If human populations in different geographical regions can be identified by DNA, while the vast amount of human DNA is identical, then, in the regions or places on the genome that are variable, there must be markers that reveal biogeographical regions of origin. DNA polymorphisms (letter changes in the nucleotides) are currently the choice markers because most human polymorphisms are characterized by alleles that are unevenly distributed among the world’s distinct populations.

Stories of family deceits and deceptions have become commonplace in a media receptive to personal tales of triumph and tragedy. A distinguished geneticist learns in his mature years that his mother, while married to his legal father, had a secret affair that begat him. A best-selling author discovers that her paternal DNA was from a medical student serving as a sperm donor and not her legal father, who traced her ancestry deep into Eastern Europe. A woman who, as a newborn, was left in a bag abandoned in the foyer of a Brooklyn apartment building searches for her biological parents 23 years later. These revelations are the result of the millennial DNA ancestry revolution.

In these reflections, I have focused on philosophical issues concerning the insight that we have always been cyborgs. Technology has always been a part of us, and this applies to the emerging technologies, too. The judgements ‘Nature = good’, and ‘Technology = evil’ are part of a traditional dualistic mindset which is no longer plausible and which has many dangerous implications. This does not mean that there are no dangers connected to emerging technologies. The more efficient a technology is, the better the advantages, but also the greater the risks. These can be terrible, given inappropriate political circumstances.

I regard the implementation of a new type of paternalism as highly dangerous. A relational ethics has such paternalistic implications. With an awareness of the terrible paternalistic structures of the German ‘Third Reich’, I am convinced that everything must be done to avoid the occurrence of such frightening paternalistic political structures. Relational ethical approaches have such dangerous implications. I regard individual personal freedom as a wonderful achievement which must not be undermined.

There are critical posthumanist approaches which argue that it would be best if humans died out. There are other such approaches which demand that human existence on Earth must be regulated such that the relational complex of the Earth lives in an appropriately attuned order. This, however, demands that eugenic practices need to be implemented. We would need to forbid people to procreate other people. This undermines the wonderful achievement of negative freedom for which we have fought on various levels during the Enlightenment process. Scientists, intellectuals, as well as the wider public have fought for their rights to live in accordance with their idiosyncratic wishes, longings, and desires, and I regard plurality and negative freedom as wonderful achievements; I am happy that this insight is widely shared today. If you start from this insight, however, then it can be more problematic to deal with some global challenges like climate change.

Instead of the demand to introduce new eugenic laws concerning procreation or to get rid of human beings or to return to a natural world before the time during which evil technologies destroyed our harmonious relationship with nature, we desperately need to focus on technological solutions for the various issues which can be associated with climate change, for example in vitro meat; roofs made of solar panels;

In the Middle Ages, scholars discussed how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Nowadays we talk about Bostrom's simulation argument, as it was popularized by Elon Musk. Both topics are fun. Both discourses make sense from the perspective of the specific cultural background. In the Middle Ages we had a Christian background. Now we cherish the sciences and technology. Yet, by dealing with these questions, we avoid being concerned with the most pressing issues of our times.

I progress as follows. Firstly, I will argue that there is no pragmatic need to be concerned with the simulation argument. Digitalization and automation are important developments. However, the most pressing moral issues concerning digitalization do not have to do with our being threatened by a super-intelligent AI. They have to do with total surveillance, privacy, and negative freedom. Secondly, I will show that we need to radically reinterpret the relevance of digital privacy, embrace total surveillance, and accept the collection of digital data for a democratic purpose. Thirdly, I will further reflect upon the following issue to provide some information on the question of how such a system could be structured: what could it mean to cherish negative freedom, to respect a person, and to avoid harming a person? Thereby, it will become clear that a democratic usage of our digital data is a pragmatic necessity. My philosophical ideas are intended to provide grounding for further reflections.

Transhumanism without mind uploading and immortality

I have heard transhumanists claim that mind uploading is the crux concerning whether someone counts as a transhumanist or not. This is not the case. Julian Huxley, who first coined the term transhumanism in 1951, would not be a transhumanist if you had to believe in the possibility of mind uploading. I do not regard mind uploading as impossible, and I definitely hold that we can and should use technologies to move beyond the current limitations of our existence. However, gene or cyborg technologies are far more likely possibilities of fulfilling this goal in the near future (Sorgner 2018b). Gene technologies cover the wide range of options from gene editing via gene analysis to selecting fertilized eggs after IVF and PGD (Sorgner 2016b, 140– 189).

