Schroeder on Transhumanism

Karl Schroeder writes some interesting stuff here about his view of transhumanism. Karl Writes some interesting novels, but his view of the post-human state, although he’s a good balance to some of the post-human cheerleading going on in SF (and reality) at the moment, is really grim.

To be honest, I don’t really buy into the transhumanist hype much either, but I think that a lot of what he’s talking about it a symptom of the tech level, rather than anything to do with the overall thrust of technological progress. That is, we’re all about virtualization and pleasure seeking today because we can’t do anything useful with our bodies yet. There are a few of us, I’m sure, who’ll be on the brain augmentation bandwagon when that sort of thing comes along. However, I think that it’s far more likely that the majority of humanity will either not augment or go the physical route: bodies that magnificent tools, seriously hard to kill and incredibly durable. I suppose that it’s a form of post-humanity, but I don’t think that these people will be all that hard to understand. They may be nigh-indestructable and incredibly long lived, but they’ll still write travel books stuffed with turgid prose, only this time waxing rhaspsodic about sitting naked to vacuum gazing bare-eyed at Jupiter, rather than sitting bareassed in the sand somewhere hopped up on E.

(update: forgot to title this one. It offends my sense of neatness.)