My illustration entitled: “The Keeper of a Thousand Years” – An ageless transhuman stands inside an immense, weathered observatory. Their subtly enhanced body contrasts with centuries of surrounding architecture, while young trees grow through ancient stone and spacecraft rise beyond the dome.
Imagine a person whose implanted enhancement requires specialist software, replacement components and periodic adjustment. For years, it works well. Then the manufacturer closes. Its staff disperse, its records become inaccessible and nobody accepts responsibility for continued maintenance.
The company has reached the end of its life. The person has not.
This hypothetical situation exposes a question that belongs at the centre of Human Sovereignty Transhumanism: what does an institution owe when its technology has become essential to someone’s bodily or cognitive functioning?
A purchase agreement may end. A business may fail. Yet the dependence created by integration can continue for decades.
When technology becomes essential to a person’s functioning, responsibility must extend beyond the commercial life of its maker.
Integration Changes the Obligation
An ordinary product can often be discarded when support disappears. An enhancement integrated with the body may offer no comparable exit.
Replacing it might require a procedure, adaptation or equipment that is unavailable. Removal might be inappropriate. Even where a transition is possible, delay could disrupt communication, movement, work or independent living.
The ethical significance lies in the dependence knowingly created.
A provider inviting someone to build daily life around an enhancement assumes responsibilities that cannot reasonably be reduced to delivering a functioning device on the first day.
The stronger the integration, the greater the consequences of withdrawal and the fewer the alternatives, the stronger the justification for continuing duties.
These duties should be anticipated before dependency begins.
Continuity Is Different From Permanent Improvement
A continuing obligation does not require every manufacturer to promise unlimited upgrades, perfect performance or support for every product forever.
Such promises could be impossible to honour and might conceal the limits that users most need to understand.
The relevant commitment is narrower: reasonably planned access to essential maintenance, protection against foreseeable abandonment and a supported path when continued operation becomes inappropriate.
Optional improvements can remain optional. Essential support requires a different standard because its disappearance threatens the basic functioning on which the person has come to rely.
Human sovereignty depends partly on the terms of that reliance. A person cannot meaningfully direct their life if essential capabilities disappear whenever a commercial arrangement becomes inconvenient.
Plan for Failure While the Provider Exists
The moment to arrange continuity is while the provider still possesses expertise, resources and bargaining power.
Before integration, users should receive an understandable account of expected support, likely maintenance needs and dependencies on external services. Uncertainties should be explicit.
The plan should address closure, acquisition, withdrawal from a market and discontinuation of a product. Each can interrupt support even when the original technology continues functioning.
Promises should identify responsible parties and practical arrangements. Saying that another organisation might help is not equivalent to securing its agreement.
A continuity plan should also distinguish ordinary maintenance from emergency assistance and eventual transition. These are related duties, but they require different resources and expertise.
Maintenance Must Have Funding
An unfunded promise is vulnerable precisely when users most need it.
Providers should therefore establish a credible financial arrangement for foreseeable essential support and transition costs. Possible approaches include protected reserves, insurance or pooled arrangements supported by participating institutions.
The appropriate mechanism depends on the technology and circumstances. Its adequacy requires independent scrutiny rather than a reassuring label.
Who can access the money? What expenses are covered? What happens if costs exceed expectations? Can resources disappear alongside the business they were supposed to outlast?
Funding should reflect credible obligations and receive periodic review. A small reserve cannot justify a large promise merely because both appear in the same document.
The arrangement must remain intelligible to the people relying on it.
A Successor Needs More Than Permission
Succession requires a qualified organisation able and willing to maintain the technology, supported by access to necessary resources.
That may involve technical documentation, service tools, component specifications, software access and training. The precise requirements should follow the needs of safe maintenance.
Preserving source material in escrow could help, but documents alone cannot replace specialist competence, manufacturing capacity or clinical judgment.
Nor should continuity become an excuse for indiscriminate release of sensitive systems. Access arrangements must account for security, confidentiality and appropriate professional qualifications.
Where practical, successor arrangements should be tested before an emergency. An inaccessible archive or an obsolete contact list offers little protection when the original engineers have already dispersed.
Corporate Transfers Must Account for Users
An acquisition should not make dependent users disappear between contracts.
