IMHO it's in a trough on the hype curve. Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again.
The promises of devices like neuralink are decades away from widespread voluntary adoption, at least. You can get small things done today, as you could 10 years ago, but they aren't ready for primetime.
Anecdotally, I got a small coated neodymium magnet implanted in a finger during my youth. It was cool as a college student, I could feel strong AC currents/PWM/etc and I never lost small metal parts like screws.
Those were small benefits though, and the risk was quite high. If the coating had breached, my immune system would have attacked the magnet. Accidentally smacking it into things was painful. I was always aware of the intrusive hardware in a mildly unsettling way. Etc.
When I entered a more nature-y phase of my life, I got it removed by a local tattoo artist who dabbled in body mods. They mentioned that the newer versions were much smaller, and would require serious medical facilities to remove.
At the end of the day, active body mods have too little going for them and too many awful failure modes. Passive ones can be fun - I've seen transdermal plastic beads put in some interesting places - but they're hardly transhumanist.
>IMHO it's in a trough on the hype curve. Tech needs to improve before it'll rise again.
You're assuming that the technology will still be attractive even as other technologies improve in parallel or as we learn more about how the use of technology effects people.
The article mentions RNA vaccines are partially transhuman, but I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe my concept is wrong, but the perception I got was always more cyborg than biological.
The magnet implants always seemed to have a very, very low benefit to me. Making interfacing with computers even easier seems to have a similarly low benefit. We are already at the point where people go on tech cleanses, your technology gives you screen time reports so you can make sure you are not using it too much, people are abandoning social networks. We are literally trying to use computers less.
> We are already at the point where people go on tech cleanses, your technology gives you screen time reports so you can make sure you are not using it too much, people are abandoning social networks. We are literally trying to use computers less.
That's just it though, those screen time reports are because people are forced to consume things through tech that forces them to be immobile and looking at a small screen next to them, and people go on tech cleanses not because of the problems of microchips and the conveniences of instant coffee from cheap appliances, but because constant bombardment of the thoughts and opinions of everyone, everywhere, all at once becomes problematic and draining very quickly, even as it's addictive.
Transhumanist doesn't have to mean jacked into the internet in new and horrible ways. The GP comment itself notes how a simple magnet exposed a new sense they did not have previously. Nothing about magnet under the skin seems to be like something someone would necessarily look to be free from in a tech cleanse. Some people would likely think it brings them closer to nature.
We're not trying to use computers less, we're trying to be used less by computers, specifically someone else's computers that they've so pervasively embedded into society through monopolistic practices that would make Rockefeller blush.
The failure here isn't technology, the failure is human greed and regulators inability to mitigate it.
And their takeaway was that there needs to be some advances to smooth out the annoyances, not that the idea itself was flawed.
Think of glasses. Glasses are used to increase people's ability to see up to the human norm, not beyond it, but besides that difference there's very little to distinguish eyeglasses from an embedded magnet on a fundamental level. Both are about increasing your capability, but nobody is attributing people getting tired of wearing glasses as a problem with technology itself and transhumanism as opposed to a limitation of that specific technology, and it's just treated as a downside you attempt to mitigate because the positives are to well understood and accepted.
The argument against transhumanism is that conventional 'external' technology is more flexible and convenient, and glasses are clearly in the latter category.
I'm not against transhumanism as such, to an extent it's inevitable for medical reasons. I expect we'll gradually build up experience from medical implants and a minority experimenting with body modification, and eventually a consensus on useful mods will emerge. I think it's going to be a very minority thing for a very, very long time though. All of my lifetime and probably those of my kids. Technology is advancing too fast for it to make a lot of sense to surgically commit to current generation tech right now, except on an experimental or critical medical basis.
To me, that's less an argument against transhumanism than it is people drawing an arbitrary line and deciding the things they don't like can get one label while the things they do don't, so they can easily point out problems even though the line is mostly arbitrary.
Whether I get some small extra perception because of a simple small magnet or because of a complex microchip is irrelevant to the point if they provide the same new abilities and have similar levels of risk and robustness.
Similarly, whether we think getting social media embedded in your consciousness or getting a gun embedded in your arm are good ideas has little to do with the prior examples, so to me they aren't examples of problems of transhumanism as much as examples of problems with humans.
No, it doesn’t, and waiting for the iteration of tech-consumerism that resembles your childhood fantasies is everything that was wrong with the transhumanist movement. It attracted too many people who sat on the sidelines and did nothing to move the needle. It was a magnet for people who couldn’t cope with reality, which occasionally helped, but usually stirred chaos.
It definitely needs a rebranding. In fact, a reasonably good attempt was made as early as the 1980s.
> It attracted too many people who sat on the sidelines and did nothing to move the needle.
You'd have to be capable of pushing the boundaries of science and engineering to really push this needle. Plus
the money is in oil/adtech and AFAIK this isn't low hanging fruit that anyone can just grab.
> Singularity activists can engage in a variety of productive roles related to advancing the Singularity Institute, roles that are just as necessary and critical as the researchers' roles. These include becoming donors, publicists, organizers, speakers, writers, graphic artists, grant writers, networkers and fundraisers.
Thiel became a major donor and co-hosted a summit not long after this call to action. The participation was extraordinary for having been during the "AI Winter", and it became a yearly event for some time. Major investments eventually started pouring into AI/ML tech.
Thanks. I'd forgotten that was started in the 1980s -- I encountered it in the early 1990s -- and don't think I realized how connected it was to prior transhumanist ideas, or as the post you linked says, an attempt to build a movement based on transhumanism. At the time I was young so everything seemed new, and stuff prior to extropians seemed "proto-" and unrealized -- surely how extropianism must seem to someone young now who encounters whatever the current transhumanist discourse is.
The promises of devices like neuralink are decades away from widespread voluntary adoption, at least. You can get small things done today, as you could 10 years ago, but they aren't ready for primetime.
Anecdotally, I got a small coated neodymium magnet implanted in a finger during my youth. It was cool as a college student, I could feel strong AC currents/PWM/etc and I never lost small metal parts like screws.
Those were small benefits though, and the risk was quite high. If the coating had breached, my immune system would have attacked the magnet. Accidentally smacking it into things was painful. I was always aware of the intrusive hardware in a mildly unsettling way. Etc.
When I entered a more nature-y phase of my life, I got it removed by a local tattoo artist who dabbled in body mods. They mentioned that the newer versions were much smaller, and would require serious medical facilities to remove.
At the end of the day, active body mods have too little going for them and too many awful failure modes. Passive ones can be fun - I've seen transdermal plastic beads put in some interesting places - but they're hardly transhumanist.