E.g.: A guarantee that people won’t wind up in dire straits of poverty because they don’t choose to adopt new technologies. If someone adopts a technology that makes them fantastically better at accumulating wealth, they are constrained to an amount of wealth that is a fixed multiple of the amount of wealth of the poorest person on the planet. (This is extremely simple and has big gaping sociological problems like “What happens to a society where the most extreme transhumans give out huge amounts of dole to everyone else, who has no need to work?” It’s just a starting point.)

• Re: Instead of Transhumanism by Peter Nolan on Thursday April 27, @09:54AM

  Natasha Vita-More's comments make the most sense of anything I've read here. Try reading the Extropy Institute email archive for seeing what transhumanists think about the future. It can be far out but it's easy to get to on the web. I made a best guess about transhumanism like Schroeder did until I looked them up. Transhumanists are some of the smartest people around no matter how you cut it. They are the ones thinking about the future of the world and its people.

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But while your suggestion might be a good one in a science fiction world, there is a large problem with it in the real world: this stuff is all science fiction right now. One hopes the technology to make it possible will come about someday, 50 or 100 or 500 years from now. But that will require generation after generation of hard, unwavering work at the basics of nanotechnology (think how long macrotechnology took from the Bronze Age to robot factories - we're still struggling to establish the Bronze Age of nanotech), biotechnology (cancer is still an enemy that was supposed to have been conquered long ago; old age will be a far greater enemy still), computation (it has taken a long time to realize that Skynet-style AI is simply an ill-posed problem; the reason we haven't found any short cuts is the same reason we haven't found the highest prime number), robotics (a commentator on an unexpected feat by a robot: "a bucket of water I accidentally kicked over the other day did exactly the same thing").

What'll happen if we follow your advice, as people seem determined to do, because the human mind is programmed to believe in apocalypse and nirvana rather than the simple continuation of things as they were? (No holier-than-thou there, I used to believe in all sorts of imminent things until I figured out the evolutionary psychology and realized how many previous generations had thought exactly the same sort of things and been completely wrong!)

Here's my best guess:

1) Everyone gets very worked up about transhumanism, ignoring the fact that it's pure science fiction for the foreseeable future.

2) The consensus agrees with you that it should be thought of as a political rather than an engineering problem - as indeed arguably it should if this weren't pure science fiction.

3) Therefore politicians are put in charge of the decision-making. Who else could be put in charge but those who are?

4) They use their tools: laws, regulations and bureaucracies. What else could they use but what they have?

5) But nanotech etc are basic research at the moment, with a desperate struggle to earn any sort of money. When you have to spend $10 on lawyers before you can get permission to spend $1 on lab work, it just goes away. There's no point in trying to work with atoms, it's pain no gain. Bits are where there's a chance of gain, bits and laws. Progress veers off into ever more sophisticated metacommentary on the legal ramifications of the social implications of political aspects of pornographic video games.

6) We all die of old age. So do our children. The social conditions that encouraged scientific inquiry were on the scale of history an aberration with a short past; they have a short future, too.

7) Sic transit gloria mundi.

I used to think our dreams of future progress could be self-fulfilling. Now as I watch the hysteria climb a steady exponential curve so many generations before any sort of reality, I'm starting to think they'll be self-poisoning.

The very fact that a movement identifies itself as transhumanist shows that it is not neutral in its preference of possible futures; so it's bogus to refer to transhumanism as being simply a group of objective analysts concerned with creating a "toolbox of options" for humanity. There's a specific agenda inherent in the movement.

Now since this is all science fiction anyway and I am a science fiction writer, my best response, if I don't agree with the transhumanist future, should really not be to write blog entries on the subject and piss people off; it should be to construct a better piece of SF that will provide a superior alternative vision. That is in fact what I've been doing, and will continue to do--with detours along the way to write pirate adventures, of course.

Arrr, me hearties.

• Re: Instead of Transhumanism by Michael LaTorra on Friday April 21, @10:22AM

  I look forwarding to reading your science-fiction ruminations on transhumanism and the alternatives to it, Karl. I have to admit that to date I have only read your short fiction ('really liked "Dragons of Pripyat", BTW) so now I am adding your novels to my "Must Read" list. The issues you raise are, of course, valid and very important. I am pleased to see that you are familiar with Nick Bostrom's writings, so you know that transhumanists are not unaware of the dangers that lurk ahead of us. At least in the World Transhumanist Association, we are not pollyanaish about existential threats and the dangers of unequal access to the goods and services that make for a decent life. I'm glad you pointed to the importance of Nietzsche, who wrote in "Thus Spake Zarathustra": Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman -- a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. Regards, Michael LaTorra Board of Directors World Transhumanist Association

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