Transhumanism: Self-Improvement with Technology
The goal of transhumanism is simply to become the absolute best version of yourself. I think all of tech will be focused on it in five to ten years.
Transhumanism is human self-improvement with technology. This is a very wide set of things. Transhumanism encompasses self-measurement, external devices (like phones, watches, glasses, earbuds, contacts), body modifications, super-soldier serums (check out myostatin null), brain-machine interfaces (like neuralink), nootropics and other cognition-enhancing drugs (like in the movie Limitless), genetic modifications with CRISPR for genetic diseases, and AI-augmented human capabilities (bionics, telepresence). It's basically a suite of technologies to power up humans.
If we were to deliver just some of these and scale to millions of people, it would be huge. That's like the creation of eyeglasses times 1,000. However, transhumanism has gotten pushback from people who are afraid of any change for humanity, whether a change is good or bad.
My approach is “optimismalism;” that is, improving things in an objective way, neither using too much technology nor too little. You can have too much fire, and you can have too little fire. We want to use just enough fire to warm us and cook food—not so little that we freeze, and not so much we burn down the house.
Humans have been living with technology in this way forever. Fire arguably made us human. Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire describes how the invention of fire allowed humans to outsource some of our metabolism to the fire and allocate more scarce calories for brain development. This relaxed an evolutionary constraint, which made us smarter and more human. We've been coevolving with technology for a very, very long time, throughout evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal.
If you distill how I think about the world, it's how to level up as an individual, then as a group, and then for humanity as a whole.
The future I envision is much better than how we live today. How much better? Think of how much better we are now than starving medieval peasants or slaves building the pyramids. Future humans will look at today’s living standard the way we look at those living conditions. These leaps in progress can continue.
We can ascend. Humans expanded out of Africa to the rest of the world. Oceanic navigation let us cross oceans. When we created submarines, we could go underwater. After inventing airplanes, we could fly. That's the transhumanism of the past. Those machines all added to human capabilities.
Our current constraints will fall away too. We can expand to the stars. We can live underwater. What else comes next?
