Transhumanism in Sci-Fi

[18-Till-I-Die]

Actually, no, it's kind of a myth that the Imperium lost that technology or even "most" of it. In the books, things like significant cybernetic augmentation, genetic engineering and such are all still quite common. The fluff of the games makes it sound less so, but then the fluff of the games is designed for game ballance. If you don't believe me go read some of Connor's technology threads, there's one up now where they go into stuff like cybernetics, smart drugs, genetics and such. The one about Necromunda somewhat more so. Point is that, from a canon perspective, 40K is actually a fairly well established posthuman/transhuman series, it's just not a particularly pretty one to live in--though I admit I never thought it was THAT bad on the whole, but others have disagreed with me. Some of the novels paint a fairly nice picture of a rather old, stagnant but still functional civilization IMO. For most planets, I'm sure Cadia or Armageddon suck balls but who wants to live on a planet called Armageddon anyway?


Also, I don't really believe more technology makes you the "smart guy"--it could just as easily make you the guy who was around longer and therefore got a running start. The Vorlons and Shadows weren't very "smart", they were craven douchebags who treated other people like pawns, but because they were a billion years old they had a billion year head start. So when the Mimbari, a far, far less douchebagy race, was still trying to make a wheel and thought fire was the next big thing the Vorlons, massive assholes that they were, had already spread across the galaxy and built an empire. Not because they were better or smarter, but because they had been around long enough to stumble upon all kinds of stuff. And really, you could say the same about any civilization that old. The fact they were around THAT long and are still kind of pussies compared to younger races from other series (like the Asgard, who would laugh at their shitty FTL drives, despite being mere infants in comparison) shows they probably weren't that bright to begin with. As if their assholishness didn't.

But that's just one example. My point is, technology or the lack thereof says nothing about anyone's intelligence or goodness or anything else. Were Africans less intelligent because White people had gunpowder? Were the Amerindians less intelligent for the same reason? No of course not, all human brain wiring is effectively the same and "genius" only pops up randomly like any other anomaly. All it means is that Whites had more access to more stuff. The same could be said of any sci-fi series too. And like I said, by that logic the humans from ID4 were mentally retarded compared to the Invaders, despite the fact a human cracked the Invader's cyphers and helped hack their computers and defeat them. Also that doesn't take into account races like the Orks whose technology is passed down by genetic memory, and therefore their actual level of intelligence (somewhere between a candy necklace and a cup of warm water) is irrelevant compared to what they "know" instinctively.

Anyway...I'm not saying technology is worthless, but it IS worthless as a measuring stick of anything OTHER THAN technological sophistication, and possibly the age of a species. Beyond that it gives no indecators of anything. I mean I guess you could look at a race like the Star Wars Humans and see how most of their stuff tends to be military based or derived and say it denotes a warlike species, but even then that's not really fair since they have basically been having one, long, continuous war for the last few centuries ever since the Republic fell. It's possible and indeed probable they were considerably LESS warlike before then.

[ThomasP]

It's pretty laughable that insecure internet nerds have latched on to transhumanism as their fad of the moment, but I'm not convinced that discounts the entire concept. If that were true you couldn't support any movement, because there will always be a group of lame nerds somewhere to ruin it.

A lot of transhumanism, when taken to caricaturish extremes, is of course silly. There really is no one unified "transhumanism", besides the general notion that technological progressivism has the potential to sooth many current human ills. Those worth listening to among the tech-progressives are those who recognize that technology has the potential to bring about just as many evils, and that social and ethical values are more important than Apple Store heaven.

Fanboys ruin anything, but that doesn't make the entire concept worthless. The shiny toys and uploads cliches get old fast, but there is much potential to explore interesting social and internal conflicts that can occur thanks to technologically-transformed human beings and societies. In that sense, transhumanism isn't much different than magic or whatever else; it's not like the kernel of the idea "technology alters civilization" is new to science fiction.

[lordofchange13]

You are right, i concede to your notion.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't know of any good SF stories that actually have that as the premise: a society of biologically immortal, disease-free humans. The birth rate would probably be extremely low (since you could spread out any children over a period of centuries to millenia if you chose to), and every human being in a reasonably sized community would live in a gigantic web of social interactions and personal history with other people going back millenia that would color everything.

You might not be able to keep track of it all- monkeyspheres and all that. If you think you're out of touch with the kids you knew in high school now that you've turned thirty, just imagine how out of date the web of social interactions you had with people last century will seem- and how little of it will have any sense of urgency or strong, vivid memories.

