Transhumanism scale 🤔
1: cane or crutch
3: glasses
4: contact lens
7: hearing aids
...
...
90: brain uploaded to cloud
95: uploaded brain downloadable to blank robot
100: brains in cloud/robots form collective superconsciousness
Agree/disagree? Points in between?
Conversation
Replying to
Humans use tools to enchance and augment ourselves. It’s core to being human. Not transhumanist. There’s no spectrum here. The real examples are just human. The ones in the 90s are religious fantasies (also a typical human activity).
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Replying to
Haha. Sorry. Just “glasses are transhumanism” is like saying “y=mx+b is an artifificial intelligence that can predict a location on a line” (to paraphrase )
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I think there's value to recognizing how seemingly trivial things are on evolutionary curves that lead to radically different states. People have a tendency hindsight-bias normalization. Glasses were HUGE. And y=mx+b was HUGE too at its point on the trajectory.
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But that’s the whole point. You’re presuming where the trajectory goes. You’re acting like you believe in intelligent design rather than evolution. There’s nothing about existing human augmentation tech that implies transhumanism is the destination. That’s the ideological step.
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No, I am speculating where it *could* go, and I'm open to the possibility of it working in more interesting ways than we currently imagine. You're doing the mcluhan rearview mirror thing.
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I guess i’m just more interested in the mechanisms of technological development and the effects of those developments than speculating about some hypothetical end point.
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Sure, and that's a legit interest and in no way in a zero-sum relationship with speculative futurist interests.
That’s fair. It feels zero sum often because the utopias (whether AI or VR or BMI) tend to suck up all the attention. And the people interested in them tend to wave away the details as unimportant or inevitable.

