Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What ever happened to the transhumanists?

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 448 posts

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#51

Post by rgrieselhuber »

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.

Yuval Noah Harari’s speech on how control over one’s biometric data should be handed to the elites in order to hack the human animal was really inspirational.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#52

Post by seydor »

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…

Transhumanism , like all trans- movements is not about maintaining the "natural" order of things, whatever that is. Nature is not better in absolute

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#53

Post by neilv »

neilv wrote: post #31

The article mentions Steve Mann. At the same time Mann was at the MIT Media Lab (as one of the first "Wearables" computing people, along with Thad Starner, Bradley Rhodes, and others), more conspicuously involved specifically in Transhumanism thought and discussion at MIT was Sascha Chislenko. Sascha was associated with Marvin Minsky and Pattie Maes, and (like Minsky's protege, Pushpinder "Push" Singh), was one of th…

I should add that Sasha seemed not just a talker, but a doer. He'd worked at Maes's startup, and, shortly before his untimely death, had joined a investment firm, to advise on tech directions, and vet companies.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#54

Post by Banana699 »

nemo44x wrote: post #12
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 wonder if Ted Kaczynski will be hailed as a great philosopher in the future and humans 100 years from now will condemn our time for our treatment of him while justifying his actions as that of a desperate man on the right side of history. It's ironic writing this on a website.

What do you mean the future ? I hail my Ted as a hero on the right side of history now.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#55

Post by aliqot »

mellosouls wrote: post #30
nemo44x wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Ted Kaczynski will be hailed as a great philosopher in the future and humans 100 years from now will condemn our time for our treatment of him while justifying his actions as that of a desperate man on the right side of history. It's ironic writing this on a website.

No. He is only famous because of the callous methods he used to get his paper published.

Within the confines of this thought experiment: I wonder sometimes if anybody would have read it at all had he not committed these crimes. Obviously the gravity of his crimes overshadowed any bit of sense in what he wrote, and effectively nullifies all ability in most people to even bring reason to the words as they read them.

That being said, there is undoubted truth in some of what he said regarding the perils of modern technology and the sociological effects on society. In the beginning it was great. These inventions unified everyone and made knowledge available, but then we got so far ahead of ourselves, that knowledge is now buried upon layer and layer of neon colored saccharine trash.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#56

Post by daoist_shaman »

ftio wrote: post #9
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…

There is a great book (a tiny novella) called Psalm for the Wild Built [0] that explores these ideas very beautifully. Highly recommend it. 0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40864002-a-psalm-for-the...

This looks like my cup of tea. Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#58

Post by concinds »

It was replaced by Virtual Reality.

The transhumanist philosophy was transcendental. Man, armed with innovative genius and deep technological knowledge, could one day remake himself and transcend his limitations. It wasn't so much a "philosophy" as a prediction of an inevitable and obvious future, which they were simply impatient to reach. Freedom from all biological, physical, intellectual constraints!

Today, people understand that technology isn't just a tool, it's a weapon. Corporations want to corral people into virtual worlds they control, and governments want perfect surveillance and infallible enforcement of all laws, and soon social rules. Your brain implant will have NSA/China backdoors, regular 0-days "observed in the wild" (sorry, no refunds), or will crash occasionally because the QA team got laid off.

Smart technologists today can see that virtual reality (which is indissociable with brain implants and most other transhumanist tech except perhaps nanobots) just means far deeper corporate/elite control over people's psyches. Read "The Rise of Virtual Reality" by Anthony Napoleon. The replacement of "real reality" (governed by the laws of nature) with a reality fully governed by other humans (and their flaws). It's very hard to get giddy and impatient about that future.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#59

Post by pixl97 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #46

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…

And were completely at the whims of nature around them. Yea, this is great when you live in a nice stable climate oasis, but most places on the planet are not like that (and that's even before we add in man made climate change).

It's all fun and games until you stub your toe and get an infection that could be treated with antibiotics, well except by choice you don't have any and you get to watch your body rot until you die.

Re: What ever happened to the transhumanists?

#60

Post by knowaveragejoe »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #57

This guy is asking where the transhumanist movement went? We're using plastic surgery and chemicals to change people's gender, and he's asking where it went?

You sound like you're getting caught up on the prefix "trans" in conjunction with the current culture war zeitgeist. That's not what transhumanism is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

Post reply on HN