I have proposed that a scenario of slower-than-disruptive tech development over the next 15-20 years combined with weak or reduced opposition to human enhancement could result in “increasing irrelevance” for transhumanists. But what exactly does that mean?
Does it mean that nothing remarkable will happen, that the world of 2025 or 2030 will look almost exactly like 2010? Does it mean that the work of transhumanists at places such as the Future of Humanity Institute, or here at the IEET, isn’t important?
The answer to both questions is definitely No.
Even if Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns doesn’t turn out to provide a century’s worth of progress in the next 20 years, and if we don’t have smarter-than-human artificial intelligence or desktop nanofactories by the late 2020s, and if the merger of humans and robots into our cyborg descendants is still the stuff of science fiction two decades from now—even IF all those things happen (or, should I say, don’t happen), still a lot of things will have changed by then, and rather dramatically.
The drama, however, will only be apparent to those who haven’t lived through and experienced the gradualness of those changes as they take place on an incremental bit-by-bit basis.
Time Traveling
Sure, if you took a time traveler from 2010 and plopped them down in 2030, they’d see things that surprised and perhaps even shocked them, just as a Sleeper from 1990 awakening today would find some changes that take a little getting used to.
But although we are all time travelers, moving steadily into the future at a rate of about 86,400 seconds per day, most of us never get to take a big leap ahead and so the future we experience, one day at a time, seems boringly familiar.
And in the same way that carrying a device in your pocket that allows you to take and send photographs, watch movies, or phone someone half a world away seems familiar to you now, so will the gadgets and gizmos and enhancements of the late 2020s seem familiar and unsurprising to you then.
Unconscious Confirmation
What happens in the meantime is a process that I call Unconscious Confirmation. We experience change gradually, so that sometimes things we might consciously have said we would never adopt or tolerate become acceptable when they come upon us a bit at a time, incrementally. We end up unconsciously confirming the tolerability of what we once would have labeled unacceptably dramatic change. We adapt and adopt without ever realizing it.
That’s why, 20 years from now, transhumanism might be largely forgotten—because everyone will be a transhumanist. Though, of course, they won’t call themselves that.
As Giulio Prisco puts it, “That would mean transhumanism, once revolutionary and disruptive, has dissolved into the fabric of the zeitgeist, and everyone just assumes that human enhancement and transcendence of all limits is good.”
But in the process of getting to that point—of going through many years of gradual change—decisions will be made at each step that will have an influence on the safety, the effectiveness, the acceptability, and the availability of various human augmentations or other transformative developments.
And as those decisions are made, someone needs to be around arguing in favor of choice, of morphological freedom, of fairness, and of reasonable precautions. That is the important role that technoprogressive transhumanists will play during the next two decades.
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