Some fair points there. The problem as far as analysis of transhumanism is concerned is much the same as attemping an analysis of socialism, capitalism or fascism or any other similar -ism. There is no thing there to be analysed just a vast network of relations and connections that have certain commonalties that allow us to claim that the thing exists. However as soon as we try to move from synthesis to analysis, things fall apart. Even my article has to over-simplify in order to communicate anything at all.
My experience (and it is fairly wide) is that 'transhumanists' (people who are attracted to the network of ideas we call transhumanism) are largely very decent and well-meaning people. There might be a tendency towards hyper-rationalism, mild autism and detachment from traditional human concerns but no single individual can be wholly type-cast in this way. What they can lack is the ability to contextualise their aspirations within the actuality of the species - the point you refer to in referring to 'millions of years of evolution'.
Hyper-rationalism is the problem here. It is a problem embedded in some 2,500 years of Western civilisationary theory. It has enabled massive technological progress (the means) but has distorted what the progress is intended for (the ends). The human condition cannot be technologised into something new easily or quickly because it has certain evolved characteristics - good and bad - that are just facts on the ground.
At the material level much of the science fiction surrounding space travel is absurd because the human body is unfitted to the environments and time-scales proposed for it. More down to earth, literally, technology-based food production for the masses has brutal unintended consequences on our bodies as we are uncovering in relation to highly processed foods and yet these were once 'necessary' to feed massively growing populations.
At the psychological level, transhumanism is ridiculously aspirational. It falls into the trap of willing being a substitute for doing, much as we have fallen into the trap of believing that an ought can be an 'is'. We are a dreaming species which makes us creative but also utopian and so rather stupid. What is surely required is a more human-centred approach to technology in which we understand our ends with more clarity and then apply technology to meet those ends. Those ends are ends of humanistic value. We cannot transcend the fact of our being as evolved creatures. The machines will be the next speciation before we are.
Transhumanists could be a highly positive force if they could detach themselves from their utopianism, their death anxieties and their over-obsession with extreme existential risks, if they left the post-humanists to their Lovecraftian fantasies and settled down to the boring job of not only identifying technologies that would improve our situation but checking the unintended consequences of their implementation. They should clinically enter into the political process as problem-solvers contributing to a very important debate to be had whether Western liberal democracy in its current form actually works any more.
The depressing thing about transhumanism - indeed all -isms - is that it takes some set of apparently simple claims and then builds a world around them that is detached from complexity. This is the essence of ideology, ideas rather than values or sentiments. Still, transhumanists as individuals have a contribution to make as much as 'socialists' or 'capitalists' so long as they are kept on a tight leash by the species they aim to improve, reform or manipulate.
Excellent wide ranging coverage of the many issues the subject surfaces. Most are deeply embedded, little considered and highly volatile.
Forced genetic intrusion and modification in its many forms now being discovered, experimented with and implemented with righteous 'self-justification' including the freedom to capitalize on knowledge and technological ability to do so, form a subject that the masses of 'commoners' or just ordinary moral folk attempting to live with loving and respectful regard in a normal, healthy and developmental way find too disturbing to rationally deal with. The world is already so upside-down topsy-turvy in the information and civil law spaces. And medical authoritarianism has been writ large in the past decade. The next appears to include weaponising 'innovative' biosciences in general.
Thanks. Very few people seem to be fully aware of a) the massive technological shifts under way or b) the complete incapacity of much of the traditional political and administrative classes in the face of these changes. I just filled out a massive health survey and, as I was doing so, I noted the intrusive extent of the questioning about vast tracts of private life that were tangential to healthcare but clearly 'justified' by some notion that the State had the right to prepare plans to guide me into decisions and choices that were coming from some abstract theoretical place divorced from my interests and needs.
