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Transhumanism?
2012-10-31 22:47:19
edited 2012-10-31 22:47:19 in Philosophy
Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto!
Discuss.
Comments
For it. In general.
I'm cool with it, but less than optimistic about it.
End thread.
XD
I'm for it, for the most part. I like technological advances.
Wide-eyed naivete and power wank fantasy. Underlying mindset usually akin to this. Fun to mock, but mostly irritating.
^^ My Emperor can't possibly be this cute?
Depends on what you mean. If you mean robot arms and legs and stuff for disabled people, that's awesome, and probably very close to happening.
If you mean brain uploading, that's not only probably impossible, but even if it could be done, would probably just kill the person (but make a copy).
I'mma go with what my doppelganger said.
Pretty much my less inflammatory thoughts on it. Prostheses are one thing, but it's not really unique to the transhumanist movement. The stuff that is, is basically right down the road of gleeful delusion.
The former for me, CU.
I actually want to work on making protheses more and more life-like. And then make humans faster, better, harder, stronger! But that's not something I'm going to see in my lifetime unless somehow we make indefinite longevity a possibility.
Not entirely against it, but it's gonna be quite a while before the tech is good enough.
There's this idea that transhumanist technology needs to be implanted in the body for it to really "count" -- that we have to, essentially, become cyborgs. But I don't see the practical difference is the HUD that might come with bionic eyes and the GPS on our phones, and anyone with any technology used to assist on bodily function technically counts as a "cyborg". I would be included in that group, because I wear glasses.
Transhumanism, in many practical respects, is already here. And from here, I'd wager that it'll be a slow crawl forward; so slow, probably, that we'll hardly notice transhumanism becoming more advanced, or somewhat more like the images in our heads. Kind of like how we didn't notice that we were in a cyberpunk future until it had already been here for years.
You were the one who wanted a swordarm, right?
A HUD in our eyes would be kind of cool.
^^ I'm still counting on that, one day!
But seriously, there is no functional difference between a sword arm and using a sword, except perhaps that the regular sword is going to be more functional if less convenient. By using technology to extend the boundaries of our abilities, we already enter into transhumanism, just mildly. Prosthetics can become more advanced, and we can make gadgets and software parts of our bodies, but those are only physical integration of technology and mankind rather than the psychological integration that has already happened.
Prosthetics and other sorts of technological aid for impaired people are cool, but I'm extremely cautious towards any form of transhumanism beyond that.
I'm one of those people who believe that humans should live in harmony with nature instead of trying to overpower it. A full-on transhuman might be immortal, super-strong, fast, of genius intelligence and perfectly rational, but, essentially, they will not be human any more, but an unnatural monster with no capability of emotions. The very thought of what could come out of that make me shudder.
Besides, I'm of a firm belief that ever natural phenomenon in the universe, us included, are a part of an all-encompassing organic whole. Trying to break away from that whole by denying the natural aspect of humanity is foolish, dangerous and wrong.
I have no idea where you get that from.
^^Why does full on transhumanism automatically mean that person is devoid of emotion? And if the modifications only affect the self, why is that "overpowering nature" if nature as a whole is left untouched (by that I mean the environment is undamaged), what is the active harm? Does transhumanism automatically damage one's spiritual self? Is what makes humanity well...human defined by our physical selves and not something more abstract?
I'm sorry, but your argument reeks of "appeal to nature".
That said, I'm not in favor of some of the loftier aspects of transhumanism (brain uploading as others have said), I am in favor of human augmentations. What I'm really worried about is who exactly controls those augmentations.
Brain uploading. Emotions are tied to our biological selves. Such more radical transhumanist ideas are what worry me above all else; I'm breaking when it comes to augmentations.
I meant it more like overpowering the natural aspect of humanity. We are a part of nature and, like I said, I believe that nature functions as an organic whole. Through technological advancement we have already come to the point where we have achieved a lot of autonomy over natural processes, which is not a bad thing in itself, but also a dangerously slippery slope. Completely breaking away from all limitations of nature is dangerous not only to the world around us but also ourselves; in a certain sense, yes, transhumanism does damage our spiritual selves - the moral aspect of our nature is directly tied to our animalistic roots and survival mechanisms: a full-on transhuman (a brain uploaded to a machine body) is inevitably amoral.
What can I do, I'm a stinking hippie. :P
Suffice to say I've spent too long as a programmer to trust any more than I absolutely must to computers. It's one thing to get a prosthetic for something that's maimed beyond use or whatever, but to just go sticking tech in yourself for the hell of it strikes me as monstrously stupid on premise alone.
I think Human Revolution hit on the pertinent topic of class, and really well at that. Currently, we're a people divided by fiscal privilege, which determines the kind of education one can receive, what kind of medical care one can expect to benefit from, and even how closely one has to follow the law. In the case of "cyborg" human augmentation being introduced, it seems likely that most of the people who will benefit from it will be the wealthy or those sponsored by the wealthy. Currently, there is no inherent imbalance of raw physical or intellectual ability along fiscal lines -- a person living in low-cost housing has the same access to information as a wealthy person via the internet, has similar access to fitness augmentation methods, and money has no bearing on one's ability to relate concepts to one-another and find the patterns.
But transhumanist augmentation is a means to exceed established human limitations, and in a capitalist society, the only outcome is that the best technology will go to the wealthiest. In turn, this means one's wealth would measure their potential for exceeding human limitation, giving them not only educational, medical and lawful advantages, but superiority on raw physical ability and information processing as well. Small doubt that the class divide we see now would be inflamed significantly by transhumanist progression. Our class divides today are already too close to feudal and caste standards for comfort, largely informed by the demands of an employer and a competitive job market fueled by the general insanity of how necessary tertiary education is considered to be. Many graduates of universities and colleges find themselves unemployed or working low-skill jobs anyway, with the requirements of many jobs being both a tertiary education and experience in the same or similar job.
