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The most dangerous consequence is basic wireheading. I suspect that most of humanity will fall prey to this unfortunately, which I see as somewhat inevitable. I'd argue that the majority of Westerners are essentially in a wirehead-lite version of life already with junk food, porn, entertainment, etc.
To respond to your quote, I think that's far too optimistic in terms of how we can change our brains. We have zero clue how to do it right now, and I think that if we play our cards right we'll slowly learn to live with the technology and adapt it into our society.
There will always be casualties. The millions of people who are obese are a casualty of cheap and tasty food. I still think that creating the abundance which allows them to exist is worth the cost. I hope we can find solutions like semaglutide which will help stem the negative effects while keeping the positives.
In your worst case scenario where we do get a fast takeoff of brain manipulation, I'd imagine the vast majority, as I mentioned above, will wirehead themselves. A small group of those with the willpower or interest in resisting that fate will hopefully persist, reproduce, and become the vanguard of the next society. With over 7 billion human beings on the planet, I'd be shocked if we all succumbed to this sort of problem through a social contagion, although I admit it's possible.
More optimistic than full-brain uploads or functional immortality?
If they become "casualties" in the sense that they put themselves in an early grave via choices freely made, that seems like something to try to ameliorate, but ultimately an acceptable outcome. What seems very questionable to me is the idea that, in a scenario that comes anywhere close to fitting the definition of "transhumanism", they do this before tech enables the sort of fragmentation Bakker is pointing out.
Of those who resist wireheading, what's your basis for supposing that they will be able to get along in any way? Why one society, and not two or five or five million? What's the force that's going to cohere them together into a unified, cooperative whole, as opposed to simply fragmenting into a bloody swamp of fratricide and predation?
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