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What ever happened to the transhumanists?

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Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#41

Post by hinkley »

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…

After 3 years of tai chi I learned that most of us are pretty oblivious to the limits of the human body. And that as someone who was previously an endurance athlete.

Sports medicine is optimizing the effort/return of such pursuits, but we also have islands of information that could be normalized as well, in particular looking for missed opportunities for complementary interactions. If you took Wim Hoff and made him a master of yoga and tai chi, would he be even more 'alien' to the rest of us? Maybe we need to set the minimum bar higher?

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#42

Post by ArtofIndirect »

kanzure wrote: post #17

Reposting a comment of mine from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731696 Extropians are everywhere. Many names come to mind, like Assange, Hal Finney, Jurvetson, Carl Feynman, and many others. I hope that something like this group comes back, but with a vengeance. Call me an optimist, but if they had put their minds to it, they could have accomplished much more than a mailing list, which has unfo…

Extropians hack reality versus a purpose built man made machine: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c

Ideas like designer drugs and therapy to embed experience and knowledge is way more interesting than VR apps

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#43

Post by atlasunshrugged »

dekhn wrote: post #20

they rebranded as effective altruism

As someone who is relatively active in EA and was interested but not super active in transhumanist orgs outside of a brief volunteer stint many years ago, I think this is incorrect. I'd guess there's quite a lot of overlap in people who are interested in both, but I don't think there was an active merging of communities

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#44

Post by pigeons »

chejazi wrote: post #24
kanzure wrote: post #17

Reposting a comment of mine from 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731696 Extropians are everywhere. Many names come to mind, like Assange, Hal Finney, Jurvetson, Carl Feynman, and many others. I hope that something like this group comes back, but with a vengeance. Call me an optimist, but if they had put their minds to it, they could have accomplished much more than a mailing list, which has unfo…

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

I was looking for the source of the quote as I had never heard it, but didn't realize my brain had assumed Leonard not Jim.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#45

Post by pizzathyme »

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…

Agree. It seems like this article is just talking about trans humanism as a cultural topic that goes in and out of popularity. But real transhumanism occurring seems inevitable if technology continues to march forward.

Is anyone in the year 2100 really going to be talking about genetic modification or wearables? No, they will be everywhere

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#46

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Is there a pre-agricultural movement I could sign on to? It seems like every development post-hunter-gatherer has been in service of extending our lives while simultaneously making them (and the environment) worse. We talk about quality of life, but what kind of life is it to sit inside a box 2/3 of your life, or breaking your back in a factory, or on a farm? Most hunter-gatherers actually have more leisure time and work less, are healthy, don't pollute.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#48

Post by FFRefresh »

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 'laws of nature'. Is a beaver dam a natural thing? An ant hill? A bee hive? A bird's nest?

It's obviously nitpicking semantics and word usage, but I think people often use 'natural world' to refer to their own human preferences for how the world should look (often just as it looked as they were growing up), and by using the term 'nature', it carries a sense of absolute purity, and anything that goes against it must be wrong.

'Natural' arguments have been used throughout history, and still get frequently used today as a cudgel to dismiss any sort of social/technological change happening.

Now this is not to say that there can't be arguments against certain changes or that all change is the same, but the invocation of what's 'natural' always feels like a cheap rhetorical tactic in place of a stronger argument about why one state of the world is inferior to another state of the world.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#49

Post by notsapiensatall »

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 could feel strong AC currents/PWM/etc and I never lost small metal parts like screws.

Those were small benefits though, and the risk was quite high. If the coating had breached, my immune system would have attacked the magnet. Accidentally smacking it into things was painful. I was always aware of the intrusive hardware in a mildly unsettling way. Etc.

When I entered a more nature-y phase of my life, I got it removed by a local tattoo artist who dabbled in body mods. They mentioned that the newer versions were much smaller, and would require serious medical facilities to remove.

At the end of the day, active body mods have too little going for them and too many awful failure modes. Passive ones can be fun - I've seen transdermal plastic beads put in some interesting places - but they're hardly transhumanist.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#50

Post by seydor »

I didn't know it was a "movement", i thought it was the logical conclusion of our current technological trajectory. I didn't even know they went in hiding, we are closer to transhumanism today than ever. Some of the technologies are within the visible horizon now, for real, like neurotechnology and artificial wombs. We just injected half the population with an mRNA protein template, repeatedly. I don't expect to reach the end my life while still a human, hopefully.
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