I filled this one out because I felt like it as my swansong of co-operation but that's it ... game over. I refused to get involved in the associated surveys. I simply no longer trust the State to use the information wisely or in my personal interest. The use of the Online Privacy Act in the last few days in order to control political discourse simply means that, of this month, I no longer co-operate with the State machine or its legacy media lackeys. That was the last straw in a long year of reasons to distrust the system on multiple fronts - they are out of control and panicking. They are simply not competent or intelligent enough to become competent. Once there is a political class in place that I can trust, my co-operation will resume.
We appreciate your personal observations and stances, applicable not only to your home country of course; but factually stated, UK powers-that-be are emphatically leading the way into guaranteed disaster. NZ'ers are speaking in public channels about this as Wellington administrations of recent years continue to jam forward onerous fantasist and international corporatist policies via radically new genetic and "health" and ag regulations. Meanwhile, all of those 'rumors' regarding rapid ongoing rises of many serious diseases since 2021 continue to grow stronger with a great many peer-reviewed studies adding substance to the picture.
"there is a risk that a population affected negatively by technology (notably the disruption expected from AI and robotics) could turn against an ideology associated with the small technocratic managerial class implementing change." Agreed. I'm waiting for a return of John Henry. And Erewhon.
It is interesting that some in the circle around Corbyn seem to have identified the collapsing graduate class as the key social force for their brand of socialism alongside ‘asset poor working households’ and ‘racialised minorities’ (whatever that may mean). There are interesting internal contradictions there which I hope to write about later in the month. The WPB has targeted the last two but is culturally problematic for most left-liberals (that is, this increasingly declasse the graduate class still trying to cling to its non-existent superiority).
Let's see if they turn to Butlerian Jihad. It's an option.
In the US, we've used the term "racialized minorities" in a few senses. One is to get away from statistical reality, to add a word which sounds insurgent and just to "minority." Another is to try to grapple with uneven social status and financial/educational attainments of different populations - i.e., the Asian American problem.
A Corbynista adviser used the term ‘racialised minorities’ (which will be incomprehensible to most Britons). This was clearly influenced by the new American radical progressivism - urban, activist (in the Saul Alinsky sense), a little Chomskian perhaps, graduate, middle class intellectual.
The tragedy of the British Left is that, first with effective Atlanticist infiltration on its Right in the late 1940s and 1950s and then with more force in the Clinton era as a form of colonialist progressivism, the ‘native tradition’ has been damaged almost beyond repair - this is why that part of the working class that is not still tribally committed to Labour is drifting to the populists.
It is interesting that this adviser’s US equivalents are not penetrating into the American working class but rather are persuading white middle class liberals to shift leftwards in reaction to populism - perhaps the hope is that populism will push more frightened and increasingly declasse liberals into ‘socialism’ (not that it really is socialism) and that the ‘socialists’ can get cover speaking ‘for’ the working class who are to remain ‘untouchables’ in reality.
As to Butlerian Jihad, I doubt it. The force of the digital economy is such that anyone who tries to fight it will be (relatively) pauperised. The pressure will be on to engage with it regardless of the potentially devastating energy consumption (to Net Zero advocates) and job transformations.
What is more likely to happen is that it is States that become terrified not of AI and robotic economic impacts on their own populations but of libertarian impacts on their own power and reach - hence the drive to so-called ‘online security’ regulation and legislation outside the US.
These are like Cnut facing the North Sea incoming tide. The tide, of course, is fiscal - the ‘black hole’ in British finances has just jumped fro £22bn to £50bn and still the posturing idiots bung wads to Zelensky and Net Zero business interests.
The victims of all this are largely atomised and incapable of effective organisation for reasons I will raise in a later article. The effective organisers are those who mobilise on cultural grounds from the Right and who do not dangle theory in front of the population.
University-educated liberals do seem to want to peel away from the working class, don't they? The rising US progressive attack on capitalism is a good example of this, as it runs smack into popular faith in the American Dream.
Very good point about governments reaching for civil liberties crackdowns. An old, favored tool.
