In my post On Merit, Encanto, and Genes I wrote that one reason people don’t view ‘genetic inequality’ as a problem to be fixed is because we can’t fix it, and that this attitude will start to change as genetic engineering becomes more and more viable.
New technologies are rarely discarded, and almost always used. Because of this, it is almost impossible for a new technology to be viewed as immoral over an extended period of time. The only exceptions I can think of are weapons of war, but even then many people would argue that the invention of steel and steam and even nuclear power were good things for humanity. We accept these technologies and view them as moral in a large part because we have to. We can’t get rid of them, so we have to accept them as moral or else acknowledge that we are living in a dystopia—and nobody wants to live in a dystopia. This is a very sad view of technological and moral ‘progress,’ but I think a valid one.
In other words, moral acceptance of new technologies is often copium.
Transhumanism is defined by Google as “the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.” Transhumanists want to give humans superpowers. Super-strength, super-sight, super-memory, and most famously of all, immortality.
Most people do not like this. Most people find transhumanism abhorrent and unnatural. In many ways I myself find transhumanism abhorrent and unnatural. But it’s important to understand where transhumanism is coming from, and I think it’s in a large part coming from predictive copium.
Whereas most people look at the current world and unconsciously think1, “these technologies exist and have existed for many years; therefore they are moral,” transhumanists look at the future and unconsciously think, “these technologies will almost certainly exist in a few decades; therefore they are moral.”
All futurists must have some way of coping with the knowledge, or at least educated guesswork, that technological dystopia is near. This can take many forms: compartmentalization, freezing sperm, trying to get rich quick to be in the top 0.001% when the Singularity hits, building underground burrows and stocking them with food to last a lifetime, and so on.
Transhumanism is only one such form of copium.
And yes, if these technologies truly are inevitable, maybe our best option is to just be chameleons and live with them. Incorporate them into our personal Overton windows. But the way I see it this is giving up. As I wrote in To Be or Not To Be a Beaver, this sort of chameleonic copium is dangerous. The outcome of this sort of activity is a world where everyone who thinks dystopia is inevitable accepts it with open arms. And that’s not a world I want to live in.
never mind what it is to “unconsciously think” shhh