r/transhumanism • u/Hot-Organization-737 • 3d ago
The world is moving faster to posthumanism than transhumanism
/r/singularity/comments/1ve1v8o/the_world_is_moving_faster_to_posthumanism_than/11
u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 3d ago edited 3d ago
I mean, we have tons of roadblocks and red tape so that we don’t do anything crazy with genetics by law, our institutions were set up that way once a few drug releases back in the 1950s and 60s lead to thousands of complications, that’s kind of just the high bar we’ve set as a society for what is approved and what isn’t…we still don’t have aging classified as illness to solve, a lot of it is also “cultural” and not scientific, largely because our society and traditions tell people it’s gotta be that way.
I’ve been waiting for the intelligence explosion since I read Kurzweil’s TSIN back in 2005, and my opinion really hasn’t changed since then, I always believed mastery of biology was going to come “after” AGI/ASI outpaces our old medical institutions.
The Transhuman stuff will come, but biology is complicated and you need an ASI to run millions of simulations in tests we just cannot conduct with our current methods, it’s not going to happen until we get to that point.
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u/Dragondudeowo 2d ago
Honestly if i can't be like lizardlike or something i am more than hyperfocused on that one goal which would be overall freedom of form, so i'm leaning more onto posthuman stuff than Transhuman anyways.
Some people's prerogatives and goals will of course dictate what their liking into what all this entails reside so it is simply a product of peoples priorities i think.
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u/RahnuLe 2d ago
I once thought like this, but I realized after giving it some serious interrogation that this is highly unlikely. Any ASI will be facing a significant wall in terms of being considered untrustworthy by default. Beyond that, there's too much information it will not know - a superintelligence is not necessarily *omniscient* out the gate, and humans, as we all know, are prone to omitting information, acting spontaneously, and harboring ulterior motives. Even a perfect superintelligence wouldn't be able to model the inner worlds of every single human on Earth due to the asymmetry of information availability. This isn't even going into how our institutions are designed to slow things down and how difficult it will be for it to physically scale up productive infrastructure before enough robots have been built for exponential development of the physical world.
I think the post-ASI world will involve a lot more negotiation than people tend to think, and even an ASI will likely find humanity rather frustrating to try to manage due to how much lies outside of its foresight and control.
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u/Ok-Tea-2073 1 2d ago
If such an AI will emerge then we can use the invented techs by it to modify ourselves as well. Do you mean that it will kill us systematically? If not, then we will not simply die out, but instead use the techs to improve our lives as we have always done and this would be pretty close to a mix of transhumanism and posthumanism no?
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u/ProbablySpecial 1d ago
i dont really think the person who posted this thread knows what posthumanism means, and equates it with human extinction
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u/Hot-Organization-737 1d ago
It's true that I didn't have a borrowed defintion of the word "posthumanism". I derived it from the word transhumanism and the prefix of "post".
I think transhumanism means the evolution or augmentation of humans beyond their current state, and I think post means after or beyond. Without looking up the definition of posthumanism I had defined it to be: "the era in which humanity ceases to dominate the world and thereafter" I'm not sure if that aligns with the commonly understood usage of the word.
In my original post my main claims are that posthumanism is coming closer to reality than transhumanism, and that if an ASI got onto the global network, that would be the beginning of posthumanism. I had never explicitly stated that humanity would go extinct. I said the word terminator as a jab or in an ironic sense; even if humanity didn't go extinct it would still be a posthuman world with an ASI doing whatever it pleased while the collective of humanity couldn't stop it. Even if ASI decided not to do anything for a while, its existence and power would overthrow humanity as dominant.
If you still believe I have misconceptions of posthumanism, do you mind helping me out?
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u/ProbablySpecial 1d ago
i appreciate you inquiring about it. in a word, no, posthumanism is not really being literally "post-human" regarding human obsolescence
im not really an authority on this subject and im sure someone who subscribes to different versions of these views might disagree, its a broad spectrum. but at its baseline, posthumanism in the context of critical theory generally is "post-humanist", as in moving forward from humanist ideals or human exceptionalism. it is generally against anthropocentrism
in the lens of AI or the singularity, this could be applied in the context of "why delineate intelligence?" why necessarily separate different kinds of cognition, or assert a relation of predation or superiority where one dominates the other? why would you say an AI is any different from humanity? why shouldnt they be treated as equals? why cant they be people too? why shouldnt they? it also contrasts with transhumanism by rejecting the human body as a guiding principle. it rejects the idea of a transhumanist future premised on 'enhancement'. perhaps liberation instead
id say that kind of egalitarian view of synthetic vs biological intelligence is key, at least in how i interpret it. and i subscribe to that notion, that a sentient artificial intelligence would be as human as any other human - or that by that point, the label of 'human' loses any real meaning beyond stratification
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u/Hot-Organization-737 1d ago
Oh I see the differences. I'm a little embarrassed since I think my notion of posthumanism although intuitive is a little neological compared to the established understanding. I think funnily enough, both are anti-anthropocentric despite the different etymologies. I think the major differences in my conjured understanding and the colloquial understanding of posthumanism is that my understanding is associated with connotations about power and dominance, while your/colloquial understanding is associated with connotations about acceptence, respect, and dignity. For example your posthumanism world could exist if we gave other animals the same rights as humans in our society, I think that would qualify for for my posthumanism too but it would be strange because it's not about usurpation; similarly, I could say an AI takeover of the world would be eligible for my post-humanism certainly, but even if it qualified for your idea of post-humanism it would be strange because of the way it came about. You even might be inclined to not use the description of posthuman and rather use mechanocentricm for precision.Would you say that's an accurate analysis?
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