[ExI] Reframing transhumanism as good vs. evil

[Adrian Tymes]

1) What is the boundary between "enhancement" and "medicine"?

1a) Does, say, curing cancer necessarily fall into only one of the two?

1b) What about prosthetics?

1c) What about prosthetics that exceed human baseline performance?

2) What part of "making life better for everyone (who wants a better life) and
eliminating many of the root causes of evil (resource scarcity, fear of death,
lack of understanding)" is not a long term and more complex form of "fighting
evil"?

3) Is not part of the discomfort we cause, because we propose to do
something about evils that most people have accepted as inevitable?

That last one may be the most significant part.  People make up all sorts of
evil motives for us, but they rarely turn out to be true.  They fear that, if we
turn out to be right, they will have been in the wrong for opposing us - yet we
pursue things so complex that most people do not think they can meaningfully
contribute.

How many people who read this message, for example, have ever actually
worked in a nanotech fab, or have studied the practical skills needed to
eventually work in one?  Or how about just building your own robot (even a
LEGO prototype) that can build something else, or done any DIY biotech
experiments?

The fraction of people who read this, and who have done one or more of the
above, is surely far less than 1.  It is also surely much much higher than the
fraction of the general public.

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:14 PM, AlgaeNymph <algaenymph at gmail.com> wrote:
> A while age in college, I was in a speech class where one of the things we
> did was have a group critique our ideas.  I had an idea to speak about
> transhumanism, to which one of my classmates rather indignantly asked me why
> I wanted to advocate biotech enhancement instead of medicine.
>
> That's the problem we have.  Even when we're not seen as evil, we're seen as
> selfish nerds who are utterly indifferent to it.  The sad thing is I find
> myself almost believing this.  Causes that comedians can't brand as outright
> evil or obvious spin are pretty much about fighting evil and/or saving
> innocents.  Citizen heroics, basically.
>
> What kind of citizen heroics do *we* have?
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