The purpose of DNA ancestry genealogy is to determine what the geographical origins are of an individual’s ancestry, regardless of where he or she is currently living. The scientific premise behind this exercise is that people’s DNA contains sequences of their ancestors’ DNA, which can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years, and that their ancestors were settled in a region of the world that remained relatively isolated. This isolation allowed ancient populations to remain inbred within certain geographical parameters. Inbreeding is the mating of humans closely related by ancestry. It is more likely to occur in isolated, non-migrating populations, resulting in a loss of genetic diversity and a high incidence of birth defects. Mutations in the DNA circulating within these inbred populations can provide a genetic fingerprint of the geographical region in which they were located.

I finished writing this book just as we passed the anniversary of the first nationwide UK COVID-19 lockdown (on 23 March 2021). It was a year unlike any other. Most importantly and distressingly, it saw more than 10,000,000 cases of the disease and in excess of 140,000 COVID-related deaths across the UK. In response to the rapid spread of the disease in March 2020, the government took infection control measures that involved suspending basic civil liberties – including freedoms of movement and association – and shut down significant sectors of the economy (essentially those that involved person-to-person contact). Education, for both school-and university-level students, was severely disrupted. Twelve months on, many of these regulations were still in place and the government was still effectively ruling by decree. It had committed enormous sums of money – close to £350 billion – to counter the effects of the pandemic, fairly evenly divided between support for households and businesses on the one hand and public services, especially the NHS, on the other. Public debt for 2020/21 was on a similarly unprecedented (peacetime) scale – at around 17 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In whatever way we choose to define the welfare state, it was transformed by the pandemic – though many of the changes were supposed to be ‘temporary’. Millions of people of working age became dependent upon the state for an income in a way they could never have anticipated. The number of people on Universal Credit (UC) – the government's principal welfare benefit – doubled from 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 in the nine months from March 2020 to January 2021. Through ‘furloughing’ for employees and support grants for the self-employed, the government avoided the mass unemployment – and the associated collapse of spending power – that the rapid contraction of the economy would otherwise have precipitated. The recession was still severe – GDP declined by around 10 per cent in the year to April 2021, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – but the hope was that recovery could be fairly rapid once more ‘normal’ trading conditions were restored. The government repeatedly found that its temporary measures – for example, furloughing and the £20 per week uplift in UC – had to be extended.

Those who search diligently enough through the dust-covered boxes in the lumber room of old Labour ideas will generally find what they came looking for. Writers of almost every disposition – from hopeful flat-earthers to scheme-mongering crypto-fascists – have at some time or another ventured an essay on ‘Labour and the way forward’. Whether these are hidden treasures or well deserving of their long-standing neglect, there is plenty to choose from. As with all Labour Party history, this rather selective searching is almost always undertaken with a very presentist and political intent. This chapter is one more example. I do not pretend that the story I tell is the true story of Labour's ideational past, though I would say that the contrasting Blair-Giddens account of ‘old Labour’ is something of a caricature. I will argue that, for all their failings, many earlier Labour thinkers (and not just those on the fringes of the party) were well aware of the challenges of effecting gradual change in a capitalist economy and society. They often recognised that wealth was more important than income. They saw that there were limits to what a progressive taxation system could do. They did not think that a slowly expanding welfare state could go on indefinitely eroding (class) privilege, if prevailing patterns of ownership were left untouched. In government, and for completely understandable reasons, Labour almost always ended up doing, rather messily, what it incrementally could – and tended to tell itself a comforting story about how this made things (at least a little bit) better. In this most unbookish of parties, if it needed a source it might well turn to Crosland's Future of Socialism (without looking too closely at the text). But there was much more and else in the Labour backstory and, despite our very changed times, that something else matters as much now as it ever has.

‘Old’ Labour

The attitude to state ownership and to state welfare that critics advocating a Third Way see as the abiding weakness of an ‘old’ Labour way can certainly be found.