“You need not fear, captain,” said the man. “We are not Social Justice Warriors, but Discourse Monks from the East.”
The guard captain nodded, and the procession of Rationalists filed into the city.
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
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.)
you: eww, I don’t want chemicals in my food!
an intellectual: everything you eat is made of chemicals.
another intellectual: “chemicals” as used in colloquial speech typically refers to isolated compounds created by industrial processes that are not commonly found in the natural environment, some of which we know are toxic to humans and have been banned for use in food production and some of which we still use but suspect are not conducive to good health.
