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I've been curious about the popular appeal of transhumanism. From my perspective it seems to operate as a low-effort utopian vision that allows people to bypass some real problem that exists by kicking it down the road.
It also reflects I think a search for transcendence which is latent in the Western world and in this aspect acts as a misplaced transference of genuine searching.
Now, I also have a lot of hope in technology - I would describe myself as techno-fix, and I've no interest in predicting against its potential, particularly over time scales that feel very long against the rapid pace of change we see now, say 100 or 200 years, but even so I find the transhumanist visions outlined unrealistic and fundamentally missing the point. Now my thoughts are likely based on very outdated knowledge and so I'm open to having them updated by the latest state of the art. Also I probably lack imagination, so feel free to tear me a new one as they say...
Moving to Mars, space
Now I think space frontiers should be explored, but we do run up against some pretty hard problems here. The most utopian visions, creating a fully viable atmosphere and water rich environment would seem to be somewhat fanciful. The second choice, some kind of resource-supported colony would seem to require inordinate resourcing and even then you've just got people living indoors, in a desert, not really much to inspire the human race with. Also what happens at this colony, who runs it, owns out- I don't think anyone thinks it would run any better than the systems we have already but I guess as a last resort to nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe it bears thinking about. But again, not really very inspiring vision here.
More to the point, we already have a beautiful planet with an atmosphere, water and abundant resources - shouldn't the utopian impulse make us redouble our efforts for poor old Earth, instead of giving the glad eye to some ugly red rock? Of course both are possible but you do have to wonder about distracting focus.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
The technical challenges of this are immense, as to how you maintain function while in the frozen state. It's not only the fracturing problem in freeze, thaw it's the lack of the electrical, chemical signalling on which neurones are formed and maintained. I'd go as far to say it's a modal confusion of what we are, which is a process more than a thing. But perhaps I'm not being sufficiently visionary in the technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
Changing sex
I'll admit changes are afoot in terms of biology. Gene editing is already being tested for rare diseases, organ creation could become trivial, re-enervation to treat spinal injuries etc. But I'll admit I'm still puzzled when people talk about changing sex, and even changing sex back and forth. What do people mean here? Obviously secondary sex characteristics can be changed and new tech could mean surgical techniques become straightforward and remove risk and provide function, so conceivably issues around numbing of sensation in a new nipple could be resolved, or an embryo could be implanted successfully in an implanted/engineered womb, uterus. But are we really calling this changing sex? How far will it be possible to engineer all the internal bits, eggs, fallopian tubes, etc while simultaneously atrophying the wrong bits. I'm struggling to see how you'd ever get ethical permission to establish such an insane idea, or why you would want to try. This says nothing about brain structures developed during puberty and the various complex hormonal interactions that influence structure, function and ultimately behaviour. This would seem to really get closer to some omniscient level of requisite knowledge of exactly what makes us up. Will we ever be able to change all of our cells?
I just don't see the appeal to this idea, and the fetish around changing sex or being something other than what you are already. It seems like a dystopia to be so focused on the surface aspects of Self when we could imagine a world where your sex is less relevant.
So to my mind, and possibly uninformed view this transhumanism is a utopian distraction from the issues of the day and a failure to think about true transcendence through a more spiritual realm. It is exactly the sort of mistaken thinking our late-stage secular materialist society would make when faced with the existential problems of today. And frankly it seems lazy, rather than explore philosophical questions around what it is to be a man/woman or what identity is, it acts as a catch-all macguffin type thing.
It seems reductive to call the desire for a space exploration age utopian. It's not a utopia people want, it's a frontier. Somewhere a young man with little social standing or assets can risk his life to make it big in new, unknown territory. The demographics of people who would sign up for a one-way Mars colonization trip are the same as the people who try to make it big gambling on stocks and crypto. Crypto is a sad excuse for a real frontier for many reasons, but it's the closest thing I can think of in the modern day.
People want more space to spread out and get away from the current social structure. A lot of the most disaffected or persecuted people in Europe were able to do this with the Americas, and right now we lack this kind of physical release valve. I think a lot of social problems would solve themselves if people who were unhappy with things could just go... somewhere else.
It's very possible that space travel looks nothing like that, and will only take highly skilled and educated individuals. Still, most frontiers are inherently dangerous, so I'd bet there is some place for those with everything to gain and nothing to lose to find their fortune.
