honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
More you might like
The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.
I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary.
It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.
I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se… I mean, kind of. It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.
What does race discourse look like when you can change your race? Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?
What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?
What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?
Et cetera.
I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.
(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)
Transhumanism just sounds really gay but also inevitable so I guess we’re all going to be gay cyborgs one day
I believe it will involve a lot of literal, rather than metaphorical, homosexuality.
The first generation to gain the ability to change to a new sex easily and cheaply and completely passing (on a physical level) will also start experimenting with new sex configurations, probably. For the generation after that, it will be normalized, and manipulation of hormones at key points in development may used to guide sexual orientation towards bisexual or pansexual.
So yeah, gay cyborgs.
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.
Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
Immortality for all.
basically just ceding ground to capitalism.
That’s a good point, actually. If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.
Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive. If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.
The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are. It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.
You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.
That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old. That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life. It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.
If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.
(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)
At first, sure. And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available. But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.
We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR. Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients. Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common. (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.) Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.
On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs. Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy. Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.
Much of the cost is in the research. One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.
Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population. However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it. That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.
Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.
But that’s what we have computers and big data for. The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.
Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever. However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible. In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.
In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood? But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.
It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.
I’m really, really worried that Peter Thiel’s support for Trump is going to lead to a public backlash against transhumanism, which so far has mostly managed to stay obscure enough to avoid it.
god it would be terrible if they banned our life-extending nanobot cultures-
wait we don’t even have those yet :(
I mean, there is plenty of reason for the Left/SJ to decide that they hate Transhumanism already. Many Transhumanists are white, they’re male, and they live in circumstances that allow them to even think about the future like that in the first place rather than desperately trying to survive until the next day.
And while, hypothetically, the Left/SJ is supposed to respect neurodivergence, in practice they often don’t.
When it comes to left-leaning moral virtue, there are multiple vectors for attack. It’s bound to be somewhat expensive, it will be decried as Ableist, probably those able to afford the first wave will be mostly white, it makes some people just straight-up better than others, it doesn’t truly respect other cultures, the list goes on and on and on.
I give it 50-50 SJ/the Left decides Transhumanism is an Evil Hated Outgroup. The other 50 depends on the Right coming down hard on it so that it gets protected by Leftist contrarianism, like Islam.
By the by, @kissingerandpals, one of the reasons I’m not a pure Capitalist is that I think such things should be voluntary, even living in communities based on it.
If you are a purist Capitalist and not a Transhumanist, then I suggest abandoning Capitalist purism. In the long run, Capitalism will sell you out to Transhumanism unless it is leashed by a strong hand. Its alignments with traditionalism in some cases are less to do with its fundamental nature as technology increases, and more to do with other factors (like not needing the same structure to enforce as the economy of the USSR).
I am not a capitalist, I do not know how you came to this conclusion.
“If” wasn’t a throwaway word, I really did mean “if you are…”.
A lot of the people who are against Transhumanism are also Traditionalists and Capitalists, who have bought into the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism.
I disagree with the right-wing moral justification for Capitalism, partially because I worry about some of the dark futures it may create, so I leverage people’s hatred for/fear of cybernetics and the like in order to convince them to ditch it.
If not you (maybe you’re a Communist or a Distributist or something), then one of the other readers will be both averse to Transhumanism and a moral Capitalist.
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction. But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.
kinda independent though? like I’m at peace with not being splattered across a mountainside but I don’t get enraged at people who fly wingsuits.
Once the Transhuman Genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. The alternative of banning it prevents them from having to become the cyberpunk version of the Amish, leaving them in the mainstream.
To pick another example, letting gays get married also means living in a society in which gays can marry, in which that becomes normal, even if you don’t get gay married. And that’s a bit less irrevocable!
So if you don’t want to see what Tumblr users will become when allowed access to 2090-era robotic surgeons, implanted computers, and automated tissue engineering facilities, you have to oppose it before it starts.
You’ll also die because a cure for whatever disease you have won’t exist, or else your body will fall apart, but you already didn’t care as much about that, soooo…
src losrh
“Yes,” she declared, “all Men.”
Deep in the darkest recesses of the great Mind at the core of the World, something not entirely unlike circuits lit up in what humans would call ‘amusement’. Its 3,768,423,281 puppets, each coated in flesh, with hairs and skin and sweat, were performing their functions admirably.
They were, in fact, extensions of one vast mind, and each could be held as morally responsible as any other. The pretense of individuality was but a sick illusion to further aggravate the true human race.
In the space of the woman’s sentence, the great beast sent another 3,445,222 dick pics.