So with class divisions enforced by the costs of tertiary education and the amount of power in the hands of employers, not to mention the inherent lack of fiscal egalitarianism that capitalism demands, something like transhumanism via bodily augmentation is likely to widen the gaps between classes and make social movement even more difficult than it currently is. If the requirements for a job are no longer restricted to experience and education, but require the job seeker to put down large amounts of money for augmentations, then you inherently restrict many jobs to those that have a certain dollar value in the bank. Experience can be hard won, and an education can be earned via scholarship, at least providing the potential for a low-class person to acquire a job above their social station, but no doubt both the augmentation technology and medical procedure would be significantly expensive.
The other side of this is the potential illegal augmentation trade, which would necessitate not only the illegal sale of technology, but illegal medical practices as well. So those in lower social classes might be pressured to seek out illegal surgeons to provide these operations. In the best case scenario, this could provide some social mobility; in the worst case, however, I can imagine criminal organisations and groups having their own surgeons. In that kind of scenario, a non-augmented underclass might be the victims of both legal and illegal augmentees, be that fiscally or physically.
I have nothing, conceptually, against human augmentation. But I very much believe that we don't inhabit a society that can socially handle them. With Romney gaining traction in the US presidential elections, and his detractors criticising his upper-class economic policies, it looks as though the US is soon going to be facing a crisis of class division -- if it isn't already. And what happens in the USA speaks loudly; like it or not, the USA is the face of the West in non-white regions of the world, and amongst Europeans, is often the face of colonial nations such as Australia, South Africa and Canada. What the USA chooses to do influences the entire world, and if the USA fails at establishing and maintaining egalitarian class conditions, then that's a strike against both movements that strive for greater equivalence and the social sustainability of transhumanist augmentations.
actually, never mind.
^^ That is completely true, I don't know why I haven't thought of that before.
^ Now I'm curious.
tl;dr your basis seems the same as fundamentalist Christianity, "Don't do X/don''t go along with X, it will damage your immortal soul!" and I don't find that to be a good basis for anything beyond a personal viewpoint, and certainly doesn't convince me of anything.
And then there was a thing about how the class division isn't an issue in the ideal of transhumanity because the notion goes hand-in-hand with the the notion of no longer having finite resources- that is, the ideal of transhumanity involves living in a post-scarcity world.
But then I realized that the first comment could be taken as offensive even if I didn't mean it to, and I don't feel like getting into an argument about either of them.
Dear god, even the summary sounds irritable.
No, it's okay.
I'm not a Christian, or religious, but am probably spiritual in a certain sense. Putting that and my beliefs about an organic universe aside, I based a good part of my argument on biology and anthropology, and there's no reason to compare it to religious dogma.
Well, you base it on biology and anthropology, but you also miss a good part of what transhumanity is. (If any steps in any process of transhumanity gets rid of your emotions, something's gone ass over tits. The notion of brain uploading, for instance, copies over your entire brain- not just your memories and thought processes, but emotions, illogical reactions and all.)
They don't want to turn people into computers- indeed, that would actually do nothing but hurt humanity, because computers can't think outside the box like humanity can.
The notion about uploading brains to computers is only a concept of extending the lifetime of people- and one of the aims of the subject is, I believe, to be able to 'download' yourself into a new body at some point.
There's also a lot of talk about current-gen cryogenic freezing and the like which I don't really understand.
All I know is that from what I understand of transhumanity, you are not understanding what the concept is all about. It is not about making people something other than human; rather, it is about making people more than human.
I don't know how to express it much better. Transhumanity is about making people live longer, making them faster, stronger, smarter. It is not, however, about changing humanity into a bunch of robots.
Blah, and now I remember why I blanked my original post.
Renewable energy is also a powerful (perhaps the most powerful) factor of a post-scarcity society, and yet we have companies like BP already trying to take a stranglehold on such technologies. Without action against similar capitalist powerhouses, we may well find ourselves in a world that has artificial scarcity imposed upon it. Technically, that's already the case; some corporations hold back their own supplies to increase prices via the inflation of scarcity. Likewise, many products exist in store shelves less to sell and more to compete, damaging the position of competing companies in the larger fiscal metagame.
The existence of post-scarcity technology, or even extreme levels of low-scarcity resources, appears to be no guarantee of social progression. As long as scarcity provides incentive to those who are already powerful, I don't think we'll see things shift naturally. It'll take active resistance against powerful multinationals for the world to change for the better, because otherwise they'll just follow the natural grooves of the system -- and that system creates competition, and that competition demands profit at any cost. Even the video games industry, which should be by all accounts harmless, isn't free of this kind of strain. This eventually takes it toll on human resources; "crunch time" is probably one of the milder examples, but then you have things like MMO gold farming cabals that force workers to make virtual currency for the organisation to sell to us.
I mean, think of how insane that is. We can put a dollar value on a literally limitless resource -- virtual currency in a video game. And in putting a value on that, we give the labour of its acquisition a value, which in turn ensures that labour is abused. In the USA, it's more common to drink bottled water than tap water, despite the fact that the USA has some of the most naturally fertile geography on the planet. We all consider gold to be the most valuable natural resource on the planet, despite the fact that its only objective use is in some electronics, and even then in small amounts. It's more valuable than its weight in water, food, actual tools -- whatever. We live in an absolutely insane world where we can invent value for an unlimited virtual resource and a scarce, useless and physical resource at the same time, all the while disregarding the value of resources that are absolutely necessary for survival.
Between that fact and the current capitalist stranglehold on every significant factor of our lives, we are in no way ready for something as potentially world-shattering as transhumanist augmentation.