Transhumanism (sometimes symbolized by >H or H+), a term often used as a synonym for "human enhancement", is an international, intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death.There is a distinction to be made here:
Although the first known use of the term "transhumanism" dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s, when a group of scientists, artists, and futurists based in the United States began to organize what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings will eventually be transformed into beings with ... such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman".[2] Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as "posthumanism" or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals.[3]
Some secular humanists conceive transhumanism as an offspring of the humanist freethought movement and argue that transhumanists differ from the humanist mainstream by having a specific focus on technological approaches to resolving human concerns and on the issue of mortality.[33] However, other progressives have argued that posthumanism, whether it be its philosophical or activist forms, amount to a shift away from concerns about social justice, from the reform of human institutions and from other Enlightenment preoccupations, toward narcissistic longings for a transcendence of the human body in quest of more exquisite ways of being.[34] In this view, transhumanism is abandoning the goals of humanism, the Enlightenment, and progressive politics.
Some critics of libertarian transhumanism have focused on its likely socioeconomic consequences in societies in which divisions between rich and poor are on the rise. Bill McKibben, for example, suggests that emerging human enhancement technologies would be disproportionately available to those with greater financial resources, thereby exacerbating the gap between rich and poor and creating a "genetic divide".[89] Lee Silver, a biologist and science writer who coined the term "reprogenetics" and supports its applications, has nonetheless expressed concern that these methods could create a two-tiered society of genetically-engineered "haves" and "have nots" if social democratic reforms lag behind implementation of enhancement technologies.[91] Critics who make these arguments do not thereby necessarily accept the transhumanist assumption that human enhancement is a positive value; in their view, it should be discouraged, or even banned, because it could confer additional power upon the already powerful. The 1997 film Gattaca's depiction of a dystopian society in which one's social class depends entirely on genetic modifications is often cited by critics in support of these views.[24] These criticisms are also voiced by non-libertarian transhumanist advocates, especially self-described democratic transhumanists, who believe that the majority of current or future social and environmental issues (such as unemployment and resource depletion) need to be addressed by a combination of political and technological solutions (such as a guaranteed minimum income and alternative technology). Therefore, on the specific issue of an emerging genetic divide due to unequal access to human enhancement technologies, bioethicist James Hughes, in his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, argues that progressives or, more precisely, techno-progressives must articulate and implement public policies (such as a universal health care voucher system that covers human enhancement technologies) in order to attenuate this problem as much as possible, rather than trying to ban human enhancement technologies. The latter, he argues, might actually worsen the problem by making these technologies unsafe or available only to the wealthy on the local black market or in countries where such a ban is not enforced.[24]The first part that we need to focus on is this right here:
Bill McKibben, for example, suggests that emerging human enhancement technologies would be disproportionately available to those with greater financial resources, thereby exacerbating the gap between rich and poor and creating a "genetic divide". [89]Human baseline enhancements, as argued above, cannot be created without extensive testing, requiring self-replication, as mentioned. As it turns out, self-replication has been proven over the past four billion years by cells, bacteria, organisms, elephants, ducks, mosquitos, humans, etc. And they all lived without money and a Swiss bank account. Given a macroscale self-replication system, derived from the need to figure out what enhancements to make, you suddenly have superabundance and technology that can make itself, given sufficient preparation, and this technology can self-replicate itself to the people of the world. It would take 33 days if the tech replicated at the rate of once per day to get to be "one replicator/fabricator per person", but 33 days is not much in the grand scheme of things, especially if you have multiple startup sites around the world so that there's no "inequality" in the amount of time between the first root site where the replicator is made and the time that everybody else gets it (the "far edges" of the world, so to speak). Self-replication is a proven technology, it has been mathematically studied for decades (and socially studied for millions of years if you get my drift), so things are looking hopeful. The trick now is to make sure any self-replicating technology is completely open and free, so in the unlikely circumstance that some company gets to the idea first, that might not be the solution we are looking for. This is an alternative to Hughes' call for the articulation of "social policies" (see social transhumanism) solved by type-1 transhumanism. Given the choice between two ideas that end up with the same thing, choose the simpler. Don't know if we need to discuss the similiarities between the Hughes-result and the replicator-result, but either way the idea is to get access to people.
