[PHILOSOPHY] Against Luddite Caricatures of Transhumanism

First of all, this post is full of obvious bullshit that Luddites say, all pathetic arguments not worth wasting another breath on, all pathetic arguments totally dispelled in the "Responses to Critics" section of Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near," and also fully addressed in his earlier book "The Age of Spiritual Machines."

Anyone who agrees with this author owes it to themselves to simply read Kurzweil's refutation of the Unabomber manifesto (and the arguments of his other short-sighted, confused, and/or unphilosophical critics).

Transhumanist: "We will be able to live 150 years - at least!"

Idiot: "Yes, but why is it important?"

You: "If you don't value your own life, why don't you end it? Life is always optional. If you lack values and desires sufficient to make you desire more life, why don't you kill yourself? Before you get to 150 years old, that's always an option."

Death will certainly remain an option into the future, even as Transhumanists expand the possibilities in billions of imaginitive ways. (All of steemswede's "other possible futures that await in the remaining 359 directions we have not even begun to imagine" are impossible if one is dead.)

And if Transhumanists are narrow-minded and short-sighted, and crony capitalist? ...Then a better answer is to simply be one who isn't, and benefit from the amazing technology they give you to do ____ in the future.

Technology expands options, it doesn't reduce them. Intelligent people, transhumanists foremost among them, want more options, not just "more speed."

Second of all, the only thing that's dumb about transhumanists is the name they chose. It literally couldn't have been more calculated to engender fear and confusion among the idiot masses. Even "post-human" (which was being used in the 1700s as an ideal) is better. Most of the ideas in that domain space are sound though, at least at the level of thinkers like Kurzweil, et al.