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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 fo

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 the natural world. From mental health decay to environmental destruction, the unintended side effects of technology were completely lost on me as a child. I believe humanity needs to pump the brakes and take a critical step back to evaluate the damage we’ve caused. I hope that it isn’t too late to try to fix what we’ve destroyed. Edit: Brakes

ftio 4y ago
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-wild-built https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40864002-a-psalm-for-the...
- daoist_shaman 4y ago
  This looks like my cup of tea. Thanks for the recommendation!
formerly_proven 4y ago
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.
- falcor84 4y ago
  Is the reason fear of the unknown?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    I mean that is a common trope, but why not fear of the known also. "Rich Capitalist optimizes future for themselves leaving the poor destitute and screwed"
- okasaki 4y ago
  What's the reason? I guess because it's easier to write?
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  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.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    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.
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    The existence of an average citizen of the Culture always seemed terrifyingly vacuous and stagnant. 99.999% of the trillions of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research (particularly compared with the vastly superior intellects of the Minds) of value so they simply amuse themselves any way they can, under the gentle care and supervision of the Minds, until their body stops working. I am reminded in particular of the ship's crew who gave themselves colds simply because they wanted to experience being ill and the Minds' "Infinite Fun Space". It is a very comfortable dystopia to be sure and possibly even the best outcome any sapient species could ever hope for but there is something very bleak about it.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      In any possible future, y% of the x number of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      > 99.999% of the trillions of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research This sadly sounds like the modern world.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  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.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect was very interesting to read at least.
- kragen 4y ago
  There's a reason why Batman is fighting costumed supervillains in literally every fiction work on him, but it isn't because costumed supervillains are a real thing, or because Batman would really be fighting them if he existed.
nemo44x 4y ago
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.
- daoist_shaman 4y ago
  Rewilding is an extreme answer, but an answer nonetheless. Could humanity ever have the discipline to only allow “some technology?” Maybe, but the extreme answer will always be there waiting for us. That his ideas were undermined by his actions is just as sad as the actions themselves. They weren’t terrible ideas. As you’ve pointed out, we might be on the path to a dystopian future where we’ll look back and say, “Damn, Ted was right.”
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >Rewilding is an extreme answer, but an answer nonetheless. Right up until the point some easily solvable by science calamity occurs and people re-invent science for that reason. I mean at this point we're treading off into "The Foundation" and setting up techno-priests to regulate learning and technology.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  No. He is only famous because of the callous methods he used to get his paper published.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    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.
upupandup 4y ago
what i found peculiar of all these identity movements is how much corporate fingerprints is behind them. a holistic, humane, and spiritual approach to elevating our collective awareness is written off as voodoo from "others" yet the rich, affluent in the West are increasingly gravitating towards it while the rest attack each other. human advancement need not be digitally/pharmaceutically driven but good luck telling this to giants.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Corporatism is taking what people want (whether it's a shiny phone, or oneness, or meditative creds) and then selling that. Optimistically you would say they are selling expertise. You can try to figure out meditation on your own - but there's a lot of cranks and nonsense and some stuff that works. Or you can give headspace $20/mo and they will give you a good experience. Of course no mass produced experience can ever meet the true need. You can't mass market meditation - and we know this! Ask the Buddhists!
mysterydip 4y ago
> I believe humanity needs to pump the breaks and take a critical step back to evaluate the damage we’ve caused. I agree, but I don't think this will happen as long as the money continues to be made. And as long as those with the money keep employing psychologists to essentially hack their customers into compliance, there won't be any resistance from that side, either.
yuuu 4y ago
brakes
- daoist_shaman 4y ago
  Thanks
austinl 4y ago
Speaking of pumping the breaks, I really enjoyed the recent documentary, The Year Earth Changed, which explores how the lockdowns from COVID had a significant positive impact on the natural world. The message is optimistic—essentially, it is still possible to make an impact if we're able to change our behavior. One of the more moving stories is the that Himalayas were visible for the first time 30 years in Jalandhar, which were previously hidden due to air pollution. Infant mortality rates amongst a number of species improved substantially as well (whales, penguins, dolphins, and cheetahs are among a few the documentary covered).
hinkley 4y ago
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?
- justinator 4y ago
