Canadian bioethicist and transhumanist George Dvorsky embraced it as a religion but he sees public interest waning amid growing criticism of Big Tech’s side effects:
Dvorsky offers some suggestions as to why the transhumanist movement has stalled: One is that, what with wearables and virtual reality, we are living in a partly transhuman environment now. Possibly, but the public isn’t clamoring for any more of it. In fact, as he admits, the public is having second thoughts. A growing chorus suggests, for example, that social media be off limits to teens for the same reasons as alcohol and firearms are. There are also increasingly pointed questions around social media suicides. Mark Zuckerberg’s executives are deserting his virtual universe. And the AI Church has collapsed in a scandal. Even enthusiast PJ Manney thinks transhumanism “could use an upgrade.”
Here’s a possibility Dvorsky doesn’t consider. This morning, Eric Holloway wrote about the fundamental deficit in artificial neural networks (ANNs), compared to human thinking: Neural networks get stymied by complex decisions due to the very processes that enable them to make any decisions at all. Bigger networks won’t fix that.
News, “Epitaph for transhumanism: But it’s far from dead!, advocate says ” at Mind Matters News (August 8, 2022)
Takehome: The waning of interest in transhumanism may be related to a growing awareness of the fundamental limits of artificial intelligence.
You may also wish to read: John Lennox: Transhumanism is not a new idea. In his just-published book, 2084, Oxford mathematician John Lennox points out that, in the 20th century, both the Communists and the Nazis had attempted transhumanist projects. The likely outcome of all transhumanist attempts to re-engineer humanity will be the extinction of humanity.