I remember Kim Stanley Robinson had one of his extremely long-lived characters in the Mars Trilogy make an interesting argument: that our reliance on impersonal, formal institutions is strengthened by our mortality and relatively short-lives. I wonder if a society of immortal beings would be more dependent on a gigantic set of informal norms and personal rules regarding human interaction (based upon millenia of interacting with the same people) than on a formal code of laws or the like.

Yes, and not just mortality, but working life. A man's career has historically never spanned more than about forty years, as a rule (when people entered the workforce younger, they also lost their health and had to stop working so much sooner). Since much of that time is spent just trying to get into a position of trust, high skill levels, and authority, there's not much time left for any one individual to shape an institution. The rare exceptions are often very memorable- think J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, where one man shaped the system for decades.

Immortality would greatly shift that trend, to the point where organizations and the personalities of their leaders might become much more similar, unless practices are in place to force turnover.

[Broomstick]

How come we see humans thousands and millions of years in the future and they are still PURELY BIOLOGICAL. Sure you got the odd robot arm but apart from that there are hardly any major Transhumans about. Why do you think this is?

Because a sufficiently 'advanced' transhuman would be a being completely alien to a baseline human. It's hard to get into that sort of mindset. From the standpoint of beings barely beyond the point of hitting each other over the head with rocks, it's also hard to visualize the sort of 'baseline' human who'd think it's a good idea to implant themselves with computers, or put themselves through some sort of cybernetic enhancement. We're still at the point where our self-image hasn't yet been divorced from our caveman directives, and the anthropocentric superstitions spawned by them.

I can certainly see damaged humans accepting cybernetic reconstruction, which could, given sufficiently advanced technology, become enhancement. We already have cochlear implants which are, in fact, implanted computers used to replace a deficient sense (where feasible - they do not help all deaf people) and increasingly sophisticated artificial limbs. One series I do not see mentioned here, probably because it is so seldom read by techno-nerds, is Anne McCaffrey's "brain/brawn" series which envisions a future civilization where severely crippled people are made into "shell people", essentially brains installed in things like FTL ships, space habitats, and cities, to run things. That makes some sense (whatever other weaknesses exist in the books) because the "shell people" would otherwise exist as helpless cripples. However, baseline, unimpaired humans in that universe do not routinely get implants, cybernetic limbs, interfaces, or what not. They use technology adapted to human beings - remotes, voice recognition, etc. I really don't get why the "brain/brawn" series is so seldom mentioned, except maybe most of them deal with things other than technowanking and don't promote cybernetics for everyone. It's a series that was first published long before words were coined like "transhumanism" but the "brains" definitely seem to qualify.

So yes, I can very much see cybernetics being used to compensate for injury or birth defect or disease, but the technonerds don't seem to understand that most people actually either don't mind or even like being meat people and see no pressing reason to swap out functional limbs and senses.

[Ford Prefect]

So yes, I can very much see cybernetics being used to compensate for injury or birth defect or disease, but the technonerds don't seem to understand that most people actually either don't mind or even like being meat people and see no pressing reason to swap out functional limbs and senses.

The perfectly happy meat people will probably start minding when they start getting selected out of the species. It's easy to just write off this sort of thing as just being groovy robot arms and whoo smart phone in your skull, but at a base level transhumanism is about fundamentally changing, and with any luck improving, human cognition. Think about the difference between being able to hit up google versus having to fiddle about with filing cabinets. Now think about the difference between typing on a keyboard and just doing something as a reflex. Imagine having the whole world of information and computing power not at your fingertips but as your subconscious.

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like for a person from the 18th century trying to find gainful employment here and now. There are people, here and now, who simply can't compete when everyone has the same bowl of warm porridge behind their eyes. They'll never survive in an environment of cognitively enhanced, networked cyborgs. No matter how hard they work, they won't be able to compete. No one really talks about this, but meat simply won't cut it in a world of custom designed diamond brains and personal tbit wifi. You either adapt, or you die. It's a sad story, but it's been one which we've been telling for five thousand years of human history.

[andrewgpaul]

I guess my main issue with transhumanism, is that ideologically, I disagree with the idea that the human "baseline" is something that should be replaced. Which is probably why I generally don't find a lot of transhumanist themed fiction like with Baxter's novels or Orion's arm appealing.

Baxter's an interesting case, in that for all the various physical improvements and changes, his characters still think and behave like normal people. I'll leave that up to you as to whether it's deliberate or simply poor writing. The more extreme examples are usually done for specific purposes - the neutron star inhabitants in Flux are the crew of a weapon, the narrator of Vacuum Diagrams underwent his changes to become ambassador to an alien race, and a few others were done for survival in "emergencies"; a couple of examples of brain uploading, the "statues" that had a silicon-based metabolism, exhaled sand and thought on geological timescales, etc.

