Transhumanism and law :: The Patriots

by Kamil Muzyka

Law generally falls into two incongruent categories: the natural law and the positive law. While the natural law encompasses universally accepted moral principles and social sense of justice, reflecting the zeitgeist or the spirit of time, the positive law ignores these premises, focusing instead on human-made laws, such as statutory and common law.

In its current state of legal advocacy, transhumanism does not exactly fit into either of these categories, representing an amalgamation of the two. Some transhumanist lawyers support same-sex marriage and morphological freedom, viewing it as the zeitgeist, as opposed to the morality-based fossil socio-legal structure.

Others, seeing death, aging and anthropocentrism as archaic and obsolete, advocate for granting legal rights to individuals in suspended animation and personhood rights to non-humans, such as sufficiently advanced AIs, cetaceans, great apes, elephants, etc.

Transhumanists certainly need skillful lobbyists and litigators in their ranks to effectively advance their cause, but what do they really want? Do they want absolute and unsanctioned by the federal government or international authorities freedom of scientific pursuit, such as chimerical engineering of humans, neural emulation, cyberware, senescence suppressants, cognitive enhancements or morphological modifications, with no legislation prohibiting or inhibiting privately funded research? Or do they want governmental funding for anti-senescence treatment, suspended animation, cyberware implants, and enhancements?

Do they contemplate the need for enforcing medical treatments, such as vaccination, and establishing a morpho-law where proper authorities would supervise and monitor human and non-human modifications and protect the modified from the unstable and harmful mods, or do they intend to follow the my body, my right, my choice initiative with all the pros and cons such freedom entails?

So what will the legal system look like in the future? Will the Computer Assisted Everything age dispense with the need for a real life attorney? As the computer technology introduces new means of controlling our environment, it seems likely that future legal services would be provided by our AI assistants, whose skills would certainly exceed the capabilities of any traditional law office. Equipped with the Internet of Things technology proficient at gathering, processing, and analyzing legally significant data from our environment - though relays, sensors, displays, etc. - our AI assistants would instantaneously provide us with sound legal advice in any area of law.

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Transhumanism and law :: The Patriots