fuck your flying car, your robot maid, and your nanotube-filled penis

[rone]

Transhumanism, when it is an actual "intellectual and cultural movement" instead of just a decent plot hook for a novel, is a ridiculous dodge.  My objections, though, are not because of the morality of what we might do, which seems to be the bone of contention in the all of the criticisms listed in Wikipedia; i think that's all a bunch of handwringing nonsense.  Instead, the real problem with transhumanism is that it turns away from the problems that we have now by thinking about how we can solve them in the future.  We should be thinking about how to solve these problems now.  How can one think about moving beyond one's humanity when we don't yet know how to effectively be human?

To call yourself a transhumanist is to reveal yourself as the worst sort of elitist asshole, because you're trying to solve your personal inconveniences with technology that doesn't exist.  There are people all over the world dying because they have no clean water; societies still haven't figured out how to have representative leadership that scales as populations increase and that discourages leaders from making a career out of pulling strings; there's (a possibly imagined renaissance of) fundamentalist fuckheads around the world who are trying to stamp out critical thinking; and much more, at the root of all of which lies this: we don't know how to teach our kids how to learn and what to learn in order to make tomorrow better.  So when you talk to me about the Singularity, i'll probably just tell you to fuck off, because there's no way we'll generate artificial intelligence worth a damn when we barely have a clue what natural intelligence is or how it works (and i'm talking wetware here).  Stop wanking to your fantasy of a nanotech-enhanced brain, and spend that energy figuring out how to get along with your neighbor.

Comments

[mangosteen]

Amen.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

More to do with your title than with your post:

While I love reading about old science fiction and obsolete futurism, I'm starting to be annoyed by people who have feelings of betrayal associated with the "where's my flying car?" complaint, especially the space enthusiasts who go on about how we'd be colonizing the solar system by now if some simple policy were adopted or if some bad people hadn't ruined it.

I think part of what sets my teeth on edge is the sense of entitlement, as if they were owed something besides being fantastically rich and comfortable by world standards (as most of the people with these complaints are). Of course one can take that kind of objection too far--rich people are not forbidden from complaining about trivial things--but these aren't trivial things; some of them like to blame the welfare state for ruining their outer-space dreams.

It's as if they're clinging so hard to old claims that the future would be a certain way that they reject even the hard data to the contrary provided by actually experiencing the future, and assume that they need to find somebody to blame for getting the world wrong instead of the more potentially useful task of figuring out why blatantly wrong predictions might have become so prevalent, or how we could move forward from where we are.

The welfare state?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

I've been listening to the wrong betrayed futurists! I thought the prevalent complaint was that the military-entertainment complex had stolen all our promise of flying cars and turned it into rap music and bomber drones.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

The people who ask for the flying cars are invariably the sort who try to change lanes while talking on a cell phone in their regular car.
Fuck you, no, you don't get to have a car that could potentially crash-land into a school.

[nyar.livejournal.com]

Look, I'm mad that Scholastic lied to me, in the form of Weekly Reader, when I was 8. I have every right to be. I was impressionable then. I was told I would have a flying car in the year 2000. My whole life was ruined!

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I'd never known there was a term for the folks who seem to think technology will fix social and cultural problems. The thinking there (or lack of it, really) baffles me. Technology has done a lot of things for us as a species, but people still worship invisible pink unicorns and kill each other over the shade of pink they can't quite make out.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

Testify

[erikred.livejournal.com]

To call yourself a transhumanist and believe that we can ignore today's problems because Star Trek tech is just around the corner waiting to save us is as you say. Singularity, if/when it happens, will bring with it its own slew of problems and issues; waiting for it makes as much sense as waiting for the Rapture.

Not all self-described transhumanists are like that. It's not some sort of monolithic club that pays dues to Bruce Sterling. There are plenty of people who are perfectly willing to lobster-suit up when the tech becomes available who are still, now, working on real world problems. Stop your fucking lumping already.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I don't really want a flying car; they'd probably wind up at least as hard to maintain and find parking for as regular cars.

No, what *I* want are shoes with wings on them.

Preach It Brother, Preach It!

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

We get no new toys until we learn to take care of the ones we already have.

Re: Preach It Brother, Preach It!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's no good either--it's equivalent to saying "never develop anything new ever" because a sufficiently perfect society is never going to happen. The point is not to just wait to get saved.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I guess the trick, as ever, is to figure out when something is "good enough".

[vajrabot.livejournal.com]

I agree. I'm also a bit disturbed by the transhumanist/singularityist assumption that technology will automatically be used to empower people and enhance human ability, and we don't have to worry about it being used to disempower and reduce human ability. I agree that technology is more likely to increase liberty, but it's not like we can just sit back and wait for it to happen. Maybe I've read 1984 too many times, or maybe they've read it too few times.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Maybe they've read it too many times!

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

I haven't thought much about this except to be alarmed at how otherwise sensible people talk about it as something that is "just about to happen," say within the next five years.

There seem to be a bunch of facets to transhumanism, and transhumanists come in different kinds, but I think the two kinds I see most often are the "nanotechnology will cure all diseases" kind and the "you'll never have to die because you can go live in a machine" kind.

The problem I see with the former is that they overlook the fact that gene manipulation is full of promise but still more like a high school science project than an industrial-grade technology. Gene therapy still isn't therapy, so far as I know.

And the latter overlooks the fact that all our best machines still use or depend on fossil fuels, and those are not free.

Transhumanists would do well to mind the state of cryonics, and remember that there's money to be made in keeping corpses frozen, but not much money to be made in figuring out how to reanimate them.

[reddragdiva]

No, the problem is that transhumanism in practice is about cat piss men who want to continue to be cat piss men for a million years. If you want to picture the future, imagine eau de Trekkie smashing into a human nose, forever.