Critics such as Kass, Fukuyama, and a variety of Christian authors hold that attempts to significantly alter human biology are not only inherently immoral but also threats to the "social order". Alternatively, they argue that implementation of such technologies would likely lead to the "naturalizing" of social hierarchies or place new means of control in the hands of totalitarian regimesFocus on the "threat to the social order" aspect. That's really just saying status quo. This is almost a direct argument from authority. But it's the second part that we need to comes to terms with: placing new means of control in the hands of totalitarian regimes. This is the "argument of evil": bad things could happen, therefore we shouldn't do it. I had the interesting experience of coming to terms with this problem when I was releasing my do-it-yourself/homebrew synthetic biology and genetic engineering kit (1) earlier this year. It was a really interesting problem to struggle with for a while. After all, releasing consolidated information on how to automatically construct and evolve new organisms can easily be abused by various individuals and groups. But I quickly realized that shooting ourselves in the foot and cutting access does not solve the fundamental problem of biological security, that just because some information wasn't released, the security holes in biologically evolved systems aren't going to be exploited. On the contrary, the very act happens every day all across the world. Have you ever gotten sick? I thought so. It's not people that are to blame (not yet), and we have so far come up with effective ways to cope. This is the same thing here: what if some totalitarian guys come up with further ways to oppress people? Yep, that's a pretty big problem. And it'll exist even without transhumanist technologies coming into play, as it has throughout history. But while I am at it, there are some interesting solutions. With empowering transhumanist technologies, bringing down a totalitarian regime will be within the possibility of a small group of individuals, since no totalitarian regime (or any other) can have complete security on what schematics are brought into the country, or ways to smuggle in the replicators or human enhancement technologies and so on. This is just something that we will have to deal with, just like nuclear fallout scenarios, where we adapt and take personal responsibility into our own hands for letting certain things continue or not continue as the case may be. Somebody might find it interesting to explore the yuck-factor involved in a lot of this, it would likely lead to some interesting thoughts.
Some critics of transhumanism allege an ableist bias in the use of such concepts as "limitations", "enhancement" and "improvement". Some even see the old eugenics, social Darwinist and master race ideologies and programs of the past as warnings of what the promotion of eugenic enhancement technologies might unintentionally encourage.Be careful here. This gets into dangerous rapids very fast. First, I'd like to point out that I have found people supporting eugenics in the most peculiar of places, amongst classmates and on the internet alike, it is quite weird to suddenly realize that a "friend" wants to kill anybody 'stupid' (whatever that means), resting on arguments like "they wouldn't be alive if medical technology and our industrialization wouldn't have helped to get them where they are today" -- the fact is that we are alive no matter how it happens to be so, and it's an arbitrary divide between "us" and "them" -- we have all, by now, felt the influence of medicine on our personal histories whether in evolutionary history or in recent phenotype-history. (Are you good at hunting? How well does your immune system do when you're starving?) Anyway, I want to explore some thought experiments to explore these issues, and I hope that others will join me and comment on these in time. First up is old-eugenics, i.e. involuntary sterilization.
Lasn argues that high technology development should be completely relinquished since it inevitably serves corporate interests with devastating consequences on society and the environment.That's very pessimistic. Who says it must serve corporate interests? Maybe as long as you demand money to play a factor, or something weird like that.
In his 2003 book Our Final Hour, British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees argues that advanced science and technology bring as much risk of disaster as opportunity for progress. However, Rees does not advocate a halt to scientific activity; he calls for tighter security and perhaps an end to traditional scientific openness.Halting openness is halting progress.
One transhumanist solution proposed by Nick Bostrom is differential technological development, in which attempts would be made to influence the sequence in which technologies developed. In this approach, planners would strive to retard the development of possibly harmful technologies and their applications, while accelerating the development of likely beneficial technologies, especially those that offer protection against the harmful effects of others.Precisely: obviously all of us will want to do as much as we can to make sure our ideals are still carried out and that inexplicable horrors do not take the best of us.