30 thoughts on “Transhumanism”

  1. This genie is out of the bottle. Things are going to happen.

    …the transhumanist view is that we should create persons who are smarter and more virtuous than we are.

    Elite thinking is that smarter is more virtuous, even those that think they’re smarter give ample evidence that it just ain’t so.

    As for spaceflight, I’ve read more than one sf on the theme that we end up with more than one type of human, one being the zero-g species and so forth.

    We’ve already done a lot of good with genetics, food production for example, but I can see the dark side is manifold and likely at least in some ways.

  2. [[[…the transhumanist view is that we should create persons who are smarter and more virtuous than we are.]]]

    I seem to recall a country in Europe in the 1930’s that made it state policy to use the tools of science to achieve the goal of improving the human race. But it didn’t turn out all that well to put it mildly. This sounds like the same plan of using science to create a master race to save us in an updated package and should be just as quickly rejected.

  3. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’m sure there’s a lot of food for thought there.

    I’m sure there will be lots of ranting and raving by luddites of either left or right persuasion. The internet, at least, seems to be infested with luddites.

    The NY Times recently had an article about the “hostile wife phenomenon” in cryonics. About a week later, NPR did a piece on curing aging and immortality. Both of these attracted the comments of luddites like honey attracts flies.

  4. “…the transhumanist view is that we should create persons who are smarter and more virtuous than we are.”

    I should like to meet a person today smarter than Benjamin Franklin or Nicola Tesla, or more virtuous than George Washington or Mother Theresa. Just to pick a few people from the past recent and less than, who were either smart, or virtuous, or both.

  5. This sounds like the same plan of using science to create a master race to save us in an updated package and should be just as quickly rejected.

    Only to someone who doesn’t understand the difference between collectivist approaches and individualistic ones. So I can understand why you might write something so foolish.

  6. Seems to come down to “it couldn’t hurt” which sounds like famous last words. Unfortunately, a lot of assertions are made with no serious backing. (More moral people? Great! How? Dunno…)

  7. Only to someone who doesn’t understand the difference between collectivist approaches and individualistic ones.

    And the Nazis did little to create better people. They sought to eliminate the “bad”. Another fundamental difference.

  8. Rand,

    The problem is that individualistic actions tend to turn into collectivist ones for the “benefit” of all.

    Look at the health food movement and how it went from a personal choice of ” health food stores for health food nuts” to the movement to tax the unhealthy alternatives, to the movement to start forcing the “healthy choices” on people by banning the unhealthy alternatives. Just look at the banning of Soda in public schools.

    It would only be a matter of time before the “choices” discussed here become “mandatory” for those individuals selected by the government to make a “better” nation.

  9. sjv,

    Before the discovery of DNA that was the best option for generic engineering of a master race. Science has advanced since then, but I am skeptical that human ethics has.

  10. It would only be a matter of time before the “choices” discussed here become “mandatory” for those individuals selected by the government to make a “better” nation.

    So, no one should ever be allowed to attempt to do self improvement because statists might make everyone do it? Do you ever think through the consequences of your nonsense?

  11. I used to have an old health food recipe book that had been published around 1960 or so. Among about fifty thousand recipes using carob and honey, there was one for Brunswick Stew, which began “clean and dress three squirrels.” It didn’t mean give three squirrels a bath and dress them in little coats. Though that is an amusing picture.

    Anyway, no master race is complete without a proper Master. Except for the Eric Roberts one. That whole snake thing was a big mistake.

  12. Rand,

    Don’t you ever take human nature into account? The Founding Fathers understood it, which is why the Constitution has lasted so long. But then they had a good grounding in the “Classics” which focused on human nature, something lacking in many tech degrees today, and sadly, in many humanity courses as well.

    Advancements like this have the potential to make life better, provided you create laws, or a strong ethical culture, than establishes a strong foundation so these advances fall under individual choice and individual decision making. Otherwise government will decide to use them to “make” life “better” for everyone.

  13. Yeah it does sound Nietzschean. I do think genetic alteration will happen, and will be for the worse of it. It will start as a way to remove genetic diseases, and progress into cosmetic changes. I suspect the future will look very boring from then on, as genetic code will eventually be tailored by fashion and lose variability.

    There will, as always, be a backlash against it. The people backlashing will be considered either backwards or too poor to pay for the treatments. It is only a matter of time after that until a totalitarian regime shows up and uses the technology to reshape society into yet another boringly uniform mass of people.

    I also suspect that if clinical immortality ever happens, it will not be applicable for those already born in a more conventional fashion. This will increase tensions in society between the young and the old.

    Eventually homicide, suicide rates will increase, as the time birth rates decrease (even without state intervention) to compensate for the clinical immortality somewhat.

  14. The article gives good examples of good intentions gone bad. The problem we have is that genetic manipulation is becoming easier while understanding the code itself may be delusional.

    I see it all the time in regular computer code and DNA has much more capacity for misunderstanding the ramifications of a code change.

    Like I said, the genie is out of the bottle. Perhaps man will not compete with nature for potential trouble. Except mankind has been one big sitcom for thousands of years.

