Transhumanism in Sci-Fi

[Dr Roberts]

How come we see humans thousands and millions of years in the future and they are still PURELY BIOLOGICAL. Sure you got the odd robot arm but apart from that there are hardly any major Transhumans about. Why do you think this is?

[Rabid]

Maybe because, from a pure literary point of view, it is easier for people to identify themselves toward basic human beings than toward Posthuman Stargods ?

This is basically the problem : it's really hard for an author to portray transhuman characters, which, fundamentally, think and act differently than baseline humans.

[Dr Roberts]

And yet they still have people from other dimensions thinking the same way we do.

[Rabid]

Thank you for understanding what I meant. That's because it's hard for people -real people, those who write those books- to imagine how something could think differently from us, and to accurately portray it in a story in a coherent manner.

[Dr Roberts]

I did my point us why not have transhumans that think like we do now? Just like extra dimensional beings seem to.

[Rabid]

Because we already have such people appearing regularly in the literary genre you are talking about ? You know, like telepath, augmented people, the random super-soldier, assassins... People like that. These people are transhuman.

Transhuman doesn't mean "LOL! NANITES & ROBOT ARM!!1!", it means people with abilities outside of the scope of what a baseline human is able to achieve on its own [1]. And Science-Fiction is already full of such people. For example, you could argue that Jedis in the Star-Wars universe are transhumans. Or the telepaths of Babylon 5 (and it's even a plot-point). Or pretty much every superhero you can think of.


[1] : In fact, what I said here is not exact, in that a "transhuman", by definition, is just an intermediary state between "human" and "posthuman", however you define those two terms. It's just that "transhuman" has become a catch-all term nowadays.

[Number Theoretic]

Isn't the point or the difficulty of a god-like posthuman being (maybe emerged from one or several humans and machines) that it doesn't think like we do?

However, mind uploading is a typical trope of Transhumanism that you can find in quite some fictional works. Most visible and consequently played in Greg Egans "incandescence" but i also saw some flavors of this in Culture novels or books from Alastair Reynolds. And i'm sure there are more examples.

[Srelex]

We've got cyborgs, mind uploading, biological augmenting, and what have you in pretty much most major scifi franchises in some form of manner. It's just that not everyone is too fussed about that sort of thing, or just doesn't want to write about intelligences living as binary code going beepy-boop all day.

[Kingmaker]

If you specifically want to know why a lot of far future/space opera sci-fi doesn't have transhumanism of even the physical variety:
a) as already pointed out by others, a lot of it does.
b) most far future sci-fi is meant to be the past or present with rayguns, and transhumanism undermines that (or is believed to, anyway).

As an in-setting justification, non-medical augmentations are unlikely to be worth the cost and risk for the vast majority of people (super strength and reflexes being not terribly useful for the Spacetm Accountant).

Plus, there's a pretty massive of subset of SF that focuses almost exclusively on transhumans and posthumans and the consequences of introducing them into society.

[Guardsman Bass]

I could actually imagine a reluctance on the part of most humans to adopt mechanical enhancements that fundamentally change them away from their biological humanity. You could have a far-future setting where most of the human population basically consists of biological humans with genetic and/or medical modifications to make them effectively immortal, resistant to diseases, and without birth defects (with some mechanical enhancements due to loss of limb/eye/body capability).

I think that especially might be the case if your setting has fantastic virtual reality/simulations and telepresence technology. You could simulate almost any experience you want anyways.

[Serafina]

Physical augmentation could also simply be impractical for widespread application. Why would i need a strong cyberarm if i can instead use a forklift (or similar machine)? I won't need super-resilient bones if the vehicles i am using have good crash-protection and i am working in an office somewhere. I certainly won't need any fancy weapons installed in my body - i am a civilian after all, what would i use them for in our peaceful society?

Now mental augmentation could be much more useful, but messing with your own brain is a pretty scary prospect - especially if the technology is not that reliable. And again, why do i need to install a computer in my brain (or turn it into one) when i can just use a normal computer?


Yes, transhumanist elements are not always represented in fiction - but there are plenty of reasons for that, and plenty of explanations why an advanced society would not use them in any widespread manner.