[andrewgpaul]

I guess my main issue with transhumanism, is that ideologically, I disagree with the idea that the human "baseline" is something that should be replaced. Which is probably why I generally don't find a lot of transhumanist themed fiction like with Baxter's novels or Orion's arm appealing.

Baxter's an interesting case, in that for all the various physical improvements and changes, his characters still think and behave like normal people. I'll leave that up to you as to whether it's deliberate or simply poor writing. The more extreme examples are usually done for specific purposes - the neutron star inhabitants in Flux are the crew of a weapon, the narrator of Vacuum Diagrams underwent his changes to become ambassador to an alien race, and a few others were done for survival in "emergencies"; a couple of examples of brain uploading, the "statues" that had a silicon-based metabolism, exhaled sand and thought on geological timescales, etc.

No one really talks about this, but meat simply won't cut it in a world of custom designed diamond brains and personal tbit wifi. You either adapt, or you die. It's a sad story, but it's been one which we've been telling for five thousand years of human history.

Being killed for ones inferiority is one thing; if it's simply a matter of being outbred, so be it.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I don't know of any good SF stories that actually have that as the premise: a society of biologically immortal, disease-free humans.

The Known Space series comes to mind.

[Broomstick]

So yes, I can very much see cybernetics being used to compensate for injury or birth defect or disease, but the technonerds don't seem to understand that most people actually either don't mind or even like being meat people and see no pressing reason to swap out functional limbs and senses.

The perfectly happy meat people will probably start minding when they start getting selected out of the species.

And why do you think that is inevitable?

Since it is not true now that the most intelligent humans outbreed the idiots what makes you think that will change in the future? The average person does not mate based on IQ scores or Mensa membership.

Now think about the difference between typing on a keyboard and just doing something as a reflex.

Typing on a keyboard IS a learned reflex for me. I don't consciously have to think of typing each letter, my hand produce the words as I think them, it's pretty seamless for me and my 90-100 wpm mad typing skills.

Imagine having the whole world of information and computing power not at your fingertips but as your subconscious

Pretty damn horrific - how do I turn it off so I can go to sleep? What about computer viruses or whatever the transhumanist equivalent is? What's wrong with simply improving the interface for meat people?

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like for a person from the 18th century trying to find gainful employment here and now. There are people, here and now, who simply can't compete when everyone has the same bowl of warm porridge behind their eyes.

Poor comparison, as humans haven't changed at all biologically since the 18th century. In fact, someone from the 18th century might not be very comfortable doing my current job, they might even be better at it than I am. There are a surprising number of occupations that have changed little since then, and mostly in the area of having something like power tools available - which I am certain I could train an 18th century person to use in about 5 minutes. Or less. Such a person would also have the same capability to be educated as a modern day human, and thus could be retrained for a new profession as easily as a modern day human.

In other words, your analogy completely fails.

They'll never survive in an environment of cognitively enhanced, networked cyborgs.

Such a change requires a critical mass of "cognitively enhanced, networked cyborgs" and if the idea never catches on in a big way, due to meat people preferring to remain meat and just develop better interfaces for themselves, you'll never have enough to tip the balance. There is also the issue that such "cognitively enhanced, networked cyborgs" might be seen as sexually undesirable and thus be reproductively less fit no matter what their other capabilities, and thus be massively outnumbered by meat people all the time.

Likewise, you seem to assume such a change, if it did occur, would be soon and quick - it might take thousands of years, leaving plenty of future in which to place advanced civilizations with transhumans present but still dominated by meat people.

No one really talks about this, but meat simply won't cut it in a world of custom designed diamond brains and personal tbit wifi. You either adapt, or you die. It's a sad story, but it's been one which we've been telling for five thousand years of human history.

Unless, of course, the "cognitively enhanced, networked cyborgs" decide to play WoW all day with their new, "cognitively enhanced, networked" capabilities instead of doing actual work.

[Shroom Man 777]

The cognitively enhanced networked cyborgs will have iBrains capable of megamultitasking so while their consciousness is playing WOW all day, their consciousness is simultaneously doing multi-macroterabyte computational processes required in actual work. Those with the latest models of iBrains can do this with multithreading technologies that use cerebral graphics cards to render the cyber-WOW in better-than-real graphics while also using processing power from the subconsciousness to maintain the stability of the core architecture of work-related programs.

To facilitate the optimization of this process, you need to have an updated Johnson & Johnson or Pfhizer artificial endocrine system to regulate the hormonal bioelectrical signals and monitor the metabolic systems of your body and ensure proper heat redistribution. A General Electric designed respiratory system will be capable of venting out heated air and cycling in cool air very efficiently.

