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For “human subject research,” we refer to the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki,
keeping in mind the 1932-1972 Tuskegee syphilis experiment, possibly the most
infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history. In 2015, the Nonhuman Rights
Project filed a lawsuit with the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of two
chimpanzees kept for research by Stony Brook University. The appellate court decision
was that chimps are not to be treated as legal persons since they “do not have duties and
responsibilities in society,” despite Jane Goodall’s and others’ claim that they do, and
despite arguments that such a decision could be applied to children and the disabled.46

What prevents extension to other animals, organoids, machines, and hybrids? As
we (e.g., Hawking, Musk, Tallinn, Wilczek, Tegmark) have promoted bans on
“autonomous weapons,” we have demonized one type of “dumb” machine, while other
machines—for instance, those composed of many Homo sapiens voting—can be more
lethal and more misguided.

Do transhumans roam the Earth already? Consider the “uncontacted peoples,”
such as the Sentinelese and Andamanese of India, the Korowai of Indonesia, the Mashco-
Piro of Peru, the Pintupi of Australia, the Surma of Ethiopia, the Ruc of Vietnam, the
Ayoreo-Totobiegosode of Paraguay, the Himba of Namibia, and dozens of tribes in
Papua New Guinea. How would they or our ancestors respond? We could define
“transhuman” as people and culture not comprehensible to humans living in a modern,
yet un-technological culture.

Such modern Stone Age people would have great trouble understanding why we
celebrate the recent LIGO gravity-wave evidence supporting the hundred-year-old
general theory of relativity. They would scratch their heads as to why we have atomic
clocks, or GPS satellites so we can find our way home, or why and how we have
expanded our vision from a narrow optical band to the full spectrum from radio to
gamma. We can move faster than any other living species; indeed, we can reach escape
velocity from Earth and survive in the very cold vacuum of space.

If those characteristics (and hundreds more) don’t constitute transhumanism, then
what would? If we feel that the judge of transhumanism should not be fully paleo-culture
humans but recent humans, then how would we ever reach transhuman status? We
“recent humans” may always be capable of comprehending each new technological
increment—never adequately surprised to declare arrival at a (moving) transhuman
target. The science-fiction prophet William Gibson said, “The future is already here—
it’s just not very evenly distributed.” While this underestimates the next round of
“future,” certainly millions of us are transhuman already—with most of us asking for
more. The question “What was a human?” has already transmogrified into “What were
the many kinds of transhumans? . . . And what were their rights?”

46 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lawyer-denying-chimpanzees-rights-could-backfire-disabled-
n734566.

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