Transhumanism

Finishing the second draft of my story and considering a few things. Memory is like a river and transhumanism comes at a cost. Seem like two very different ideas. If you upgrade or more than likely are upgraded by someone else who has vested interests in what you will become then that river of memory can be altered, can become about the collective, the merged, the best of something or many someones. That keeps costs down. No more mess ups in the workplace. We talk about the rise of eugenics through DNA sequencing but the real threat in eugenics is if we believe science will lift us into a new realm beyond cyborgs. We fail to see the dangers of AI merged people which is the next logical step after merging with the machine. Remember that a computer is a commodity. An AI is a commodity. It is owned and because it has no body it has no rights. It is not bound by the laws we have constructed. If we merge, if we become human+ (an awful term that somehow again makes me think of eugenics) then we too fall down the rabbit hole. You will be owned. You will be just like your mobile phone which you alter to benefit you but the real power still lies with those who own the operating software. They can do what they want to those who embrace this more than likely path in transhumanism in the name of scientific exploration. Going out into space then memory banks have limited sizes and your brain is large, so is your memory, so edit, fuse, merge and make human+. This is not dystopia. This is business and if you dump your body you become a commodity, if you plug and play your body, those plugs in are owned by someone else no matter how much they cost you.

Even your false hip has a warranty and is owned by the company that made it. No one owns their mobile phone because you can’t. It would mean you would have to own the network, own the software, own the mines for the metals, the factories and the workers. Transhumanism in SF is worrying because it is often seen as a future in which we could explore the stars, and it is likely that is how we will do it but remember all travel costs. Mass exploration, mass emigration or enforced relocation is nothing new and it is expensive, you need to send out a lot to recoup costs or hope that you find some damn gold at the end of that rainbow. Transhumanists are setting themselves up to become the prisoners on the way to Botany Bay, to be a new penal system owned by the person who planted their flag there first. That could be the truth of going to Mars or Europa or even further out into the cosmos. Transhumanists become the new slaves in the hold on the way to the West Indies out by Betelgeuse. For me I have already seen it, how we treat those whose bodies are deemed by society to be worthless, it comes back to my disability and how many judge it and how our government has judged it in such a way that many have died because of it. When you have a balance sheet you measure worth and when you are a business doing that you talk about units and profits. You are judged. Transhumanism is already very much here and we will carry our prejudices over into it, and for that reason we will alter not just our bodies but merge our memories with others to become a collective and this will not be our choice. It will be the choice of those who own the software to meet market demands and our children or great-great-great-great grandchildren will be okay with that because you have no body, so legally you are a product.