/lit/ - Literature

Ted Kaczynski thoroughly deboonked the entire concept of transhumanism.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-techies-wet-dreams

> It is an index of the techies' self-deception that they habitually assume that anything they consider desirable will actually be done when it becomes technically feasible. Of course, there are lots of wonderful things that already are and for a long time have been technically feasible, but don't get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: "How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!"[9] But people never do "all try together," because the principle of natural selection guarantees that self-propagating systems will act mainly for their own survival and propagation in competition with other self-propagating systems, and will not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of philanthropic goals.[10]

> The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased.[22] Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;[23] consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-propagating systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies' own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it's safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire[24] is nothing but a pipe-dream.

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https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-techies-wet-dreams

> Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today.[21] On the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else we've said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will survive indefinitely are minute.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-techies-wet-dreams

> The techies' belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon,[30] to which we may give the name "Technianity." It's true that Technianity at this point is not strictly speaking a religion, because it has not yet developed anything resembling a uniform body of doctrine; the techies' beliefs are widely varied.[31] In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions.[32] Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity,[33] which is the point at which technological progress is supposed to become so rapid as to resemble an explosion. This is analogous to the Judgment Day[34] of Christian mythology or the Revolution of Marxist mythology. The cataclysmic event is supposed to be followed by the arrival of techno-utopia (analogous to the Kingdom of God or the Worker's Paradise). Technianity has a favored minority—the Elect—consisting of the techies (equivalent to the True Believers of Christianity or the Proletariat of the Marxists[35]). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.[36]

> Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at "times of great social change or crisis."[37] This suggests that the techies' beliefs reflect not a genuine confidence in technology, but rather their own anxieties about the future of the technological society—anxieties from which they try to escape by creating a quasi-religious myth.