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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#161

Post by magpi3 »

FFRefresh wrote: post #48
daoist_shaman wrote: post #6

I used to identify as a transhumanist and believed that technology could do no harm. I was an adolescent donning rose-colored glasses, with a burning passion for science, technology, and improvement of our species. Only after an electrical engineering degree, 10-15 years of more wisdom, and dabbling in biohacking have I realized that we really have no clue about the massive deleterious impacts that technology has on…

I think I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, in that we do need to think about the negative externalities of different technologies before scaling them out as a species. I am getting a little tripped up on your usage of 'the natural world' and 'environmental destruction' though. Aren't humans 'natural'? And if we are natural, shouldn't anything that springs from us also be 'natural'? We are subject to the…

You're just playing with semantics. If everything humans do is natural than everything is natural: computers, plastics, concrete, etc. The purpose of using the word natural is to distinguish from what is unnatural, and without grabbing a dictionary, for me that generally means something that does not "naturally" occur (i.e. without human intervention specifically) in the natural world.

Chemical engineers create unnatural things, things that don't exist in the natural world.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#162

Post by celdon25 »

notsapiensatall wrote: post #49

IMHO it's in a trough on the hype curve. Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again. The promises of devices like neuralink are decades away from widespread voluntary adoption, at least. You can get small things done today, as you could 10 years ago, but they aren't ready for primetime. Anecdotally, I got a small coated neodymium magnet implanted in a finger during my youth. It was cool as a college student, I cou…

> Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again.

No, it doesn’t, and waiting for the iteration of tech-consumerism that resembles your childhood fantasies is everything that was wrong with the transhumanist movement. It attracted too many people who sat on the sidelines and did nothing to move the needle. It was a magnet for people who couldn’t cope with reality, which occasionally helped, but usually stirred chaos.

It definitely needs a rebranding. In fact, a reasonably good attempt was made as early as the 1980s.

https://metanexus.net/h-true-transhumanism/

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#163

Post by dr_dshiv »

I once went to an early 2000’s transhumanist party with Nick Bostrom. He had a transhumanist leadership position at that point, if I recall. (The party was rad)

The most transhumanist thing in my life currently: getting into flow states writing academic papers with GPT-3. It is genuinely mind melting.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#164

Post by nemo44x »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #145
nemo44x wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say leftists of more federally liberals but settled on post modernism since it’s taken up by those groups. Post modernists say there is no truth and that everything comes down to power structures and control. That everything is made up anyways so feel free to throw away all grand narratives and indulge in whatever decadence you want. Because truth doesn’t exist and is a function of power structures. I…

Exactly, just like when conservatives espouse "family values" and get busted for infidelity, or when they espouse anti-gay views and then solicit sex from police officers, or when they espouse free market values and then solicit money from the government to prop up some privatized service. That's the least throw-away-all-grand-narratives-and-indulge-in-whatever-decadence-you-want behaviour I've ever seen, yessir. Rem…

No post body was provided.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#165

Post by giraffe_lady »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #25
formerly_proven wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why literally every fiction work on transhumanism is a dystopia, even those were transhumanism is just a generic stand-in for technological advancement.

That is absolutely not true – Iain M. Banks' Culture novels are probably some of the most well-known works of fiction with themes of transhumanism, and would hardly be called dystopian.

In the books the culture is frequently called dystopian by people outside of it. Usually to some extent out of ignorance but not completely and not always.

Within the culture itself in the books, there is an awareness of the dystopian potential of the culture's powers, and tension about what applications are acceptable. The political and cultural shape of the culture itself sort of makes a silhouette around the dystopia it is trying not to be, or could become.

It's a positive transhumanist take for sure, but it directly confronts how necessarily tangled up that is with much worse worlds, and should get credit for it.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#166

Post by mensetmanusman »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #117
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's accurate. Animals aren't trying to create things that break down easily; they're not trying to do anything but survive. The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that c…

>The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. Er, this is your argument, not mine. Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'." Plastics nor PFAS meet that standard. Those matter types stay static. The animals called 'humans' make pl…

PFAS, like nearly everything, has a half-life. As a category so large the half-lives can range from days to thousands of years in a vacuum, but even those with thousand year half-lives can be broken down with catalysis in seconds.

It is new tech on the scale of humanity and we will figure it out.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#168

Post by myownpetard »

walterbell wrote: post #154
jholman wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we did have to invent the (social) technology that enabled us to transition to a post-feudal society. And we did so without fully understanding feudal society. For another technological example, we didn't fully understand bronze when we transitioned to the iron age (in fact, at least in the west, the transition to the iron age happened in large part due to our understanding of bronze getting substantially worse )…

> we did so without fully understanding feudal society. No human understood feudal society? What about the leaders of those societies?

There is probably some folk theorem about this.

The emergent structure of a society is always more complex than the analytical tools available in that society are capable of modeling. As the tools become more sophisticated, the same technologies and institutions that enabled their development results in a correlated increase in complexity in the social structures. Forever keeping true contemporary introspection out of reach.

The best sci-fi counterexample is probably Seldon's Psychohistory from The Foundation Trilogy.

A thought experiment related to this: how dominant would the average macro hedge fund from 2022 be if they were transported back to 1985, with no knowledge of specific future events but with all of their scientific knowledge, models (and maybe computing power?) etc.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#169

Post by mensetmanusman »

armchairhacker wrote: post #14

"Transhumanism" is already here, in a way. We have medications including some complex drugs, most people at least take multi-vitamins, we have surgeries and sometimes do weird stuff like transplant limbs or faces. Even simpler, we have knowledge of diet and health which lets us stay in better shape than before (though a lot of people are in worse shape due to junk food...we have access to high-protein diets and effec…

I never knew the bar was so low as to include taking vitamins. Once we are all transhumanist no one is a transhumanist.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#170

Post by schoen »

neilv wrote: post #36
chejazi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cypherpunks write code- but what about the extropians? As Jim McCoy said, it takes Evil Geniuses to really get the job done.

Circa 1999, the Zero Knowledge Systems (ZKS) startup had a group called Evil Geniuses.

There was also a cryptography startup later on called Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow (working on peer-to-peer stuff that I think is slightly akin to Filecoin).
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