The space race generated/improved countless technologies that vastly improved quality of life back on Earth. A new wave of interest in space would almost certainly result in new material gains here. If asteroid mining is possible in the long term, it could solve a lot of resource problems and lead to an explosion in wealth gains like no other. If by utopia, you mean spiritual transcendence, then yeah this probably wouldn't help with that.
My issue with transgenderism is the "point deer, make horse" of social pressure to affirm that someone who is clearly not a woman is a woman, and of pushing dangerous, irreversible medical interventions onto autistic and underage people. Philosophically, I'm not against the concept of changing your body and hormones to be the same as a woman's, were it possible to actually do so. I'm not willing to bet that medicine will ever figure this out 100%, but if it does, that's a good thing.
Sex change isn't your thing, but are you against other forms of bodily modification? Do you have no issues with your health or vanity that you'd be willing to medically fix/improve if it were cheap and easy enough?
I guess ultimately I might have a different definition of transhumanism than you. At its core, it seems like the concept of using technology to overcome failings of the body. We've been doing that since we first picked up a walking stick. If in the future, the cure for blindness is to install vat-grown eyes, I don't see that as much different than LASIK, or even from wearing glasses. In all examples, your genetics or life circumstances led to you having the bad hand of poor eyesight, and you're relying on an unnatural intervention to overcome that.
I admit it looks pretty silly when you look at Yud talking about Cryonics and living forever. I wouldn't recommending holding out for technology to fix everything as an excuse to ignore your physical fitness. I'm not holding my breath for space travel, extreme body modification, etc. But at the same time, if you were to tell a man with poor eyesight from 100 BC that in the future, we could fire lasers into his eye to reshape his cornea, he would probably dismiss that as magical thinking in the same way that you are with some of your examples. These things don't always pan out how we want them to. But sometimes they do.
I think you raise an important point about frontier spirit, which I consider one of the problems we are facing, that modern life in many ways is ill-fitted to our nature.
I think you might want to think a bit more carefully about what kind of people we send on missions though. I think modified humans that have been engineered for cooperative behaviour might be a safer bet than 'wild-west' types. I don't know if you are familiar with the mutiny on the bounty tale at all, though to their credit the colony survived even if everyone is now related to Christian Fletcher...
As to medical improvements, I'm for them- I could be persuaded of a reasonable amount in this domain. Cosmetic procedures I would endure if there's a good reason, an unsightly mole but not really anything at the next level. I'm in the norms of feature proportions as far as I can tell so haven't had the need. I seem to get uglier year on year but don't notice for large periods of time so it's no biggie. Full-body tattoos are good for Yakuza etc
My concern around the impulse for sex change in some people is part of it may be originating in cultural ideas. I contend it's better perhaps to change the cultural space rather than mainstream cosmetic surgery.
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The problem is, that the technology needed for the high frontier is so high, by the time we get it operational to create those Mars domes there will be nothing for a guy who can drive a lorry to do there. We'll have robot diggers etc.
In the 17th-19th centuries, the disaffected guy with nothing more than his manual labour to offer could scratch out some kind of living on the frontier wielding a shovel or working on a ranch. For a Mars colony, what is a guy with a shovel to do? He can't strike out on his own for the gold diggings or claim a land grant for a farm of his own, since everyone will be dependent on technology to live from breathable air onwards. And that means living in organised settlements en masse, no solitary prospector wandering the hills. If the social problems arise out of "he can't stop getting into fights with other people, unless he lives on his own" then they'll be transplanted right along with the disaffected.
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But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.
But the modal young American man is too comfortable. He’s too comfortable because his ancestors won and he really did grow up in a fantastically prosperous society where all you need to do is study computer science and learn how to program (trivially easy) and you can make a comfortable living and essentially enjoy an easy and materially prosperous life. America is a place where trivial email jobs pay $100k a year. The young man doesn’t leave because, by being born an American, he has already won the lottery of life.
What the crypto gamblers really want to be is rich. But very few Irish or German peasants in 1850 who emigrated to the US became wealthy or anything even close to it. So the ‘frontier’ argument is really just a delusional fantasy of LARPing as a gold prospector from a Hollywood movie who strikes it rich. That’s as realistic today as it was 200 years ago, which is to say not very.
