely with authors to get published articles into the best possible form to communicate to a highly educated but diverse audience, and we’ve often received grateful thanks for our editorial input. In short, we have much to offer potential contributors who are producing research at the leading edge of transhumanist thought. If that sounds like you, please think of submitting to JET.

Central to our thinking, and implicit in the title “evolution and technology,” is the idea – increasingly familiar and plausible – that the human species stands at the threshold of a new form of evolution. This is very different from the slow Darwinian mechanisms of differential survival and reproduction. It is powered, rather, by new technologies that increasingly work their way inward, transforming human bodies and minds. According to this idea, technology can do more than merely give us tools to manipulate the world around us. It can actually alter us, and not just by shaping our neurological pathways when we learn to handle new tools. Our future may, in part, be the product of emerging technologies of human transformation, ranging from genetic engineering to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement to such radical possibilities as mind uploading and all that it might imply.

This idea of a technologically mediated process of evolution is, of course, familiar to transhumanists, who envisage (and generally welcome) the emergence of intelligences with greater-than-human physical and cognitive capacities. Even outside the transhumanist movement, however, there’s an increasing familiarity with the general idea of a new kind of evolution, no longer the product of Darwinian mechanisms but driven by technology and deliberate choices.

At the same time, this idea, in all its forms, remains controversial. Even if we grant it our broad acceptance there remains much to debate. It is unclear just how the process might be manifested in the years to come, just where it might take us or our successors, and what downsides there might be. No serious person should doubt that there will be risks, possibly on a global scale, in any path of transition from human to posthuman intelligence.

The idea of technologically mediated evolution, perhaps with a great transition from human to posthuman, merits careful study from all available viewpoints. Among writers and thinkers who take the idea seriously, there are bound to be disagreements. To what extent is the process already happening? If it accelerates or continues over a vast span of time, will this be a good thing or a bad thing – or is it a phenomenon that resists moral evaluation? What visions of the human or posthuman future are really plausible: for example, does the idea of mind uploading make good sense when subjected to scientific and logical scrutiny? Reasonable answers to such questions range from radical transhumanist visions of sweeping, rapid, entirely desirable change to various kinds of skepticism, caution, or concern.

JET welcomes a spectrum of views on all this, and we have been willing to publish intellectually serious critiques of transhumanist views alongside radical manifestos by transhumanists. We are unusual, though, in providing a forum for radical proponents of new technology to develop their visions in detail, and with a rigor seldom found elsewhere. Their ideas are then available in their strongest form for scrutiny from admirers and critics alike.

As I said at the start, there’s a great story to tell about JET – the journal has a rich history and exciting prospects for the future. If you’re not familiar with what we do, please check us out!