I have said for some time that the problem is much deeper. The human race in general was never on board with transhumanism. The idea of radical life extension has been around for millennia, it has been scientifically plausible for decades if not centuries, but it has always been a marginal concern. There was never a society which organized to make the cure of ageing a major priority.
There has been an incremental improvement over time, both in medical capability (thanks to the progress of conventional medicine) and in openness to life extension (partly thanks to science fiction, perhaps). But it’s almost as if humanity backed its way into this improved situation, under the pressure of immediate concerns (e.g. specific illnesses, individual grief), without ever having consciously adopted a futurist vision like those you describe. At the level of individual psychology, and even more at the level of mass psychology, most people are completely resigned to living out the historically normal human life cycle.
Nonetheless, we actually have a form of transhumanism in power now, but it’s this AI-centric version, half of whose protagonists are in denial about what they are creating. Many of the others think they can skip biology entirely, and just go straight to mind uploading or creation of benevolent AI, or even believe they are in a simulation. This points to a divide within transhumanism itself (and adjacent movements). But socially and politically, I think denial of the full implications of AI, is the main enabling factor. There is no politician who runs for office on the platform of creating non-biological superhuman intelligence. It’s only the tech CEOs who talk directly about anything like that.
I have been contemplating a post about different forms of transhumanism which would go into more detail about all this.
From a very broad perspective, not even focused on Earth, but just on the possible destinies of intelligent life in the cosmos once technology comes into play… It would not be surprising to know that in the encounter with technology, intelligent species often blow up their world or inadvertently replace themselves with a successor species, and only sometimes manage to preserve their own existence and imperatives. It’s just that we also get to live through one instance of such an encounter in person.
I have said for some time that the problem is much deeper. The human race in general was never on board with transhumanism. The idea of radical life extension has been around for millennia, it has been scientifically plausible for decades if not centuries, but it has always been a marginal concern. There was never a society which organized to make the cure of ageing a major priority.
There has been an incremental improvement over time, both in medical capability (thanks to the progress of conventional medicine) and in openness to life extension (partly thanks to science fiction, perhaps). But it’s almost as if humanity backed its way into this improved situation, under the pressure of immediate concerns (e.g. specific illnesses, individual grief), without ever having consciously adopted a futurist vision like those you describe. At the level of individual psychology, and even more at the level of mass psychology, most people are completely resigned to living out the historically normal human life cycle.
Nonetheless, we actually have a form of transhumanism in power now, but it’s this AI-centric version, half of whose protagonists are in denial about what they are creating. Many of the others think they can skip biology entirely, and just go straight to mind uploading or creation of benevolent AI, or even believe they are in a simulation. This points to a divide within transhumanism itself (and adjacent movements). But socially and politically, I think denial of the full implications of AI, is the main enabling factor. There is no politician who runs for office on the platform of creating non-biological superhuman intelligence. It’s only the tech CEOs who talk directly about anything like that.
I have been contemplating a post about different forms of transhumanism which would go into more detail about all this.
From a very broad perspective, not even focused on Earth, but just on the possible destinies of intelligent life in the cosmos once technology comes into play… It would not be surprising to know that in the encounter with technology, intelligent species often blow up their world or inadvertently replace themselves with a successor species, and only sometimes manage to preserve their own existence and imperatives. It’s just that we also get to live through one instance of such an encounter in person.