I'm certainly staying put even if they started taking recruits for the Mars colony tomorrow. But I don't mind taking the office job route you talked about, and I plan to get engaged soon. The pot is sweet enough in America that you can just coast if you're a certain type. That said:
Come on. This is not trivially easy. It's easy if you have a high enough IQ and can put up with school and office life for 80% of your life. Even if we're talking about email jobs, that still selects for a certain level of agreeableness and conscientiousness. There are many people who simply lack the cognitive horsepower for this kind of work, and there's a large group of people for whom this is a living hell. I don't mind the work, but you must agree the modal office environment is very feminine.
My college friends are all capable of and okay with this route, but I have a lot of other friends from different backgrounds that this is not a viable path for. In any society, there will be people unhappy with the current order, but the rising trend in sexlessness and radicalism indicates that there are more unsatisfied people than normal right now. If there were a compelling alternative path, I think there'd be a lot less societal stress from men with unfulfilling lives.
Yeah that's a fantasy, and there are many good arguments for why space can't be the escape valve for those people, but my point was that such space aspirations were a frontier fantasy, not a utopian fantasy as OP was saying.
Their earnings potential was much better in America, no? That's why they came. They wouldn't die rich by the standards of landed European money, but they'd be wealthier than they ever would have been had they stayed in Europe. There was a legitimate reason to go, because there was a lot of "unclaimed" land and opportunity to die with some land and money, not a landless serf.
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Ahh yes Computer Science the easy major that 50% of people drop out of after their first year.
Or programming so easy of a profession that the practitioners get paid just because those slimy software engineers conned us all.
Link your github or gtfo.
Becoming a FAANG dev or majoring in computer science at Stanford is hard. Going to a bootcamp and doing basic data science python stuff for a plain old corporation that pays $105k a year in the burbs of some Sun Belt City isnt. But I think you’re getting distracted, because my focus wasn’t just on tech but on ‘email jobs’.
Do you think millennial girlbosses in HR or ‘Product Marketing Managers’ are doing an ultra-challenging job intellectually? Because they all make decent money too.
Its been a decade since anyone could get a software job by knowing html,css and js. And do you really think Dunder Mifflin Paper company has Data Scientists working for them when their "database" is most likely an excel sheet? Your conception of working in tech is based off of reddit comments.
Anyways, I dont think professional email senders do much intellectual work, neither do bankers or any non STEM white collar workers for that matter. Its class warfare. But I dont really lose sleep over it because I trust demand and supply.
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For some. If you have the maths ability and the kind of mind that works for programming, you can do that. The likes of me? You could not beat it into me with sticks (literally).
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There's nothing new or unknown about either of them, and lots of men do them.
Frontiers have potential; the DRC is a basket case and is known to be. Trying to "do what it takes" there would be like trying to homestead during the Dust Bowl. Southeast Asia, of course, is absolutely packed with people.
Very broadly drawn, there's less than 6 million professional programmers in the US, out of 158 million total employed. It's certainly not trivially easy to do so; if it were, more people would do it and drive the salary down. Furthermore, it doesn't help; while it is far more comfortable than fracking or working on an oil rig, like those jobs it provides money without status, or perhaps even negative status. There was a short time this was changing, though only for the top of the profession, but it did not last.
Not just rich, but rich in a flashy and impressive way. Get rich by making a good salary and investing the money in normal stuff, you're boring. Get rich by joining a tech startup and hitting the IPO jackpot, and unless you reach Sergey Brin levels of rich, you're just weird (Brin is weird but rich enough that it doesn't matter). Get rich by throwing your life savings into a meme stock or shitcoin and hitting it big, and you're exciting. Winning gamblers are just inherently higher status than winners who got their money more conservatively. Losing gamblers are, of course, losers, but even they might be higher status on the way down.
Yeah but by definition this isn’t really a solution. If all young men want to do is gamble with infinitesimally small odds of great wealth, they can play the lottery. A comfortable, happy life is within reach of most young American men. A 99.99th percentile life is, by definition, not. And it wasn’t in the ‘age of the frontier’ either.
So you understand your proposals don't work and you're just suggesting young men eat cake?
The lottery doesn't work for various obvious reasons either.
My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.
If it’s about gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich, you can do that.