I am not sure it is as as simple as that. I think they want to connect but do not know how to do so except on their own patronising terms. They are as uncomprehending as missionaries dealing with conquered indigenous peoples. They think the 'other' can be 'improved' by listening to their analyses of situations. These look very different from the point of view of interconnected families and communities.
As to capitalism, what is it now? There is a cogent Marxist analysis but progressives merely dabble in that. It has become just a label for 'that which we loathe even though we do not understand it' - a monster to be set aflame. They feel scared of the monster and so out come the pitchforks and the brands.
They do not realise that they want to kill what they have become existentially dependent on. They have no plan (unlike the Communists or true reform Social Democrats) for creating functional independence or at least as much as is practicably possible. Indeed, they have no plan ...
The way I see it the Transhumanist Singularity approaches swiftly whether we like it or not. It emerges in a problematic field we definitely don't like. Both key problems you outline already. No.1 Capitalism's impending collapse under it's own contradictions. Though not as Marx believed by the unbearable immiseration of labour as capital sought to extract more surplus value but by the disappearance of labour itself. No.2 by as you say the political stasis. Capitalism's core contradiction being that it steadfastly regards the only mechanism to add value being human labour power and meanwhile the vast bulk of wealth being inherited capital it is only useful insofar as it can leverage labour power and is expressed in GDP. Economic growth is the imperative but measured in labour effort units. Both capital needs labour to grow and governments need it for Pay as you earn taxation. Cooking the books by mass importation of unskilled labour will only work for so long. Not least because the proles are getting restless. The capitalist model of value is about to fail and needs replacing. Wage labour was not always the basis of economics. in fact it is historically recent. The taxation of wage labourers is even more recent coming in the mid-20th century. A new model which recognises machine labour as adding value can be developed and here Transhumanism along with the A.I. can manage the algorithms of production, supply and demand. Secondly the political stasis. We are all aware of the uniparty, Labour/Tories. Each party led be dumber and dumberer. New ideological parties either fail to breakthrough or like Reform morph into another version of the uniparty. A lot of Transhumanists are familiar with the Tao te Ching. Maybe staying in the background, declining to take credit, loose affiliations rather than centralised committees. The new parties on the Left and Right if they want to be effective should concentrate on single issues, which do have a chance of breaking through the mainstream blockades.
We should draw a distinction though between transhumanism and the singularity. The singularity may make transhumanism pragmatically redundant … its very existence is more likely to demonstrate the necessity of remaining human and allowing technology simply to enhance human values. The remaining transhumanists may simply spin off into post-human modes of thinking either with the machines or in fruitless competition with them.
Will capitalism (whatever that is precisely) collapse? It certainly riddled with contradictions but global commodity trading and the new blockchain-crypto universe both suggest new forms rather than premature collapse as does Chinese state capitalism. What may be collapsing is Western deficit financing and the current last chance saloon attempt to regain control through ‘military Keynesianism’.
The tariff issue may be less problematic since it is merely a rebalancing related to goods (despite the squeals of liberals) and not services. The huge commodity combines have the capacity both to manage the consequences and undertake effective work-arounds. Similarly finance capital and the so-called bond vigilantes are in a position of unparalleled power but are also having to learn responsibility as increasingly rational actors concerned with the sustainability of the system as much as quick profit.
The point you have made though is an important one - what happens when labour disappears because a combination of AI and robotics makes it redundant? The transhumanists offer us an ideology of abundance but fail to comprehend both that humans require work to thrive and that they aspire to yet more work that gives the resources for pleasures.
Transhumanists are not good at psychology (nor are socialists for that matter). The numbers going to be satisfied with civic duty and performing woke dramas is going to be limited. Many of the new needs will be illicit. It is no accident that the cartels are turning up in Ukraine to learn new skills in the implementation of force as humanity’s most cynical capitalists.
Similarly you share the point about political stasis - once the struggle between libertarian economics and progressivism is over, what next? The first will exhaust itself on the failure to deal with the aspirations of the mass as it unfolds and the second will exhaust itself in a conservative rearguard action against unfolding future history.
