Letter #8: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Like Lonestar, They're Already Here

My Beamish Boy,

Since it falls on me to begin our third week of conversation, I’d like to take the opportunity to change our course a little. In our opening essay, Those Who Remain, we declared (with our trademark charm and audacity), “Everything the anti-humanists believe makes perfect sense, if there is no God. We believe there is. This changes everything.” In our first two weeks, we got right down to the business of describing some of the reasons why we do believe in God and some of the Everything that faith changes.

But in the same opening essay, a few sentences earlier, we pointed out that the anti-humanists “seek the obliteration of the human race… And for the first time in history, it looks as if the power and technology to make their vision possible is coming into existence.”

On cue, Elon Musk announced last week that his company Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface (BCI) into a human being. As I write, Elon has not revealed anything about the individual who received the brain implant. He simply says the technology — to be called “Telepathy” — "enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking."

So, like, yikes.

Now obviously, the most reasonable reaction to this news is something akin to the shriek Donald Sutherland lets out in the final frames of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I mean, it’s pretty easy to see where this is going. The first BCI implants will be irresistible because they’ll let blind men see and lame beggars walk or some such useful thing. But pretty soon, people will be popping these buggers into their brains like eating M&M’s until everyone is transformed into a human-machine hybrid with Klaus What’s-his-Face secretly reprogramming us to eat caterpillar grubs. I can already hear the podcasts with names like BugPilled, featuring some 22-year-old hipster drawling through his vocal fry: “Hey, the illusion of free will is over, man. Get with the new normal.”

Because the mindless path from occasional cure to universal addiction has become the pattern of scientific “progress” in the capitalist West, it’s always the wisely cautious who get caught flat-footed. Desperate to stop the stampede, they start babbling ill-conceived objections. It violates nature! There’s unintended consequences! It’s a conspiracy! All of which means nothing if your kid is falling behind the bio-engineered genius in the seat next to him at school.

After all, from eyeglasses to pacemakers, body technology can truly sweeten life. What we’re looking for is not the end of science, but the continuation of humane humanity.

What then are the criteria that will keep us from swerving off the road to Gizmo Heaven and onto the eight-lane highway to Cyborg Hell?

You should know the answer. You’re a doctor!

Love,

Your Beamish Dad