If it’s about working hard to provide a comfortable life for your family, you can do that.
If it’s about living somewhere rural and remote, living off the land, homeschooling your kids, you can still do that in many parts of the US (and for relatively little money if you’re not picky).
If you want to live some kind of outlaw criminal fantasy, then again, you can do it - and just like it did for most outlaws in the Wild West, it’ll probably end badly.
So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.
What has been lost is the true belief in God that compelled people to have hope that such a drastic move could lead to a better life. Remember that the majority of the settlers were Christians who were so devout they were willing to cross an ocean and take incredible risks, leaving behind everything they've ever known to go to a new land. There's a reason those people were selected.
They had, like, five fucking older brothers and didn't stand a chance to inherit anything good. Or a king they never met lost a war and they got displaced. Or they were from a Godforsaken frozen mountain in Sweden and farming on the great plains is just a better deal. Yeah.
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You know, though, that the substitutions you are suggesting meets some technical definition while missing the essence. Playing the lottery isn't the same as prospecting for gold, even if both are "gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich". Working as a corporate drone isn't the same as working as a cattle driver or even running a store.
I’m not trying to be facetious.
My point is that the difference between then and now is mainly a product of huge increases in total societal prosperity. 2/3 of your examples (working on a cattle ranch and running a store) are totally possible today, it’s just most people don’t want to do them because they’re hard work and poorly paid compared to a lot of other stuff you could do.
Most men didn’t seek their fortune in the West as some kind of grand adventure, they did it because they were desperate and poor, because life in the urban tenements of the East Coast was intolerable, because they held out hope for a small fraction of the quality of life that the average American has today.
You’re romanticizing what in many ways was the historical equivalent of Nigerien migrants crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy dinghies in the hope that they become soccer champions. A sad phenomenon that modern young Western men need not take part in because they have already won the birth lottery.
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God bless America. Sometimes I forget how damn lucky I am. Thanks for reminding me.
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it is trivially easy for some (including me) but not to all, and no - it is not only about intelligence
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None of these places are frontiers. They offer no respite from people telling you what to do and how to do it, and that's like 80% of the appeal.
The wilderness may have no people telling you what to do and how to do it, but it has Nature telling you so, and Nature can be far crueler and more demanding than any human tyrant. Although I suppose that depending on your personality and temperament it could still be more tolerable.
The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.
True, and fair enough.
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The actual frontier never had that either, there was always government in the Wild West. Unless you’re talking about the outlaw fantasy (organized crime is still pretty big today, so that’s certainly doable), the inhabitants of the old west lived under a system of government that was substantial, backed by military force and involved the weight of legal, social and cultural expectation in almost every aspect of life; it was, if anything, a more conformist society than the present.
There's government that's going to bother to look for you and make sure you're doing everything exactly the way they want it, and there's government that won't. No one would have arrested you for finding a free plot of land and starting a farm (though you might end up getting screwed once "civilization" expands, and your land becomes interesting, I suppose.)
The United States are still pretty empty, and a skilled farmer can still get land at both trivial price and effort to practice his craft. It is also hard work that you do in places of solitude after a half-decade or so of learning your craft as an absolute nobody, which is why the people fantasising about frontiers aren't growing beets off in Ohio right now: things stop being romantic when you have to put in sweat and effort for them.
I was unaware that they brought back the homestead act.
Yes. That is why I said trivial, rather than free. Lots of farmers, both American and even foreign, still start new farms on US soil, and they pay very little money compared to what they end up making. It's just less of a cultural cornerstone ever since farmers became such a minority of people in the west.
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I think it’s utopian in the sense that most people have wildly utopian and really do not understand the dangers of both exploration and colonization. They’re basing their ideas on TV and movies where space travel is barely more dangerous than a cruise ship and has better food. Where colonies are easy to build and maintain and don’t require any inputs from earth.
The real universe is not like this of course. If everything goes right, you’ll ride in a tiny cramped and probably cold ship to a tiny colony entirely supported from earth (with costs in the trillions or at least high billions per year) where you do basically manual labor and spend several hours a week on top of that maintaining the structure of the biosphere or farming. Basically, the gestalt image should not be Picard on the bridge sipping an earl grey tea, but the very early days of colonizing the new world. Many will die, and those who don’t are going to be doing a lot of very hard work.
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