Getting Our Priorities Straight

One plank of a technoprogressive platform is “Ensuring Universal Access to Enabling Technologies.” Ultimately, we want all responsible sentient beings (excluding children, criminals, the insane, etc.) to have equal and uninhibited access to advanced tech that might enable radical life extension, brain augmentation, sensory expansion, and other “wonders” not yet even contemplated.

A big step toward achieving that goal would be a general acknowledgment that items like decent housing, health care, and basic education are fundamental human rights and not just privileges reserved for those who can afford them.

Putting such words into action is not easy, of course—one of the first acts of the fledgling United Nations was to pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, but we are still a long way from seeing it fulfilled in much of the world, including the United States.

Unless and until the most basic human rights for all humans are assured of protection, technoprogressives will not get very far in promoting access to enabling technologies. And we shouldn’t. Our first priority must be to build a strong foundation, and only then to start actual construction of our platform upon that.

Both the foundation and platform might take some of their shape from another old idea—Abraham Maslow’s pyramidal “hierarchy of needs,” a theory he originally proposed in 1943:

By putting our weight squarely behind efforts to insure that all humans (and someday all sentient beings) have a right to at least the lowest level on Maslow’s hierarchy—and, arguably, the second level as well—then we’ll have a much better chance of getting somewhere.

After that process seems well on its way, we can focus on higher levels. With this approach, communities and nations will be quite used to the idea of recognizing and guaranteeing access to basic rights. The challenge, then, is to continually upgrade the meaning of “basic rights” until eventually we reach the point when our demands will include all of the enabling technologies that can be offered safely and responsibly.