Cooling won't be a problem for people who are playing WOW in their mind, while doing real work, underwater. Their dimpled shark-skin epidermis manufactured by Speedo is both extremely hydrodynamic and designed also to facilitate the radiation of body heat into the surrounding water to reduce the human being's infrared signatures while allowing him to glide through the water seamlessly. General Electric can provide rebreather systems for superior underwater respiration.

Of course, if you want to use your new Ford or GMC artificial musculature systems to run ten marathons in a day, your General Motors cardiovascular system will have to divert the bloodflow and coolant circulation and oil/lubricants from your iBrain and to your enhanced micro-servohydraulic and synthetic muscles. So if you want to bench press ten tons, your cerebral performance might decrease as energy is shunted towards your physical systems.

Or you could have an enhanced gastrointestinal system that has optimized nutrition uptake, and you could eat the latest posthuman-foods provided by Gerber or Nestle or whatever, which concentrates ten times more nutrients into a single protein pill than an entire thanksgiving turkey. With this kind of nutritional intake, you could use both your artificial muscles and your enhanced brains at full capacity simultaneously.



Naturally, every single cell in your body will be marked by the various company brand logos of the constituent corporations that have patented the designs of your anatomy. You'll have factory warranties so if in case of any defects, you can get replacement kidneys, unless the warranty runs out or unless you do something against the contract which voids that warranty.

If you simply want to turn off the information flow into your brain, the iBrain can easily decrease the multi-terabyte datastreaming of the modem built into the base of your spinal chord.

Or, if you just want a good's night sleep, you can turn HALF of your iBrain off while the other half stays conscious and continues on working, while you alternate the sleep cycles of your brains' hemispheres. Post-people will do that all the time so they can continue working, or playing WOW, in the workplace or at home without having to literally go to bed and shut off their stream of consciousness.

For any issues, you can download software and wetware and brainware patches for your cybernetic brains.

There is planned obsolescence though, in a couple of years the latest iBrain you bought will be laughably obsolete and people will mock you and think you're cheap and outdated, so you better buy the latest model whenever it comes out!

[Number Theoretic]

Wow. Shroomy, your post made me laugh and horrified me at the same time. Because as absurd as it might sound at first, it is at the same time ... somehow ... realistic.

[Starglider]

Buy now and get 30% off; all you have to do to quality is accept a hypercontextualised 24/7 personalised product information stream directly into your neocortex. Rest assured that we screen all our sponsors carefully and experience thirty eight fewer total memory theft incidents per year than our nearest competitor.

I wouldn't worry about cyborgs being unsexy. Not only will you be able to download licensed celebrity personality overlays to replace your dull and unsexy personna with the latest pop sensation, you can also access a library of 3,800 techniques with full motor patterns - and your cyber-body will give you the stamina to try them all in one session!

As for Broomstick, obviously she's part of the retro hipster demographic, but that's ok; we'll market a special line of cyberhands just for people craving that 1000 wpm typing sensation;

[Broomstick]

As for Broomstick, obviously she's part of the retro hipster demographic, but that's ok

We call that "steampunk", sonny. Now, get off my lawn!

[VarrusTheEthical]

I personally find one of the core notions among many Transhumanists, that humans must change to adapt to a technological society, to be unconvincing. The fact is that technology is adapted to humans, not the other way around. The rise of technological society has been geared towards adapting the environment to better suit humanity, thus making the baseline human "more fit" rather than less.

On the issue of "networked cyborgs", I don't think those are really more fit than a normal human with an smart phone.

[Number Theoretic]

The only way, i see, that would work like many transhumanist people imagine is if these changes are appealing to many people. If for example a nanotech-implant is available that gives you the power to increase the speed of thinking for a limited time and if it is not only reasonably prices but also requires minimal brain surgery, i think many people would consider getting one.

[Ford Prefect]

And why do you think that is inevitable?

I just described why it's inevitable; if you hadn't felt the need to devolve this to a meaningless spaghetti debate, you probably would have noticed.

Here, let me pare it down even further: if one cyborg can obsolete ten floors of normal people nattering away at 90-100 WPM in cubicles, exactly how many corporations do you think are going to skip the opportunity to shrink their workforce?

[VarrusTheEthical]

Here, let me pare it down even further: if one cyborg can obsolete ten floors of normal people nattering away at 90-100 WPM in cubicles, exactly how many corporations do you think are going to skip the opportunity to shrink their workforce?

Two points I would like to make.

1. You're assuming that such Cyborgs would be feasible in the first place when in fact there is no such guarantee.

2. You're assuming that you can't get a similar improvement in productivity by simply improving the tools normal people have available.