  Now I'm curious about the lessons you learned from tai chi!
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Sure why not. The biggest are that some things cannot really be explained with words. They can be highlighted, they can be pitched, but at the end of the day you need to feel someone doing it before you understand. Either yourself or a model. Time and again I was reminded of the first line of the Tao Te Ching (many, but not all tai chi people pay lip service to Taoism): > The Tao that can be written is not the eternal Tao. If you pull on that thread enough you learn that intellectualizing everything doesn't work, and you start to wonder what else in your life you've been intellectualizing that maybe you shouldn't be, and what you're doing and how you're feeling about the things that don't respond well to it. We in tech are particularly bad at this. The act of participating in HN is pretty heavily tilted toward it, and in my very limited experience looking at cybernetics and transhumanism through that filter, I find a whole lot of questions I want to ask the person daydreaming about this altered state they are looking for. Are you trying to become more than human because it's awesome, or less than human because it hurts? In a more pedestrian bent, there are a lot of positions the human body thinks it can't maintain but it actually can, and for much longer than you would have imagined (though things always look easy until you try them, which takes away some of the marvel. Big deal, I could stand like that for a minute. No, no you can't.) I have to be careful on rocky terrain or near boats to turn around and say, "Kids, don't try what I just did, you will hurt yourself. Take my hand, and I won't ask you twice." Gaps and slippery surfaces are made deceptively mundane looking by some of my betters. I know a couple of people who can do the form in socks. Including horse stance. Edit #? I got into it for joint and back pain. I never achieved complete relief from the back pain, but I can do some things with my muscles that stretch and reset things without 'doing a stretch'. It's half parlor trick, but very useful in situations like crowds or lines, or where busting out into a stretch is a faux pas, like in the middle of someone else's argument, or story.
FFRefresh 4y ago
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.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Are you serious? An ant hill or a beaver dam are mere reorganizations of known matter types, and could be analogized to humans building things like walls. Stone, and even some types of mortar, participate in the great cosmic dance of Gaia [0], just like the works of the animals cited above. They decay, they are broken down by various processes over time, they are fashioned of things found in the environment. PFAS, by comparison, does not, cannot, and is not, respectively. It doesn't break down, and was never present in any ecosystem nor any part of the water cycle until a few decades ago -- an fraction of an eyeblink in the sort of evolutionary time it'll take for PFAS' presence to be integrated into the cosmic dance of Gaia, and until then it's just gonna cause cancer. I can agree that invoking the naturalistic fallacy isn't good argumentative practice, but some things are decidedly unnatural. Creating novel waterproofing chemicals that don't have naturally-occurring ways to break down and then dumping them into the water supply isn't something beavers, or ants, or birds, can do. Humans have transcended the natural world. I can tell because of all the new types of things we're adding to it. [0] should be read less as some pseudoreligious thing and more a handwave about the ancient, stable systems that repurpose atoms from moribund things into newer, more vital things: microbes, fungus, rot, uptake of substances by plants, etc
seydor 4y ago
Transhumanism , like all trans- movements is not about maintaining the "natural" order of things, whatever that is. Nature is not better in absolute
red75prime 4y ago
> I hope that it isn’t too late to try to fix what we’ve destroyed. It will be like pumping the brakes and critically thinking, while staying in a landslide (caused by you, but blame assignment will not do much at the moment). Climate change will not wait. Extinct species will not pop up back into existence. Asteroids on impact course (if any) will not stop moving for that matter. We need to run faster than ever to have a chance to fix at least some things.
- alexvoda 4y ago
  With regards to asteroids, the question is when, not if. The probability that none of the known or unknown space objects will ever collide with Earth until the sun exhausts it's fuel is incredibly slim. Of course, an asteroid collision is perfectly natural.
celdon25 4y ago
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/index.php/IEET/more/tpdec2014 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.
the_omegist 4y ago
> I believe humanity needs to pump the brakes and take a critical step back to evaluate the damage we’ve caused. I hope that it isn’t too late to try to fix what we’ve destroyed. What are you talking about ? You mention your engineering degree and experience to give you some authority but then you ruin this by saying what a 5yrs old kid could have said (sorry if it's harsh). Humanity won't "pump the brakes" because it never did it & never will. No one wants to go live back in caves. Do you really imagine 1000 yrs from now technology staying at its current level? Would it be a nice thing ? No. Not for me. I don't see mankind as beavers : we can and should aim for the highest achievements and progress. If in the way damages are made, they will be repaired later on. That's my view. Of course, during this journey, the less damage made the better. But this kind of Luddite mentality is only seen in privileged western societies.
- rsync 4y ago
  There are different ways to “pump the brakes”. The Jewish sabbath comes to mind. How beneficial, and at what cost, would it be to block air travel or discretionary car trips, say, once monthly ?
antifa 4y ago
Transhumanism was cool before we realized it was going to be cheap shoddy products that overheat under your skin and required Facebook accounts.

