Transformer

This was lying in the posts to edit for a long time.
Disclaimer: If you have better things to do( I did not when I started out writing this.) don't read this.If The Matrix is your Gospel truth and you look upon Bladerunning as a possible future career, read on.

Happened to read some stuff about transhumanism some time back, when time ran drearily, and disuse atrophy threatened. Seemed oddballs and kooky initially- a movement that proclaims to help people do 'better than well.'

I had a sticker stuck on the cover page of my school diary- it read, in Comic Sans MS font, "Good is not good where better is expected."I remembered.I read on.

Wikipedia ( funnily Citizendium, for all its refinement has no entry) puts it as "international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities, and to ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death."

I am piqued.Who are these guys? Surely they aren't aiming at sculpting a philosopher's stone?! I mean it is good to aim to improve. But how do you itemize it into a protocol or menu?That seems Riddikulus...get some parallax for gossakes.

The World Transhumanist Association defines it as "the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities."

Wow. So PC!!
Abstruse. As PC stuff usually is.

They aim for convergence of Nano, Bio, Info and Cognitive technologies. I was looking for hard examples. Came up with fancy shmancy names: Extropianism ( proactive evolution), Immortalism( technological immortality), Abolitionism ityaadi. Nice to read. But does not form links beyond sounding sexily vague.There are no examples to see. There is no bamboo microscope or AI based prosthetics for cripples, no Deep Thought on brain mapping for Psy illnesses, rather Bootstrapping on boozed up bombast.

My take is that as a transhumanist you could write a great bestseller, or script a hit TV series/movie.Tarsem Singh ...Cell. Remember? Feed the public on such neuromancing with the quaint, put in the CIA, a Jason Bourne and a rumpunctious hotbod like JLo, plenty of intellectual masturbation ( 'IM', as the surgical twats acronymize) with some of the above words, and you have a pseudoPhodu cheez.

Go through the WTA website, you realize it is really an idea of bringing together all progressive thought into one scaffold of improvement.It is as vague as it is ambitious. Because people never set out to eat and drink to build a beauteous fat cell 2.0, and prefer simple non intellectual fornication to IM. How can you call it a movement?Its rather a way of thought, life maybe.

There are ethical angles ad infinitum. It creates a world akin to the alpha beta Omega craziness of Huxley's Brave New World. A caste system of sorts, of those who want to stretch the limit versus those who want to make two meals a day.

All in all: Keep the font Comic Sans MS on that.Not serious are you?

If I had time to waste, I would have written more. I don't, and hence I end here.I want to use the time to evolve pro actively.