[Ford Prefect]

1. You're assuming that such Cyborgs would be feasible in the first place when in fact there is no such guarantee.

2. You're assuming that you can't get a similar improvement in productivity by simply improving the tools normal people have available.

1. Who gives a shit? This is totally irrelevant to the core premise of my statement.

2. Uh, hello, if I can think up a powerpoint production in literally two seconds flat, I would obsolete the entire American military industrial complex. If cybernetics develop to the point where people really can just imagine what the want and piece it together by daydreaming, unless your tools are mind reading personal computers you can fit in your back pocket no tool will be able to compete. And if you did have mind reading personal computers that fit in your back pocket you'd be pretty transhuman anyway.

[Tasoth]

Question: If we can make cyborgs as such that they would make obsolescent scads of human beings, would there be AI present that would make obsolescent these super efficient cyborgs? Why put potentially unhealthy prosthetic in a human when you can do what they do with a smaller block of code and a machine?

[VarrusTheEthical]

1. Who gives a shit? This is totally irrelevant to the core premise of my statement.

2. Uh, hello, if I can think up a powerpoint production in literally two seconds flat, I would obsolete the entire American military industrial complex. If cybernetics develop to the point where people really can just imagine what the want and piece it together by daydreaming, unless your tools are mind reading personal computers you can fit in your back pocket no tool will be able to compete. And if you did have mind reading personal computers that fit in your back pocket you'd be pretty transhuman anyway.

Which all sounds nice if you ignore the fact that your arbitrary increases in productivity are based completely on techno-babble.

[Bakustra]

Uh, dude, so is your "magically increase productivity with better tools". At least Ford can give a simple reason why cyborging can be used to increase productivity. I doubt that you can give one that wouldn't be made better with cybernetics.

[VarrusTheEthical]

Uh, dude, so is your "magically increase productivity with better tools". At least Ford can give a simple reason why cyborging can be used to increase productivity. I doubt that you can give one that wouldn't be made better with cybernetics.

How about a guy with a combine harvester versus a guy with a sickle? The guy in the harvester is orders of magnitude more productive than the guy with the sickle without a single piece of cyberware.

There's no magic to tools increasing productivity, that's been well demonstrated in history and is not likely to change. The problem with cybernetics is that they are not likely to be cost effective. An augmentation that allows for the increases in productivity that Ford describes would require a lot of computing power, which means in the absence of magic, it will create heat. So unless you want wear a beer helmet filled with liquid nitrogen to prevent your brain from frying, you're likely better off keeping the techno-magic on the outside.

The fact is, like Tasoth just pointed out, an AI could likely do the cyborg's job better and more cost-effectively.

[Ford Prefect]

An augmentation that allows for the increases in productivity that Ford describes would require a lot of computing power, which means in the absence of magic, it will create heat. So unless you want wear a beer helmet filled with liquid nitrogen to prevent your brain from frying, you're likely better off keeping the techno-magic on the outside.

So you access your computing power via wireless connection. The only structures you need in your body are those which allow you to seamlessly connect with the network. Honestly, these pieces of technical minutae are totally irrelevant. What matters is that as hypothetical people start turning themselves into superhuman supergeniuses, normal people are going to end up increasingly marginalised.

[Bakustra]

Uh, dude, so is your "magically increase productivity with better tools". At least Ford can give a simple reason why cyborging can be used to increase productivity. I doubt that you can give one that wouldn't be made better with cybernetics.

How about a guy with a combine harvester versus a guy with a sickle? The guy in the harvester is orders of magnitude more productive than the guy with the sickle without a single piece of cyberware.

And if he could control the combine without using his hands, and with as much or more precision as he uses to control his hands, via cybernetics, he would be better than a guy just driving one. That's the point I was driving at- the abilities that Ford is talking about are qualitatively different.

There's no magic to tools increasing productivity, that's been well demonstrated in history and is not likely to change. The problem with cybernetics is that they are not likely to be cost effective. An augmentation that allows for the increases in productivity that Ford describes would require a lot of computing power, which means in the absence of magic, it will create heat. So unless you want wear a beer helmet filled with liquid nitrogen to prevent your brain from frying, you're likely better off keeping the techno-magic on the outside.

The fact is, like Tasoth just pointed out, an AI could likely do the cyborg's job better and more cost-effectively.

So you use the cliche skull-port and limit the amount of hardware you put into the body, (this is still cybernetic, by the way) or you redistribute it so that the hotter stuff goes into the body cavities. You don't necessarily need a huge amount of machinery added to the skull to speed things up.