[VarrusTheEthical]

I'd like to jump on the point Seratina just made, if I may.

One question about any kind of augmentation is would it be better than simply using a tool?

To clarify, does a person who has a computer built into there head that has all the functions of an iphone really have an advantage over a person who just has an iphone in there pocket? Would a cyborg with super-strong limbs be better than a normal person in an similarly strong exo-skeleton? Would an implanted weapon system really be better than a traditional small-arm? My guess is that the answer is no in most cases.

The fact is that (Though I hate the term) "baseline" humanity is actually pretty capable, and only needs access to tools to go overcome it's physical and mental limitations.

So to answer the OP, the apparent lack of big T Transhumanism in a lot of speculative future-fiction is because there is often no need for it.

[SpaceMarine93]

Well, there is the Manifold series by Stephan Baxter.

[Kingmaker]

One question about any kind of augmentation is would it be better than simply using a tool?

The point of actual transhumanism is not to duct-tape diverse extra appliances onto the human body. As you rightly point out, the ease of use of an implanted phone or computer does not really outweigh the hazards of the necessary surgery. Even if we assume Future Medical Technology eliminates the risk, the inconvenience of hardware upgrades would discourage the cast majority of users.

Now, imagine that instead of a smartphone, the doohickey stuck in your head is a device that allows to you to remotely access and control a number of peripherals with a thought, allows you to manually toggle your concentration on a given task, gives you a constant feed of information to do your job in The Future, enables you to process the flood of data you need to do your job in The Future, gives you quicker and better communication with your co-workers, and plays music.

Such a hypothetical augmentation is not reproducible by a manually operated external device.

The point is not really to make a better hunter-gatherer mammal. It's to make a creature better optimized for life in a technology saturated society. And to live forever. That too.

[Simon_Jester]

How come we see humans thousands and millions of years in the future and they are still PURELY BIOLOGICAL. Sure you got the odd robot arm but apart from that there are hardly any major Transhumans about. Why do you think this is?

What do you mean by "transhuman?" And, come to think of it, why do you capitalize the word?

Define your terms first, then ask why you don't see them around. Sometimes, having a clear definition of what a thing is will answer the question by itself: only a fool would ask "why don't we see more circular squares around?"

[lordofchange13]

Peter Hamilton's books tend to have a lot of Transhumanist quality in them. As the OP says this at least 1000 years in the future, if technology advanced even at half the rate it has over the last century then getting cybernetic limbs should be fairly simple.

[VarrusTheEthical]

The point is not really to make a better hunter-gatherer mammal. It's to make a creature better optimized for life in a technology saturated society. And to live forever. That too.

A good point. And perhaps I may be confusing big T Transhumanism with small t transhumanism.

I guess my main issue with transhumanism, is that ideologically, I disagree with the idea that the human "baseline" is something that should be replaced. Which is probably why I generally don't find a lot of transhumanist themed fiction like with Baxter's novels or Orion's arm appealing.

This is not to say that I disagree with notion of augmenting the human body to do a job better or live a longer and healthier life. I just disagree that such augmentations makes anyone who gets them "better" in a moral sense.

Also, the whole "live forever" thing is just too utopian for my taste.

[Tasoth]

Depending on how stringent your definition is, we, currently, are transhuman with the way we integrate technology into our lives. There also doesn't need to be a mechanical aspect to transhuman human's, as modifying the genome to remove medically recognized flaws and disease counts in the transhuman field.

Now a rant.

From my travels on the fiberoptic highway, I've come to see that the internet's Transhumanism is a fabled glory. It seems like many of the adherents are individuals who have issues with their bodies or their personalities, the kind of issues that push them towards living through the internet instead of in the meat. They think if they move their brains or upload themselves into a hard drive and place it in a mechanical body, all their woes will dry up. They will be reborn, the will be liked by others (both inside their Transhuman society and outside it among the normals) and all will be well. They don't take into account that keeping their brain in a jar will preserve all the deviant wiring in their neurons that create their flaws or realize that uploading your mind will just make a machine with your memories. But in the end, for them, Transhumanism is their 'Wait until I get my robot legs...'

