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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#181

Post by celdon25 »

mlinksva wrote: post #179
celdon25 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Just curious, what 1980s attempt are you referring to?

Extropianism (talked about in the post I linked) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism#Introduction

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#182

Post by celdon25 »

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…

You must have missed out on the 2014 Technoprogressive declaration, which was co-signed by a number of prominent transhumanists (including the author of the OP).

https://web.archive.org/web/20170203004407/http://ieet.org/i...

> Emerging technologies could make things dramatically better or worse. Unfortunately too few people yet understand the dimensions of both the threats and rewards that humanity faces. It is time for technoprogressives, transhumanists and futurists to step up our political engagement and attempt to influence the course of events.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#183

Post by celdon25 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #143
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.

Isn't that just because it wouldn't be interesting to write about a utapian transhuman society? I really wouldn't put much stock into what a few story writers came up with.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect was very interesting to read at least.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#184

Post by stubish »

peteradio wrote: post #97
photochemsyn wrote: post #91

To become transhuman or posthuman, you'd first have to understand what it is to be human, and we're not anywhere near that. Some of the enthusiasm about the hopes for such a transition were raised by this: > "The Human Genome Project finally released a complete human genome sequence in 2003, in a project that took 13 years to complete." The most remarkable thing about that accomplishment was how little it resulted in…

You could potentially make a thing that acts like you, that's it. The only reason our existence is tolerable is that we agree with the guy that when he goes to bed he is dead and I take over in the morning and I make the same deal tomorrow.

Salami tactics (Yes Minister) would work around this. Replace and extend your brain and nervous system small parts at a time. Until one day you are entirely hardware, and thus your consciousness entirely software. Continuity of consciousness remains uninterrupted.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#185

Post by NateEag »

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…

I've known many people who lean conservative to one extent or another.

I think many of them have demonstrated a good deal of wisdom, often by not trusting too much in the conclusions of their all-too-fallible intellects.

I can't say that any of those conservatives I've admired have been politicians or megachurch pastors, which given your descriptions seems to be who you're looking at as "conservatives".

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#187

Post by xvilka »

It's dangerous to modify something we don't know in details - risk breaking it is too high. The only sane action transhumanism could do is to throw money and working hands on the biomedical research, also biomedical engineering. Even nanotechnology is less relevant since those nanobots would need to know exactly what to modify. At the end, likely we will just design new proteins which are true nanobots already existing in our bodies.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#188

Post by stubish »

danjoredd wrote: post #89
elliotec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pessimistic and myopic view of transhumanism. Where it becomes a good idea is a context that humanity is limited in its current (biological) form. There are lots and lots of things that could kill our species over the next several thousand years and the transhumanists simply think it is worth investing in looking into how we could potentially use technology to adapt to those threats or enhance the human expe…

My main area of concern is people who can exploit these augmentations for political, personal, and profit reasons. Even in the best scenario possible, these things are going to happen. All code is flawed in some fashion. Unless we plan on keeping these augmentations completely offline, they can and WILL be exploited by hackers. Imagine how giddy North Korea would be to be able to mess with the President's body, or ha…

Your argument applies to biological machines too. Think of advertising. The only reason your mechanical augmentations seem more exploitable is because the technology involved seems better understood fnord.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#189

Post by filoeleven »

daoist_shaman wrote: post #156
pixl97 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have wrote what Ted wrote in one form or another, you don't know their names.

Many people also have trouble separating ideas from individuals. Ideas are imagination. They aren’t real until they are actualized. They can be beautiful or they can be toxic. Ideas are one thing, but the transmission of them is another. The moment an idea is uttered is the moment that its meaning is jeopardized. Interpretation is the demise of the idea. People have ruthlessly killed each other for millennia because…

> Ideas are imagination. They aren’t real until they are actualized.

> Ideas are one thing, but the transmission of them is another. The moment an idea is uttered is the moment that its meaning is jeopardized. Interpretation is the demise of the idea.

Pleas explain why this is not incoherent.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#190

Post by drdaeman »

magpi3 wrote: post #161
FFRefresh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unnat…

That's the whole point. Word "natural" is not good in any serious argument because it simply doesn't have well-recognized unambiguous semantics most people can agree on. Ask a bunch of folks if some things are natural and while they'll most likely agree on the basics (wild forest flower is most likely would be called "natural", while a mobile phone is most likely not) the opinions will start to diverge on less obvious stuff (e.g. penicillin).

It's like a concept of "god" - everyone has their own idea what it might mean. (full disclosure: I'm ignostic).

With such words it's best to either start with a definition, or pick some different, less ambiguous term.

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