  15. The main question I would have is: What would happen to overweight transhumans in New York, where they’ve outlawed transfat?

  16. Don’t you ever take human nature into account?

    Yes, I always do.

    Advancements like this have the potential to make life better, provided you create laws, or a strong ethical culture, than establishes a strong foundation so these advances fall under individual choice and individual decision making. Otherwise government will decide to use them to “make” life “better” for everyone.

    Who said otherwise? With whom are you arguing?

  17. I also suspect that if clinical immortality ever happens, it will not be applicable for those already born in a more conventional fashion.

    There is no theoretical basis to believe, or even “suspect” this.

  18. Greater prosperity does tend to lead to greater morality (our lives are not as short and brutish as once they were) and I would expect a Moore’s law on wet-ware to lead to greater prosperity.

    It seems that in this future it will become important to keep your virus protection wet-ware up to date.

    The human spambot industry may perhaps come to dominate with the resultant arms race out pacing the capability of the vast majority of malicious virus makers.

  19. We’re all transhumanists already.. we’re typing shit into little machines that let us talk to each other from across the world and in asynchronious time. Our intelligence and memory is enhanced by sophisticated algorithms which convert our incoherent rememberings into prior conversations and give us access to facts and figures which allow those of us who are willing, to base our arguments on evidence and reason. More and more when we step away from these little machines we feel diminished – having rely on our human recall and accept on good faith the arguments of others.

    In regards to Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, George Washington and Mother Theresa, intelligence and virtue are in the eye of the beholder and often distorted by selective history. I wonder how virtuous Rand Simberg will look to the historic record?

  20. sjv Says:

    And the Nazis did little to create better people. They sought to eliminate the “bad”. Another fundamental difference.

    Actually, they did have a breeding program of sorts in addition to the elimination program.

  21. In regards to Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, George Washington and Mother Theresa, intelligence and virtue are in the eye of the beholder and often distorted by selective history.

    An interesting point of view, one that would lead the casual reader to conclude that you consider these examples to be poor examples of intelligence and virtue. What persons, past or present, do you offer as examples of intelligent and virtuous?

  22. We’re all transhumanists already.. we’re typing shit into little machines that let us talk to each other from across the world and in asynchronious time.

    We also have books that allow us to accumulate information. Okay, since we’re talking “transhuman” and not “posthuman” I’ll agree, but only if I’m allowed to revise Russell’s observation: transhumanism begins with Thales.

  23. In regards to Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, George Washington and Mother Theresa, intelligence and virtue are in the eye of the beholder and often distorted by selective history.

    I tried separating them into two categories in my original post (Tesla and Franklin = intelligent, Washington and Mother Theresa = virtuous). See, I consider the first two intelligent but not virtuous — we all know Franklin was a great guy, but he was not exactly famous for his extreme moral rectitude; as for Tesla, he was basically nuts. But what a brain! As for Washington, I don’t know how he registered on the brain scale (he was certainly smarter than me, but then most people and some of their pets are), but he had a reputation for virtue: he was called “America’s Cincinnatus.” Someone who turned down a chance to be a king or a president-for-life certainly has more virtue than is found in many people these days. As for Mother Theresa, whatever you may think of her beliefs, someone who went among the most wretched of the poor is not exactly lacking in moral points.

  24. At what point do we stop being human? How smart is not human? How many fingers are not human (humans have six or less per limb.) Conjoined twins are still human.

    Genetics tends not to add new features, but add limbs. Is it even possible to make humans smarter?

  25. Mother Theresa was somewhat tyrannical in her treatment of the poor – mostly good tyranny, but not always. I would not refer to her so much as ethical but rather as highly focussed.

    “So Mother Teresa isn’t perfect. She has, as Murray Kempton noted in his review of Christopher Hitchens’s book [“The Shadow Saint,” NYR, July 11], accepted donations from dictators and other unsavory characters. Mother also tolerates substandard medical conditions in her hospices.”

  26. At what point do we stop being human? How smart is not human?

    Ken, only the next Steve Jobs can answer those questions.

  27. One thing I think is interesting is the certitude some people have that we are going to win the war against aging in the near future. I, for one, would enjoy living healthily past 120. I would appreciate the same for my family (I suppose there are those who would be happy to outlive their family–hmm, possible interesting conflict for sci-fi short story, been done some). But I don’t yet see a lot of concrete evidence that it’s going to happen.

    When Shelly wrote Frankenstein one of the big ideas was that our knowledge had become so great that we were about to have the power to create intelligent life (okay, given pre-existing used parts). We seem to just now be getting to the point where we know enough to create single-celled life, using pre-existing working parts. Our reach still greatly exceeds our grasp.

    From an engineering standpoint, I do have hopes that we’ll figure out more about what goes wrong with aging and how we can fix it. But I also suspect will run into additional difficult issues at various later ages.

  28. Indeed, Jeff. Frankly, the only transhumanism I see going on today is selective breeding of more compliant eloi for the morlocks.

  29. I, for one, would enjoy living healthily past 120

    I wouldn’t mind past now.

    Titus: …Steve Jobs…

    You always bust me up, but this ref. left me befuddled???

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