The parties should establish which institution assumes maintenance duties, preserves relevant records and communicates with affected people. A change of ownership should trigger review of continuity arrangements.
Users should not have to accept unrelated surveillance, research participation or new commercial uses of intimate information merely to preserve essential support.
Transfer of necessary service information requires care. The receiving institution should obtain only what its justified responsibilities require, with appropriate safeguards and clear explanations.
Information stewardship and maintenance continuity must be considered together. Moving equipment responsibility without the knowledge needed to discharge it creates a successor in name alone.
My illustration “The Keeper of a Thousand Years” work-in-progress. The art shows how longer life opens a deeper relationship with time.
Transition Must Be Clinically Appropriate
Sometimes continued support will become impracticable despite reasonable preparation. Components may become unavailable, a successor may fail or continued use may present unacceptable risks.
The answer cannot automatically be to remove the enhancement.
A transition plan should involve appropriately qualified professionals and the person affected. It should compare realistic options, explain uncertainty and consider the individual’s circumstances.
Options might include continued monitoring, replacement, modification or removal where appropriate. None should be treated as universally safe or suitable.
Planning should also address rehabilitation, communication support, accessibility and disruption to daily life. Providing an alternative device does not necessarily restore the capabilities someone previously possessed.
Transition is a process owed to a person, rather than a disposal instruction attached to equipment.
Who Owes What?
Responsibility should follow the power, knowledge and benefits associated with creating the dependency.
Manufacturers should design for maintainability, disclose dependencies and finance credible continuity arrangements. Institutions offering integration should examine those arrangements and explain their limitations.
Successors should honour the responsibilities they actually assume. Funders and purchasers should account for long-term support when judging affordability.
Public institutions may need to establish safeguards and protect people facing abandonment. That protective role should not become an excuse for private providers to transfer foreseeable costs onto the public.
Users should receive clear information about their own maintenance responsibilities. However, knowing that failure is possible does not mean consenting to preventable abandonment or accepting every subsequent burden.
The Objection of Cost
A developer might object that these obligations would increase prices, discourage investment and delay technologies that could improve lives.
This concern deserves attention. Excessive requirements could restrict access, especially for small patient populations or early innovations.
The response should be proportionate arrangements, including shared infrastructure or pooled support where appropriate. Duties should reflect dependency and foreseeable consequences rather than impose identical requirements on every device.
But making integration appear affordable by ignoring its later costs does not eliminate those costs. It leaves someone else to bear them, often the person least able to escape.
A responsible assessment of innovation includes the resources needed to sustain its benefits or manage its ending.
Test the Promise Against Disappearance
Consider our opening example before the manufacturer closes. A meaningful review would ask who answers the user’s call the following week, who can obtain replacement components and who pays for an assessment if ordinary servicing stops. It would check whether a successor can access the necessary tools without negotiating permissions from people who are no longer available.
The review should also examine what the person must do. Must they travel abroad, pay unexpected charges or repeat invasive assessments? Could language, disability or financial circumstances make the promised support inaccessible? Continuity that exists only on paper may leave daily dependence unchanged.
These questions should produce identified actions, responsible institutions and realistic resources. Periodic checks can reveal that a successor has withdrawn or that a funding assumption no longer holds. Users should learn about material weaknesses early enough to participate in planning.
No exercise can guarantee survival through every crisis. Its purpose is to distinguish reasonable preparation from an unsupported assurance. The uncertainty that remains should be disclosed plainly, so the person can weigh integration with an honest understanding of its continuing conditions. A user should not need to become an insolvency specialist to obtain a clear answer.
A Human Life Beyond a Product Cycle
Human Sovereignty Transhumanism must examine what happens after the demonstration, the sale and the successful intervention.
Can the person obtain essential service? Are resources protected? Can another qualified institution take over? If continued use becomes inappropriate, is there a funded and clinically responsible transition?
These questions should shape decisions before integration, then remain open to review as circumstances change.
The aim is to make dependence more accountable and prevent commercial disappearance from becoming personal abandonment.
An enhancement may outlive the institution that created it. Our arrangements for human dignity, continued support and responsible transition must be designed to outlive that institution too.