by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

At a public square on the Lower Main a belligerent drunk in an electric wheelchair shouts obscenities at a police officer whose attempts to grab him are befuddled by the man's oversized vehicle. The cop, befuddled by the prospects of getting the drunk into the paddy wagon, awkwardly tries to grab the man again. Eventually the cop gives up and drives off.

The disabled man in the big wheeled machine has transformed disability into his advantage - the technology has turned him from a cripple to a space pod commander invulnerable to arrest. Body technology had kept the well-oiled man-machine from the backseat of the cop van.

It's a suitable image just prior to a meeting with Justice de Thézier, the local leader of Montreal's transhumanist movement, a recently formed gang of about 15 hardcore techno-utopians who seek to lobby and curry public enthusiasm for the improvements that technology can have for the human condition.

I was keeping a contacted-lensed eye out for a futuristic übermensch clad in exoskeletal scaffolding with a wearable computer and an integrated Webcam. But the chief local enthusiast of cyborgs and the gatekeeper of the cryptadia of the full-throttle human tech agenda comes equipped only with a cool name - Justice de Thézier, apparently his real moniker, and his physical form looked more metrosexual than technofutural.

Life extension, human gills

Sitting over a frosty ice drink, the UQÀM student articulately recounts how he discovered and embraced transhumanism while researching a script for an experimental movie, and has since embraced the possibilities of repairing and improving the human condition through cutting-edge scientific innovation. "Right now the public discourse on these issues is dominated by neo-Luddites and technophobes who are so afraid that they're even pushing for laws banning technologies that don't even exist yet," he says.

Thézier's mission is to get the world ready and receptive for massive scientific inroads which will give us unprecedented choices in altering our human form. Some stuff he foresees: germline engineering to remove diseases, giving ourselves gills to breathe underwater or animal feathers, or changing the colour of one's skin. "It'll take 20 to 50 years for most of this stuff to be safe," he says. Plus there is, of course, cryogenic revival and life extension on their agenda.

Transhumanists credit the birth of their movement to F.M. Esfandiary (aka FM-2030), an Iranian-American futurist who first laid the receptive groundwork between a future marriage of man and machine in 1966; in 1998, the World Transhumanist Association was founded, according to Thézier, "to defend the right of individuals in free and democratic societies to use new technologies that overcome the limitations of the human body."

Thézier says that our local gang is a thoughtful bunch whose only true eccentric is a vice-president who wears a voice-activated tape recorder around his neck at all times. "He's recording everything morning to night so he can be ready for when we download our consciousnesses."

The local group busies itself with the challenge of making government more receptive to the techno-future, translating documents into French and hoping to ensure that the poor also benefit from future innovations. "What people really want to know is whether human enhancement is only going to benefit the Donald Trumps of the world," says Thézier, who wants to bring superintelligent brain implants and other innovations to the all social strata by "guaranteeing safe, universal and voluntary access to them. Because for me, ultimately, it's all about the little guy finally having a chance to not only overcome the biological limitations we all have as human beings but also the social limitations imposed on him."

The future is now

Transhumanists believe that amazing technological advances will hit us quite suddenly, possibly in a magical moment called "singularity," when an advanced artificial intelligence unit will offer a host of technological advances all at once, at which point "the progress curve becomes nearly vertical," says Thézier.

Some improvements have already arrived, such as the improved method of cryogenic freezing called vitrefication, which he enthusiastically reports "turns a body into something like glass, thereby leaving tissues undamaged."

Perhaps the most heralded upcoming innovation is also the most controversial: germline engineering, which would see a defective or undesirable gene removed from one's genetic structure, ensuring that the trait would not be passed on. It's rife with controversy, but these guys are all for it.

Thézier wants people to overcome their apprehensions to what could be an unrecognizable human future. "There's too much technophobia out there. When the VCR flashes 12:00, what prevents people from adjusting it is the assumption that it's complicated, but in fact it's quite simple. So much technology now is ubiquitous and fundamentally integrated, and it's becoming more so, with the visual phone, the Segway - the list goes on."

Human 2.0

I later got McGill University bioethicist Margaret Somerville on the blower and it turns out she's abuzz with caveat emptor vis-à-vis transhumanism. "One of the things I'm interested in researching is the importance of the basic presumption in favour of the natural. It doesn't mean you can't change nature, but you must be sure that you are justified when doing it. The transhumanists have the opposite presumption. They think it's fine to do what you can. I feel that they've got an unbalanced optimism about what they can use science for," she says.

Somerville, who had a high-profile debate last year with Toronto transhumanists, says she's concerned that two tiers of humanity could evolve from techno-tinkering. "They think they will engineer the transition from human to post-human, to make a vastly superior model. In fact it would be so different from what we know as human, that what we consider human would be so inferior that it'd be a subspecies.

"The stated goal is to create humans that have superintelligence, superemotions, that you won't have to worry about wars and conflict because we'll be so well-programmed. That has an ultra-humanist base but I think it fails to understand the complexities and values of what we are."

Somerville also believes that efforts at immortality are also a dodgy goal. "We won't be wear-outable, they say, because we'll be made of replaceable computer bits. But once you start talking about immortality you're getting close to advocating a secular religion because that's what religions deal with - why we're here, what we're doing and how long we'll be here."

Somerville also worries about the vaunted germline engineering that would simply deprogram unwanted traits in an embryo. "That's really designing humans. The basis of democracy is that we are all free and equal and what that would mean is that the designed person is not free because they've been designed. It's not a free thing that happened to them, it's the ultimate form of slavery - genetic slavery."

Enhancement for everyone!

Nor is she persuaded by the idea that once somebody does it, it's full-speed ahead for the rest. "It's like using drugs in the Olympics. You're supposed to work out whether that's what you really should be doing in the first place."

One scenario Somerville suggests might come involves slowed ageing. "You go into the embryo and alter the ageing gene, so you wouldn't reach puberty until 25 or 30, you'd hit middle age at 60 and wouldn't actually get old until you were like 150. Is it acceptable to do that? Who will be the first to make their kid go through that?"

When told of this criticism, Thézier seems delighted that such debates are evolving, but he tosses suspicions back. "Bioethicists hide a conservative agenda and don't look at both sides; we're not a cult or religion. We don't have a cult hero," he says. "Nor do we all have shared values. Some transhumanists care about space colonization, for example, others don't. We have no dogmas. We're a humanist movement. We want to explain the benefits of funding research and development of enhancement technologies but also guarantee safe, universal and voluntary access to them through modernized health-care plans.

"Rather than banning these technologies for fear that they might increase social inequalities, they should be seen as tools for the poor and disenfranchised to gain not only better health but social mobility."