Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

It was replaced by Virtual Reality.

The transhumanist philosophy was transcendental. Man, armed with innovative genius and deep technological knowledge, could one day remake himself and transcend his limitations. It wasn't so much a "philosophy" as a prediction of an inevitable and obvious future, which they were simply impatient to reach. Freedom from all biological, physical, intellectual constraints!

Today, people understand that technology isn't just a tool, it's a weapon. Corporations want to corral people into virtual worlds they control, and governments want perfect surveillance and infallible enforcement of all laws, and soon social rules. Your brain implant will have NSA/China backdoors, regular 0-days "observed in the wild" (sorry, no refunds), or will crash occasionally because the QA team got laid off.

Smart technologists today can see that virtual reality (which is indissociable with brain implants and most other transhumanist tech except perhaps nanobots) just means far deeper corporate/elite control over people's psyches. Read "The Rise of Virtual Reality" by Anthony Napoleon. The replacement of "real reality" (governed by the laws of nature) with a reality fully governed by other humans (and their flaws). It's very hard to get giddy and impatient about that future.

No, it was not replaced by VR. I am a trans humanist. As soon as there's a better than natural artificial heart proven to work for decades and with low risks, I will happily undergo surgery. Major cause of death avoided.

My eyes are good for now, but I imagine in 20 years they will start really going downhill. If there's an artificial option, I will switch.

Same goes for most organs.

Unfortunately all these advances are decades away. Connecting to the nervous system isn't a solved problem, so no comparable arms or hands any time soon, even though they may be much more durable, strong, fast very soon. You still need the skin to feel. OK, maybe not "need", but really want.

Transhumanism isn't just advanced medicine. The idea isn't to replace a human heart with an artificial heart that's mostly functionally identical (current-day technology). The whole idea is to transcend biological limits using technology, i.e. develop eyes, ears, and brains that are functionally different and superior.

Prolonging human longevity is just one of the (many) goals of the transhumanist movement). Its core definition (according to Oxford dictionary) is: "the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology."

The original transhumanist dream was that we would each gain more control over our biology (that sounds like freedom to me); the realities of today's world mean that we would instead gain marginally more control, while corporations and governments gain exponentially more control (that sounds like tyranny to me).

It's inevitable that artificial organs will be better than the natural ones. But you first have to reach parity.

> while corporations and governments gain exponentially more control

that is unavoidable. Transhumanism doesn't guarantee preserving full individuality. Achieving transhumanism most probably would require giving up significant degree of individuality as the tightly connected "collectives/hives" - once such possibility become practical - would outcompete individuals. I.e. Borg is one of the most probable and close description of the future transhuman society.

In every movement you have over-enthusiasts/utopists who don't see the challenges. But even in a game like Deus Ex you can see it's not difficult to see the utopia [0] from reality [1].

Now, like everything : no one will get a new limb if he knows a corp will make him a slave for life. So for these companies to succeed they must guarantee peace of mind to their users. You don't fear getting addicted to aspirin every time u take it. Perhaps open-sourced with generics parts.

On a more philosophical note, car makers gave us more freedom by transcending our biological limitations (higher speed, no tiredness) but in exchange of some loss of freedom (loan, accessible areas, time lost finding a parking spot, etc). Nothing comes without a cost.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG_oThcYsn0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW1V1HQ5PDE

Am I being dense? What does VR have to do with transhumanism? Seems like a total non-sequitur.

See my answer to bufferoverflow.

Also: virtual reality isn't just a heads-up display or an iPhone camera feature. Augmented ears that can hear things normal humans can't hear, augmented eyes, or an augmented brain inherently means you lose sovereignty over your own mind since there is a necessary and irreducible degree of trust you need to have in your government and in corporations: trust that they are not interfering with what you hear, see, or think.

I count that as virtual reality, just as movie theaters (where, early on, people screamed when they saw a train driving towards the camera, i.e. towards them, though that may be apocryphal) were a very primitive and early form of virtual reality. Ok, duh, movie theaters aren't dystopian. But the frontier is soon going to breach the boundaries of our bodies and skulls. There are clear dangers involved.

Neither the Free Software movement, nor any "cognitive sovereignty" legislation as proposed by some transhumanists, would solve this. There's a fundamental trust issue that seems unsolvable.

I am trying to provoke thought; to me, the core issue with transhumanism is that other humans will be capable of subtly, undetectably and plausibly-deniably change your perception of reality and of yourself. Even people who focus on the "politically dystopian" aspects of transhumanism tend to ignore this; and instead focus on inequality, discrimination, and so on, which in my view are secondary.

Most transhumanists I know are interested in biological immortality, mind uploading, hive minds, etc. VR does nothing for that.

Mind uploading and hive minds are perfect examples of what I mention in my last paragraph (which I edited after posting, and you may not have seen before replying); my concerns are more than relevant there.

Why wouldn't free software solve this? Where it is successful, it keeps your government and corporations from making you run software you don't want or keeping undesirable features (like interfering with what you hear or see) secret from you.

It's true that some backdoors or vulnerabilities might go unnoticed, but you can choose firmware with an extremely low chance of those. If your enhancement needs are modest, you might even be able to write your own firmware from scratch.

It might be convenient for you to choose to trust some little-known firmware that hardly anybody has vetted, in order to get extra functionality. And there's always the possibility that all the supposedly independent people who have vetted some firmware are part of a conspiracy to hide its antifeatures. But that's very different from it being necessary to trust governments and corporations.

You can augment your ears and eyes by purchasing night vision tubes (more tubes are better, better light input area and field of view, but they ultimately need to combine into two phosphor screens projecting into your eyes), a active hearing protection headset, and possibly a HUD projector to attach to the front of one of the night vision tubes. Attach all that to a high-cut helmet, and possibly a battery/compute/etc unit under your rear plate. More modern active hearing systems (3M Comtac V/Ops Core AMP/possibly others) let you set how much you want outside sounds to be amplified, and do advanced signal processing to prevent passthrough of not just loud explosive noises, but other noises that would normally prevent you from comfortably turning up the amplification as high as you might want to hear potentially relevant sounds. I guess strapping 50,000 USD worth of stuff to your body just to look like a mix between a 1990s MIT Mixed Reality Lab reject and mass shooter might be a deterrent to people actually doing this though.

That's bullshit. Transhumanism is about overcoming the human condition. Ibuprofen, penicillin and even ancient technology like animal husbandry or irrigation are more important to transhumanism than VR goggles and pointless magnet implants.

Ironically, this comment is the perfect example for the real reason for the downfall of transhumanism: It has become popular and thus poisoned by clueless tech pornographers with zero understanding of the philosophy.

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