I
got about six minutes into a documentary about transhumanism,
Technocalpys, before stopping.
I'll
probably be posting, soon, about how we have a bias towards
technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic and how
this limits our understanding of technology, but this was definitely
on my mind when watching, y'know, the first six minutes of the Technocalpys.
What
really lost me is that some talking head was saying that humans are beginning to cheat nature's limitations. Which . . . is very
much baffling to me because humans have been reshaping themselves for
thousands of years. Pretty much the first time a person decided that
they didn't want the body that nature and their own unconsidered
habits gave them – the first time a human set about exercise –
the decision was made to transform us from the coincidence of our genetic inheritance and circumstance into
something different. Likewise, the first time a human set out to
consciously discover something, they started the process of education
which created a vastly different kind of person. To a paleolithic human, we are transhuman.
Sure, compared to the future, the ttechniques humans use to improve themselves will be considered crude. Much in the same way an
abacus is crude compared to a laptop. But the continuum is there –
the ancient Greeks invented progressive weight training, a conscious
way to develop and improve physical strength. They decided to be
more than nature made them, to be stronger, to be better, shaped by
their own conscious desires. To me, that's the pivot upon which
transhumanism moves and it started moving long ago.
The
bias is, as I hinted above, primarily the bias we have for
technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic. For
instance, I believe that steroids and human growth hormones
intermediary between simply progressive exercise and cybernetic or
genetic manipulation for improved strength. If you take steroids
intelligently, you become slightly superhuman. If you take them
intelligently combined with progressive exercise techniques, you
might as well be superhuman. Seriously, take a look at the abilities
of professional athletes and the way their abilities tend to
increase over time. Much of that improvement is due to various
performance enhancing drugs. Compared to the athletes of yesteryear, modern athletes are slightly superhuman.
But,
y'know, that's cheap. It is also hard on a personal level. I suppose that we also tend
to approve of technologies that make things easier for us. I'm sure
the first robot bodies won't actually be better than the bodies of
elite athletes – the primary difference will be that to be an elite
athlete takes an awful lot of work whereas, in people's minds, having
your consciousness transferred to a robot will be relatively quick
and painless.
At
any rate, when I realized that the documentary was going to be so
tone deaf as to make no connection between historical and present
efforts to reshape our bodies and minds past their natural states, I
realized that it had nothing to teach me or, I think, too much interesting to say.
They also used a lot of Burning Man imagery and I've never met anyone who's gone to Burning Man who is capable of seriously talking about futurism. Just sayin'.
"They also used a lot of Burning Man imagery and I've never met anyone who's gone to Burning Man who is capable of seriously talking about futurism."
ReplyDeleteSeriously? Kurzweil is the Engingeering director at Google. Google bought the community bikes at Burning Man. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are Burners. There was a Ted Talk there. The EFF goes.
"Sure, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may have hit the playa for the first time, but Burning Man has always been a meeting and networking place for the tech elite. "
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57601986-235/why-fear-of-a-tech-elite-fueled-burning-man-burnout-is-sooo-wrong/