Spinning Superlativity

Michael spins for his Robot Cult, thusly:

If exploring human enhancement in detail is good enough for the U.S. National Science Foundation and investigating molecular nanotechnology is good enough for the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies, then it’s good enough for me. Are transhumanist ideas really as marginal as all that?

You don't have to join a Robot Cult to believe in healthcare or to advocate medical research or to champion consensus science as a guide to relevant public policy. Similarly, you don't have to give in to a full froth of True Belief in drextechian nano-cornucopia to grasp that interventions at the nanoscale are already yielding and will very likely go on to yield ever more useful breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science, biotechnology, sensor technology, medical technique and so on. I have had many students at Berkeley who are actively contributing to these breakthroughs themselves in their labs. None of them are transhumanists, and all of them find transhumanist formulations hyperbolic, unqualified, unscientific, and rather funny.

Transhumanists like to commandeer secular progressive mainstream commitments and wildly hyperbolize actually promising emerging technoscience as a way of selling their faith-based initiative to the rubes, but once mainstream secular progressives actually join the company of superlative techno-utopians they discover soon enough that the talk has turned to friendly Robot Gods, uploading, techno-immortality, drextech post-scarcity, and the similar sillinesses that transhumanists and singularitarians and Ayn Raelians and such really mostly care about but which weren't included in the glossy sane-washed Robot Cult brochure. It's a scam and few are fooled are long.

As for "enhancement" -- as a conceptual matter, "enhancement" is always, properly so-called, "enhancement" according to whom, "enhancement" in the service of what end? To pretend agreement already exists as to what kinds of humans there should be and what kind of lifeways are flourishing ones, especially in the areas that are inevitably the focus of discussions of "enhancement medicine" is to substitute eugenic efforts to facilitate parochial conceptions of "optimality" for proper democratic efforts to expand the scene of informed, nonduressed consent in matters of prosthetic self-determination, whether normalizing or not. I agree that transhumanist discourse has contributed to this terrible eugenic way of framing questions of non-normalizing therapeutic intervention. It's not a contribution any democratic-minded person should be crowing about in my view.