Some fair points there. The problem as far as analysis of transhumanism is concerned is much the same as attemping an analysis of socialism, capitalism or fascism or any other similar -ism. There is no thing there to be analysed just a vast network of relations and connections that have certain commonalties that allow us to claim that the thing exists. However as soon as we try to move from synthesis to analysis, things fall apart. Even my article has to over-simplify in order to communicate anything at all.
My experience (and it is fairly wide) is that 'transhumanists' (people who are attracted to the network of ideas we call transhumanism) are largely very decent and well-meaning people. There might be a tendency towards hyper-rationalism, mild autism and detachment from traditional human concerns but no single individual can be wholly type-cast in this way. What they can lack is the ability to contextualise their aspirations within the actuality of the species - the point you refer to in referring to 'millions of years of evolution'.
Hyper-rationalism is the problem here. It is a problem embedded in some 2,500 years of Western civilisationary theory. It has enabled massive technological progress (the means) but has distorted what the progress is intended for (the ends). The human condition cannot be technologised into something new easily or quickly because it has certain evolved characteristics - good and bad - that are just facts on the ground.
At the material level much of the science fiction surrounding space travel is absurd because the human body is unfitted to the environments and time-scales proposed for it. More down to earth, literally, technology-based food production for the masses has brutal unintended consequences on our bodies as we are uncovering in relation to highly processed foods and yet these were once 'necessary' to feed massively growing populations.
At the psychological level, transhumanism is ridiculously aspirational. It falls into the trap of willing being a substitute for doing, much as we have fallen into the trap of believing that an ought can be an 'is'. We are a dreaming species which makes us creative but also utopian and so rather stupid. What is surely required is a more human-centred approach to technology in which we understand our ends with more clarity and then apply technology to meet those ends. Those ends are ends of humanistic value. We cannot transcend the fact of our being as evolved creatures. The machines will be the next speciation before we are.
Transhumanists could be a highly positive force if they could detach themselves from their utopianism, their death anxieties and their over-obsession with extreme existential risks, if they left the post-humanists to their Lovecraftian fantasies and settled down to the boring job of not only identifying technologies that would improve our situation but checking the unintended consequences of their implementation. They should clinically enter into the political process as problem-solvers contributing to a very important debate to be had whether Western liberal democracy in its current form actually works any more.
The depressing thing about transhumanism - indeed all -isms - is that it takes some set of apparently simple claims and then builds a world around them that is detached from complexity. This is the essence of ideology, ideas rather than values or sentiments. Still, transhumanists as individuals have a contribution to make as much as 'socialists' or 'capitalists' so long as they are kept on a tight leash by the species they aim to improve, reform or manipulate.
Excellent wide ranging coverage of the many issues the subject surfaces. Most are deeply embedded, little considered and highly volatile.
Forced genetic intrusion and modification in its many forms now being discovered, experimented with and implemented with righteous 'self-justification' including the freedom to capitalize on knowledge and technological ability to do so, form a subject that the masses of 'commoners' or just ordinary moral folk attempting to live with loving and respectful regard in a normal, healthy and developmental way find too disturbing to rationally deal with. The world is already so upside-down topsy-turvy in the information and civil law spaces. And medical authoritarianism has been writ large in the past decade. The next appears to include weaponising 'innovative' biosciences in general.
Thanks. Very few people seem to be fully aware of a) the massive technological shifts under way or b) the complete incapacity of much of the traditional political and administrative classes in the face of these changes. I just filled out a massive health survey and, as I was doing so, I noted the intrusive extent of the questioning about vast tracts of private life that were tangential to healthcare but clearly 'justified' by some notion that the State had the right to prepare plans to guide me into decisions and choices that were coming from some abstract theoretical place divorced from my interests and needs.