Additionally, for crazy Transhumanism, in the something-awful goldmine on their forum, there is a 140 page thread where they stumble upon a cult dedicated to this idea and the insanity, sadness and horrors that come with it. If you have a lot of time to waste, it is an interesting read.

[lordofchange13]

Depending on how stringent your definition is, we, currently, are transhuman with the way we integrate technology into our lives. There also doesn't need to be a mechanical aspect to transhuman human's, as modifying the genome to remove medically recognized flaws and disease counts in the transhuman field.

Now a rant.

From my travels on the fiberoptic highway, I've come to see that the internet's Transhumanism is a fabled glory. It seems like many of the adherents are individuals who have issues with their bodies or their personalities, the kind of issues that push them towards living through the internet instead of in the meat. They think if they move their brains or upload themselves into a hard drive and place it in a mechanical body, all their woes will dry up. They will be reborn, the will be liked by others (both inside their Transhuman society and outside it among the normals) and all will be well. They don't take into account that keeping their brain in a jar will preserve all the deviant wiring in their neurons that create their flaws or realize that uploading your mind will just make a machine with your memories. But in the end, for them, Transhumanism is their 'Wait until I get my robot legs...'

Additionally, for crazy Transhumanism, in the something-awful goldmine on their forum, there is a 140 page thread where they stumble upon a cult dedicated to this idea and the insanity, sadness and horrors that come with it. If you have a lot of time to waste, it is an interesting read.

Your really only talking about the extreme Transhumanists. Most do not with to upload their brain in to the Web, or become robots, but simply wish to find technology that can enhance the human experiences and decrease suffering.

[Tasoth]

I concede I may be talking about the extremists, but it seems like they're the most vocal on the internet.

[lordofchange13]

I concede I may be talking about the extremists, but it seems like they're the most vocal on the internet.

Yes, that is true for all every organisation, religion, philosophy, etc.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

How come we see humans thousands and millions of years in the future and they are still PURELY BIOLOGICAL. Sure you got the odd robot arm but apart from that there are hardly any major Transhumans about. Why do you think this is?

Because a sufficiently 'advanced' transhuman would be a being completely alien to a baseline human. It's hard to get into that sort of mindset. From the standpoint of beings barely beyond the point of hitting each other over the head with rocks, it's also hard to visualize the sort of 'baseline' human who'd think it's a good idea to implant themselves with computers, or put themselves through some sort of cybernetic enhancement. We're still at the point where our self-image hasn't yet been divorced from our caveman directives, and the anthropocentric superstitions spawned by them.

You don't even need the "ZOMG full-mind upload onto teh Interwebs with waycool robot/cyborg bodies" transhumans to achieve creepy alienness. For example, if you took a baseline biological human being and cured them, through genetic engineering, of all the usual hereditary maladies; and made them biologically immortal (such that the only thing that kills them are accidents and malice,) this person would become quite alien to us; solely because he or she would have the expectation of living around 1000 - 2000 years, and would never suffer from the sorts of things that preoccupy us, and define who we are.

[Guardsman Bass]

I don't know of any good SF stories that actually have that as the premise: a society of biologically immortal, disease-free humans. The birth rate would probably be extremely low (since you could spread out any children over a period of centuries to millenia if you chose to), and every human being in a reasonably sized community would live in a gigantic web of social interactions and personal history with other people going back millenia that would color everything.

I remember Kim Stanley Robinson had one of his extremely long-lived characters in the Mars Trilogy make an interesting argument: that our reliance on impersonal, formal institutions is strengthened by our mortality and relatively short-lives. I wonder if a society of immortal beings would be more dependent on a gigantic set of informal norms and personal rules regarding human interaction (based upon millenia of interacting with the same people) than on a formal code of laws or the like.

[18-Till-I-Die]

I concede I may be talking about the extremists, but it seems like they're the most vocal on the internet.

Yes, that is true for all every organisation, religion, philosophy, etc.

Yeah but it's not really "extremists" though. I've been around a LOT of sci-fi web forums and the one thing nerds obsess over is this concept of "Transhumanism". It's some kind of halcyon age where everyone is immortal and beautiful and life is good and the technology TOTALLY isn't purely in the hands of the rich and powerful while they still slog through a life now ruled by merciless immortal cybergods. Because that's just silly.

