/lit/ - Literature

>>4510437
Is transhumanism a practical? I don't think so.
Potentially beneficial concept? Maybe, but I am very skeptical in practice.
The stuff of nightmare? It is for me, but not for everyone

As other posters have raised the issues of where the line for transhumanism is, much more then I thought they would. I am going to move this over to a much broader topic of technology. Technology is nothing more then a tool that allows us to do more. Whether the tool is used for good or bad is dependent on the users. The problem I see is that the tools are getting much more powerful and we don't really know what we are capable of with the new tools. Now this always has always been a problem, but I see it getting bigger and bigger, partly because we have distanced ourselves for the how and why.

Take the automobile (in my opinion the most destructive tech ever made). It started out as laughable item few care about, which have very little effect. However once it reached a certain level of development it stopped being a toy for the rich and became a tool for the rich. Those who could afford them could do things other couldn't and as such made even more money making a larger wealth gap. So more and more people bought them so they to could get ahead in life (as by this tech level it was impractical to build your own). Of course at some point it became the "everyone is special, so no one is" problem. Now large amounts of resources were going to maintain these tools, but the "relative" benefits were mostly gone. What is more is our civilization changed around the car as people started to assume people would just use their car to get from place to place. This made it hard to abandon the car as it had become the new norm which required much more resource to up keep then the old way.
The ability to travel twice as fast, means little if it costs more, can't be use due to traffic and places are twice as far apart.

And this is the same pattern I see with a lot of technology. There are gains are from relative benefits (which don't last very long) and the actual benefits (that last, but are usually offset by downsides people do talk about). But the thing is these are because of how we use it, not the tech itself. We ask what can tech do for ME, not what tech can do for US.
I see the people talk about how tech will make them immortal, but they never talk about how a bunch of immortals could really change how our world functions.
If we are going to change the rules of the game, we need to at least try to make a new set of rules that aren't broken, or worse bet that new rule changes will save us from the problems we created with the last rule change.
While I don't advocate a unified global system to keep all this stuff in check, I do think we all need to talk more.

We need to fix our social systems before we go changing them

I am not sure I am communicating my ideas very well, as this is a very long a detailed discussion topic. But do you get what i am trying to say?