I filled this one out because I felt like it as my swansong of co-operation but that's it ... game over. I refused to get involved in the associated surveys. I simply no longer trust the State to use the information wisely or in my personal interest. The use of the Online Privacy Act in the last few days in order to control political discourse simply means that, of this month, I no longer co-operate with the State machine or its legacy media lackeys. That was the last straw in a long year of reasons to distrust the system on multiple fronts - they are out of control and panicking. They are simply not competent or intelligent enough to become competent. Once there is a political class in place that I can trust, my co-operation will resume.
We appreciate your personal observations and stances, applicable not only to your home country of course; but factually stated, UK powers-that-be are emphatically leading the way into guaranteed disaster. NZ'ers are speaking in public channels about this as Wellington administrations of recent years continue to jam forward onerous fantasist and international corporatist policies via radically new genetic and "health" and ag regulations. Meanwhile, all of those 'rumors' regarding rapid ongoing rises of many serious diseases since 2021 continue to grow stronger with a great many peer-reviewed studies adding substance to the picture.
"there is a risk that a population affected negatively by technology (notably the disruption expected from AI and robotics) could turn against an ideology associated with the small technocratic managerial class implementing change." Agreed. I'm waiting for a return of John Henry. And Erewhon.
It is interesting that some in the circle around Corbyn seem to have identified the collapsing graduate class as the key social force for their brand of socialism alongside ‘asset poor working households’ and ‘racialised minorities’ (whatever that may mean). There are interesting internal contradictions there which I hope to write about later in the month. The WPB has targeted the last two but is culturally problematic for most left-liberals (that is, this increasingly declasse the graduate class still trying to cling to its non-existent superiority).
Let's see if they turn to Butlerian Jihad. It's an option.
In the US, we've used the term "racialized minorities" in a few senses. One is to get away from statistical reality, to add a word which sounds insurgent and just to "minority." Another is to try to grapple with uneven social status and financial/educational attainments of different populations - i.e., the Asian American problem.
A Corbynista adviser used the term ‘racialised minorities’ (which will be incomprehensible to most Britons). This was clearly influenced by the new American radical progressivism - urban, activist (in the Saul Alinsky sense), a little Chomskian perhaps, graduate, middle class intellectual.
The tragedy of the British Left is that, first with effective Atlanticist infiltration on its Right in the late 1940s and 1950s and then with more force in the Clinton era as a form of colonialist progressivism, the ‘native tradition’ has been damaged almost beyond repair - this is why that part of the working class that is not still tribally committed to Labour is drifting to the populists.
It is interesting that this adviser’s US equivalents are not penetrating into the American working class but rather are persuading white middle class liberals to shift leftwards in reaction to populism - perhaps the hope is that populism will push more frightened and increasingly declasse liberals into ‘socialism’ (not that it really is socialism) and that the ‘socialists’ can get cover speaking ‘for’ the working class who are to remain ‘untouchables’ in reality.
As to Butlerian Jihad, I doubt it. The force of the digital economy is such that anyone who tries to fight it will be (relatively) pauperised. The pressure will be on to engage with it regardless of the potentially devastating energy consumption (to Net Zero advocates) and job transformations.
What is more likely to happen is that it is States that become terrified not of AI and robotic economic impacts on their own populations but of libertarian impacts on their own power and reach - hence the drive to so-called ‘online security’ regulation and legislation outside the US.
These are like Cnut facing the North Sea incoming tide. The tide, of course, is fiscal - the ‘black hole’ in British finances has just jumped fro £22bn to £50bn and still the posturing idiots bung wads to Zelensky and Net Zero business interests.
The victims of all this are largely atomised and incapable of effective organisation for reasons I will raise in a later article. The effective organisers are those who mobilise on cultural grounds from the Right and who do not dangle theory in front of the population.
University-educated liberals do seem to want to peel away from the working class, don't they? The rising US progressive attack on capitalism is a good example of this, as it runs smack into popular faith in the American Dream.
Very good point about governments reaching for civil liberties crackdowns. An old, favored tool.
