[ExI] Transhuman

[Anders Sandberg]

Apropos transforming bodies, Shulamith Firestone recently died. She 
proposed artificial wombs as a way for women to  liberate themselves 
from biological constraints (and hence removing the main practical 
reason for patriarchal oppression), and in the long run post-genderism 
where the sex distinctions would evaporate as people could choose 
genital designs arbitrarily.

> We are no longer just animals. And the kingdom of nature does not 
> reign absolute. ... Thus the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' 
> value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer 
> justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on 
> grounds of its origins in nature.

http://io9.com/5939856/rip-futurist-shulamith-firestone-who-promoted-artificial-wombs-and-cybernetics-as-tools-of-liberation
http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm

I think she had a very useful early insight: beyond historical 
materialism driving how societies work there is of course biological 
materialism. The fact that it takes a man and a woman to reproduce, and 
that pregnancy and child-rearing requires certain conditions to work, 
that imposes constraints on what societies are possible. But just as 
economic conditions change due to technological innovations biological 
conditions can change too, and that makes new forms of societies possible.

But, beyond the Marxist apparatus she used in her arguments, I think one 
can make a cultural/memetic argument that just because we can change 
ourselves freely doesn't mean we will automatically do it: we will 
pursue changes that we think make sense, and that is conditioned on the 
extant culture. Sure, there are always somebody trying strange things, 
but most people are by definition mainstream. Being part of the 
mainstream likely provides economies of scale, reduces friction and has 
various more or less obvious stabilizing feedbacks. So even if all 
constraints suddenly disappeared cultures might turn out to be 
surprisingly slow-moving.

Those Japanese doll faces are a neat case in point. We can make 
anything, but people go for exaggerated things similar to our past. It 
will take a while before we discover the really important possibilities.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University