Frankly the whole transhumanism thing is a joke to me by now. It's a childish masturbatory fantasy cooked up by people who use technology as a dick measuring contest, assuming if you have the most "stuff" clearly then those guys who laughed at you in high school will all feel really stupid about it. And really, all that is basically what it's about. There is, as pointed out, NO LOGICAL REASON otherwise.

Why go through all the bullshit to put some fancy technopathy machine in your brain when you can build a remote that does the same thing. A superman with superrobot limbs is no better than me in a powered exoskeleton. Implanted bluetooth is no better than a cell phone, save the microseconds it takes to pick it up, so why do it? Well of course, because it's not really about that is it, it's about measuring your cock based on how much "stuff" you have--the same reason why internet nerds have decided the humans in Avatar were the "good guys" even though they were genocidal assholes willing to condemn a species to extinction to make money: they have more "stuff", so clearly they're good guys.

Hell I have literally heard people argue Sauron was the good guy in LOTR because he used technology more. Yeah you know, that Sauron, the asshole who wanted to enslave the world in an eternal darkness, that guy. He's a patron of technology so clearly he's the good guy and the rural Hobbits are assholes. Yes, people said this, and people agreed with it. I've seen people write fanfics where the ultra-cool technowhiz bad guys win in about a dozen genres and series, from Avatar to District 9 to ID4, and don't even get me started on the crap that drips out of actual "posthuman" authors who overwhelm their works with a level of smug self-satisfaction that is almost mind blowing...don't believe me, go over to Orion's Arm if it still exists. No, not because it's BAD, because it's the least disagreeable example.

The really hilarious thing to me, is that we already HAVE a really deep, developed and long-running transhuman/posthuman type series: Warhammer 40,000.

Oh yeah, it's got everythng. Mind uploading, man-machine interfaces, cybernetics are commonplace, so are smart drugs and artificial organs, AIs are everywhere, posthuman supermen of five different flavors, incredible once-human space gods, omnipresent space travel and communication, massive genetic engineering...the whole nine yards. But no one ever talks about that, at least none of the transhuman wankers I've seen, because then they'd have to admit it's also a pretty accurate picture of what it'd look like: the rich have all the best "stuff" and powers, the poor live in city-sized cespools, and if you get out of line the posthuman stormtroopers of the Imperium will come down on you like a ton of bricks. It's the perfect transhuman fantasy, only it isn't perfect to live in, therefore it's not good enough.

(Ghetto edit: I honestly didn't realize how much of a rant this is until right now, but I stand by my assessment because I believe it's the correct one, but don't anyone think this is meant as an insult directed at you in particular it's just my opinion from years on the internet watching to nerds masturbate to cyborgs)

[lordofchange13]

I concede I may be talking about the extremists, but it seems like they're the most vocal on the internet.

Yes, that is true for all every organisation, religion, philosophy, etc.

The really hilarious thing to me, is that we already HAVE a really deep, developed and long-running transhuman/posthuman type series: Warhammer 40,000.

Oh yeah, it's got everythng. Mind uploading, man-machine interfaces, cybernetics are commonplace, so are smart drugs and artificial organs, AIs are everywhere, posthuman supermen of five different flavors, incredible once-human space gods, omnipresent space travel and communication, massive genetic engineering...the whole nine yards. But no one ever talks about that, at least none of the transhuman wankers I've seen, because then they'd have to admit it's also a pretty accurate picture of what it'd look like: the rich have all the best "stuff" and powers, the poor live in city-sized cespools, and if you get out of line the posthuman stormtroopers of the Imperium will come down on you like a ton of bricks. It's the perfect transhuman fantasy, only it isn't perfect to live in, therefore it's not good enough.

(Ghetto edit: I honestly didn't realize how much of a rant this is until right now, but I stand by my assessment because I believe it's the correct one, but don't anyone think this is meant as an insult directed at you in particular it's just my opinion from years on the internet watching to nerds masturbate to cyborgs)

Your points are ture exsept for 2 things: Using more tecchnology does not make you the good guy it just makes you the smarter guy, second The Imperium HAD that technology, it was called the dark age, and has since lost most of it.