I am not sure it is as as simple as that. I think they want to connect but do not know how to do so except on their own patronising terms. They are as uncomprehending as missionaries dealing with conquered indigenous peoples. They think the 'other' can be 'improved' by listening to their analyses of situations. These look very different from the point of view of interconnected families and communities.
As to capitalism, what is it now? There is a cogent Marxist analysis but progressives merely dabble in that. It has become just a label for 'that which we loathe even though we do not understand it' - a monster to be set aflame. They feel scared of the monster and so out come the pitchforks and the brands.
They do not realise that they want to kill what they have become existentially dependent on. They have no plan (unlike the Communists or true reform Social Democrats) for creating functional independence or at least as much as is practicably possible. Indeed, they have no plan ...
The way I see it the Transhumanist Singularity approaches swiftly whether we like it or not. It emerges in a problematic field we definitely don't like. Both key problems you outline already. No.1 Capitalism's impending collapse under it's own contradictions. Though not as Marx believed by the unbearable immiseration of labour as capital sought to extract more surplus value but by the disappearance of labour itself. No.2 by as you say the political stasis. Capitalism's core contradiction being that it steadfastly regards the only mechanism to add value being human labour power and meanwhile the vast bulk of wealth being inherited capital it is only useful insofar as it can leverage labour power and is expressed in GDP. Economic growth is the imperative but measured in labour effort units. Both capital needs labour to grow and governments need it for Pay as you earn taxation. Cooking the books by mass importation of unskilled labour will only work for so long. Not least because the proles are getting restless. The capitalist model of value is about to fail and needs replacing. Wage labour was not always the basis of economics. in fact it is historically recent. The taxation of wage labourers is even more recent coming in the mid-20th century. A new model which recognises machine labour as adding value can be developed and here Transhumanism along with the A.I. can manage the algorithms of production, supply and demand. Secondly the political stasis. We are all aware of the uniparty, Labour/Tories. Each party led be dumber and dumberer. New ideological parties either fail to breakthrough or like Reform morph into another version of the uniparty. A lot of Transhumanists are familiar with the Tao te Ching. Maybe staying in the background, declining to take credit, loose affiliations rather than centralised committees. The new parties on the Left and Right if they want to be effective should concentrate on single issues, which do have a chance of breaking through the mainstream blockades.
We should draw a distinction though between transhumanism and the singularity. The singularity may make transhumanism pragmatically redundant … its very existence is more likely to demonstrate the necessity of remaining human and allowing technology simply to enhance human values. The remaining transhumanists may simply spin off into post-human modes of thinking either with the machines or in fruitless competition with them.
Will capitalism (whatever that is precisely) collapse? It certainly riddled with contradictions but global commodity trading and the new blockchain-crypto universe both suggest new forms rather than premature collapse as does Chinese state capitalism. What may be collapsing is Western deficit financing and the current last chance saloon attempt to regain control through ‘military Keynesianism’.
The tariff issue may be less problematic since it is merely a rebalancing related to goods (despite the squeals of liberals) and not services. The huge commodity combines have the capacity both to manage the consequences and undertake effective work-arounds. Similarly finance capital and the so-called bond vigilantes are in a position of unparalleled power but are also having to learn responsibility as increasingly rational actors concerned with the sustainability of the system as much as quick profit.
The point you have made though is an important one - what happens when labour disappears because a combination of AI and robotics makes it redundant? The transhumanists offer us an ideology of abundance but fail to comprehend both that humans require work to thrive and that they aspire to yet more work that gives the resources for pleasures.
Transhumanists are not good at psychology (nor are socialists for that matter). The numbers going to be satisfied with civic duty and performing woke dramas is going to be limited. Many of the new needs will be illicit. It is no accident that the cartels are turning up in Ukraine to learn new skills in the implementation of force as humanity’s most cynical capitalists.
Similarly you share the point about political stasis - once the struggle between libertarian economics and progressivism is over, what next? The first will exhaust itself on the failure to deal with the aspirations of the mass as it unfolds and the second will exhaust itself in a conservative rearguard action against unfolding future history.