Teleporters

We can imagine, and sci-fi writers have indeed imagined, a piece of future technology that can transport people across a vast space in a short period of time, or even instantly. A good example here is the “Farcaster” in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. Let’s say we call the device that can do this a “Teleporter”.

It is possible to imagine different ways in which the Teleporter might work. A classic one is to use an artificial wormhole. For our purposes, we imagine a special mechanism that may or may not be realistic: the sender device decomposes the object being transported to record all information related to it, transmits this information at the speed of light (or even faster), and recomposes it on the receptor side using materials there. Therefore, this version of the Teleporter is akin to a fax machine that always shreds the source material.¹ The classic Star Trek Transporters seem to be somewhere within this camp.

The following statements follow immediately:

• Teleporters would have a significant impact on human civilization. Once a society adopts them, going back to a world without them would be catastrophic. Hyperion provides a good imagined scenario of a society that relied heavily on this technology and lost it overnight.²
• It leads to the philosophical problem of whether the person that comes out of the receptor is the same person that entered the sender. It is possible that the original is dead, and all we get is a copy of it in the sense of Davidson’s Swampman.³ This should be an old point of debate for Star Trek fans.

All of the above is probably old news. But what I think makes this scenario more interesting is the contention it displays between individual humans and Human as a society, or more narrowly, as an economy. A Human that depends on Teleporters to function relies on humans that potentially die and are reborn every day, and the implication of this sounds like a metaphysical and moral disaster, and a disaster particularly on the individual human level. But prohibiting the use of Teleporters due to this concern would significantly reduce the efficiency of Human, at least if Human is left without alternatives for extremely fast intergalactic travel.

Therefore, if the future Human that obtains this technology does not hold individual human lives in much higher regard than its natural tendency toward economic growth, expansion, and efficiency, it is quite imaginable that Human would uphold the use of Teleporters as a lesser evil, and thus redefine the meaning of being a human, potentially for the worse for individual humans. This seems to resonate with Marx’s famous statement that “the essence of man” is not an “abstraction inherent in each single individual”, but “the ensemble of the social relations” amongst humans.

All of these are fairy tales, of course. We don’t have the Teleporter and, for what it’s worth, may never have it. But if we allow for some reverse extrapolation here, this line of thought suggests that a life-changing technological advancement, if coupled with a Human society that does not align its values and intentions well with those of individual humans, can be a philosophical, moral, and physical disaster for humans. The relevance, therefore, is hopefully self-explanatory in this day and age.

References

• Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989).
• Donald Davidson, “Knowing One’s Own Mind” (1987).
• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845).