[ExI] Transhuman

[B.K. DeLong]

I do agree with you in that respect - but we will have such issues of
beauty when it comes with truly transhumanistic modifications. Say I want
to genetically modify my skin and hair so I can have better survival
against the elements. I am not a scientist or doctor and have not worked
out the...medical kinks here but what if a procedure is created to remove
all natural melanin, suppress it's natural development and have
controllable nanobots manage it henceforth. Obviously the process would
have to mitigate any issues normally associated with hypo-leucism, but what
I envision would allow for people to change their hair, eye and skin color
fairly rapidly. If not at-will or to suit the elements they find themselves
in then at least via some sort of smartdevice. But as with the
transhumanistic benefits, you will have people doing so for social and
beautification reasons and with the benefits you will have all colors of
the spectrum and stereotypical racial traits may cease to exist. Whole new
societal definitions of beauty would come about.

While I'm not sure many would ever want this technology to exist in the
hands of the public due to its obvious disruptive quality, ethical
quandaries and wholesale changes in societal perceptions, this is an
example of a transhumanist technology that would definitely require a
change in how beauty is defined by society or groupings of cultures. People
are already using skin lightening and spot removal techniques that involve
melanin removal.

(on a side note, some of the more disruptive factors of this was covered
heavily in A. Sayeeda Clarke's short ITSV "FutureStates" episode  "White"
discussing melanin as a commodity in the age of global warming and racial
tensions.

Article:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/04/imagining-the-future-of-global-warming-and-race-through-film.html
Episode: http://www.futurestates.tv/episodes/white)

More to think about....

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:13 AM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why not different social norms for different groups. Like, a
> > socially-approved vision of beauty for people with wings, and another
> > socially-approved vision of beauty for people with gills.
>
> For the same reason we no longer hold people to different social
> norms - in most aspect - based on the color of their skin.
>
> A case could be made for relevant social norms (for instance, the
> most beautiful black skinned folk still tend to have wide noses,
> rather than the pointed noses of other ethnicities).  However, in
> practice, attempting to impose social norms based on that leads
> to irrelevant social norms (which I trust I do not have to elaborate
> on).  There is no reason to believe this would not be the case even
> if the racial differences were more functional (e.g., wings and
> gills), and even easily configurable (such as via inexpensive
> surgery to add or remove them).
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-- 
B.K. DeLong (K3GRN)
bkdelong at pobox.com
+1.617.797.8471

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkdelong    Work

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