Transumanar

Interesting comment on a blog

[Talking of a friend] She’s saying that Francis Fukuyama and Leon R. Kass and other prominent bio-Luddites are right to fear transhumanism, but perhaps not for the reasons they think. Transhumanism, she says, can be seen as a sort of intentional sub-speciation; when two distinct subspecies compete in the same ecological niche for the same resources, conflict is often the result.

And she’s right. For the bulk of human society, we have found it very easy to dehumanize those whose skin is a different color. Just recently, on another forum I read, people were expressing discomfort and shock because other people ink their bodies or wear jewelry in unconventional places, and express doubt that such people can fit into society in a professional way. It need not be the machines that rebel, Cylon-style, against the humans; the humans are more than capable of starting the conflict, with our inbuilt fears and prejudices, ourselves. If we can not handle people who look a little bit different from us, ir decorate their bodies a little bit differently, how will we handle people who look nothing like us, or do not have human bodies at all? It is no accident, I think, that in the Matrix, is is the humans, not the machines, who (literally) throw the first stone.

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Posted by on 12/05 at 07:34 AM