ftio 4y ago

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-wild-built https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40864002-a-psalm-for-the...

daoist_shaman 4y ago
This looks like my cup of tea. Thanks for the recommendation!

formerly_proven 4y ago

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.

falcor84 4y ago
Is the reason fear of the unknown?
- pixl97 4y ago
  I mean that is a common trope, but why not fear of the known also. "Rich Capitalist optimizes future for themselves leaving the poor destitute and screwed"
okasaki 4y ago
What's the reason? I guess because it's easier to write?
matthewmacleod 4y ago
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.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  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.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  The existence of an average citizen of the Culture always seemed terrifyingly vacuous and stagnant. 99.999% of the trillions of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research (particularly compared with the vastly superior intellects of the Minds) of value so they simply amuse themselves any way they can, under the gentle care and supervision of the Minds, until their body stops working. I am reminded in particular of the ship's crew who gave themselves colds simply because they wanted to experience being ill and the Minds' "Infinite Fun Space". It is a very comfortable dystopia to be sure and possibly even the best outcome any sapient species could ever hope for but there is something very bleak about it.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    In any possible future, y% of the x number of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > 99.999% of the trillions of individuals that exist are not talented or interesting enough to produce any artistic works or scientific research This sadly sounds like the modern world.
rowanG077 4y ago
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.
- celdon25 4y ago
  The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect was very interesting to read at least.
kragen 4y ago
There's a reason why Batman is fighting costumed supervillains in literally every fiction work on him, but it isn't because costumed supervillains are a real thing, or because Batman would really be fighting them if he existed.

nemo44x 4y ago

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.

daoist_shaman 4y ago
Rewilding is an extreme answer, but an answer nonetheless. Could humanity ever have the discipline to only allow “some technology?” Maybe, but the extreme answer will always be there waiting for us. That his ideas were undermined by his actions is just as sad as the actions themselves. They weren’t terrible ideas. As you’ve pointed out, we might be on the path to a dystopian future where we’ll look back and say, “Damn, Ted was right.”
- pixl97 4y ago
  >Rewilding is an extreme answer, but an answer nonetheless. Right up until the point some easily solvable by science calamity occurs and people re-invent science for that reason. I mean at this point we're treading off into "The Foundation" and setting up techno-priests to regulate learning and technology.
mellosouls 4y ago
No. He is only famous because of the callous methods he used to get his paper published.
- aliqot 4y ago
  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.

upupandup 4y ago

what i found peculiar of all these identity movements is how much corporate fingerprints is behind them. a holistic, humane, and spiritual approach to elevating our collective awareness is written off as voodoo from "others" yet the rich, affluent in the West are increasingly gravitating towards it while the rest attack each other. human advancement need not be digitally/pharmaceutically driven but good luck telling this to giants.

vorpalhex 4y ago
Corporatism is taking what people want (whether it's a shiny phone, or oneness, or meditative creds) and then selling that. Optimistically you would say they are selling expertise. You can try to figure out meditation on your own - but there's a lot of cranks and nonsense and some stuff that works. Or you can give headspace $20/mo and they will give you a good experience. Of course no mass produced experience can ever meet the true need. You can't mass market meditation - and we know this! Ask the Buddhists!

mysterydip 4y ago

> I believe humanity needs to pump the breaks and take a critical step back to evaluate the damage we’ve caused. I agree, but I don't think this will happen as long as the money continues to be made. And as long as those with the money keep employing psychologists to essentially hack their customers into compliance, there won't be any resistance from that side, either.

yuuu 4y ago

brakes

daoist_shaman 4y ago
Thanks

austinl 4y ago

Speaking of pumping the breaks, I really enjoyed the recent documentary, The Year Earth Changed, which explores how the lockdowns from COVID had a significant positive impact on the natural world. The message is optimistic—essentially, it is still possible to make an impact if we're able to change our behavior. One of the more moving stories is the that Himalayas were visible for the first time 30 years in Jalandhar, which were previously hidden due to air pollution. Infant mortality rates amongst a number of species improved substantially as well (whales, penguins, dolphins, and cheetahs are among a few the documentary covered).

hinkley 4y ago

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?

