A book I must buy. The excerpt is enough.

[elfs]

When someone asks me, "What's the point of transhumanism?" I often have no real convincing answer. I have a hard time putting it into words, which is why I'm today grateful to economist Max Singer for giving me the words I've been looking for.

Even today, we live in a Hobbsian world, not a Human one. Too many people lead lives that are nasty and brutal, and say what you want, I think even our own is too short: I don't just want eighty years, I want eight hundred years, and more, if I can have it. I am looking forward to, as Singer puts it in Passage to the Human World:

No other word as aptly describes the character of the new world into which we are passing as the word "human." The new features of this world are being created by people. In this new world the most basic fact of life -- how much of it each person will have -- will be determined by the genes of our human species, not by external natural forces that cut human life short. Humans will be plentiful, and their lives will be the kind of lives that we think of as normal human lives -- concerned mostly with human creations, not with a constant struggle against nature...

The only thing with which I would disagree with Max is singular: our genes are natural forces that, like the rest, will fall into our hands and be subject to our control.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

"Transhumanism" is, simply put, the most important choice facing us over the long term (decades to centuries), in that there is really more than one choice.

See, we are going to transcend our current flesh, whether we like it or not. That's not avoidable, even if we wish to avoid it, because those who do choose to transcend will be so much more capable than those who do not that the future will belong to them.

The questions, and the choice, are these -- What sort of transcendance will we choose to make? What will we become? And how will we treat each other?

Depending on the answers to those questions, our future could be Hellish -- or Heavenly.