justinator 4y ago
Now I'm curious about the lessons you learned from tai chi!
- hinkley 4y ago
  Sure why not. The biggest are that some things cannot really be explained with words. They can be highlighted, they can be pitched, but at the end of the day you need to feel someone doing it before you understand. Either yourself or a model. Time and again I was reminded of the first line of the Tao Te Ching (many, but not all tai chi people pay lip service to Taoism): > The Tao that can be written is not the eternal Tao. If you pull on that thread enough you learn that intellectualizing everything doesn't work, and you start to wonder what else in your life you've been intellectualizing that maybe you shouldn't be, and what you're doing and how you're feeling about the things that don't respond well to it. We in tech are particularly bad at this. The act of participating in HN is pretty heavily tilted toward it, and in my very limited experience looking at cybernetics and transhumanism through that filter, I find a whole lot of questions I want to ask the person daydreaming about this altered state they are looking for. Are you trying to become more than human because it's awesome, or less than human because it hurts? In a more pedestrian bent, there are a lot of positions the human body thinks it can't maintain but it actually can, and for much longer than you would have imagined (though things always look easy until you try them, which takes away some of the marvel. Big deal, I could stand like that for a minute. No, no you can't.) I have to be careful on rocky terrain or near boats to turn around and say, "Kids, don't try what I just did, you will hurt yourself. Take my hand, and I won't ask you twice." Gaps and slippery surfaces are made deceptively mundane looking by some of my betters. I know a couple of people who can do the form in socks. Including horse stance. Edit #? I got into it for joint and back pain. I never achieved complete relief from the back pain, but I can do some things with my muscles that stretch and reset things without 'doing a stretch'. It's half parlor trick, but very useful in situations like crowds or lines, or where busting out into a stretch is a faux pas, like in the middle of someone else's argument, or story.

FFRefresh 4y ago

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.

revolvingocelot 4y ago
Are you serious? An ant hill or a beaver dam are mere reorganizations of known matter types, and could be analogized to humans building things like walls. Stone, and even some types of mortar, participate in the great cosmic dance of Gaia [0], just like the works of the animals cited above. They decay, they are broken down by various processes over time, they are fashioned of things found in the environment. PFAS, by comparison, does not, cannot, and is not, respectively. It doesn't break down, and was never present in any ecosystem nor any part of the water cycle until a few decades ago -- an fraction of an eyeblink in the sort of evolutionary time it'll take for PFAS' presence to be integrated into the cosmic dance of Gaia, and until then it's just gonna cause cancer. I can agree that invoking the naturalistic fallacy isn't good argumentative practice, but some things are decidedly unnatural. Creating novel waterproofing chemicals that don't have naturally-occurring ways to break down and then dumping them into the water supply isn't something beavers, or ants, or birds, can do. Humans have transcended the natural world. I can tell because of all the new types of things we're adding to it. [0] should be read less as some pseudoreligious thing and more a handwave about the ancient, stable systems that repurpose atoms from moribund things into newer, more vital things: microbes, fungus, rot, uptake of substances by plants, etc

seydor 4y ago

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

red75prime 4y ago

> I hope that it isn’t too late to try to fix what we’ve destroyed. It will be like pumping the brakes and critically thinking, while staying in a landslide (caused by you, but blame assignment will not do much at the moment). Climate change will not wait. Extinct species will not pop up back into existence. Asteroids on impact course (if any) will not stop moving for that matter. We need to run faster than ever to have a chance to fix at least some things.

alexvoda 4y ago
With regards to asteroids, the question is when, not if. The probability that none of the known or unknown space objects will ever collide with Earth until the sun exhausts it's fuel is incredibly slim. Of course, an asteroid collision is perfectly natural.

celdon25 4y ago

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/index.php/IEET/more/tpdec2014 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.

the_omegist 4y ago

> I believe humanity needs to pump the brakes and take a critical step back to evaluate the damage we’ve caused. I hope that it isn’t too late to try to fix what we’ve destroyed. What are you talking about ? You mention your engineering degree and experience to give you some authority but then you ruin this by saying what a 5yrs old kid could have said (sorry if it's harsh). Humanity won't "pump the brakes" because it never did it & never will. No one wants to go live back in caves. Do you really imagine 1000 yrs from now technology staying at its current level? Would it be a nice thing ? No. Not for me. I don't see mankind as beavers : we can and should aim for the highest achievements and progress. If in the way damages are made, they will be repaired later on. That's my view. Of course, during this journey, the less damage made the better. But this kind of Luddite mentality is only seen in privileged western societies.

rsync 4y ago
There are different ways to “pump the brakes”. The Jewish sabbath comes to mind. How beneficial, and at what cost, would it be to block air travel or discretionary car trips, say, once monthly ?

antifa 4y ago

Transhumanism was cool before we realized it was going to be cheap shoddy products that overheat under your skin and required Facebook accounts.