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14 lines
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layout: post
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title: Thoughts on the Transhuman revolution
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date: '2009-07-03T05:56:00.000-04:00'
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author: Anna Wiggins
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tags:
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- transhumanism
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- Technology
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modified_time: '2013-10-22T11:19:50.602-04:00'
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blogger_id: tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209116010564764361.post-898649080911079486
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blogger_orig_url: http://www.stringofbits.net/2009/07/thoughts-on-transhuman-revolution.html
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---
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I've been reading a lot of near-future science fiction and speculative nonfiction lately, and as a result I've been contemplating the idea of transhumanism and what it means for us as a species and a culture. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism">Transhumanism</a> is decently defined by wikipedia, and has been explored in fiction by <a href="http://www.accelerando.org/">Charles Stross</a>, <a href="http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=2993">Cory Doctorow</a>, and others. It has been discussed extensively in the non-fiction sphere as well: <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=2">Ray Kurtzweil</a> is probably the most well-known thinker discussing the topic. However, while Kurtzweil discusses the possibilities of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI">AI consciousness</a> and the emergence of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">singularity</a>, I am more interested in transhumanism in this article.<br/><a name='more'></a><br/><h3>Defining Transhumanism</h3><br/>For semantic clarity, I'm going to define what I mean by transhuman, because my definition and connotations may differ from yours.<br/><br/>A 'transhuman' is someone who augments reality with technology at a constant and unconscious on nearly unconscious level. The key concept here is that transhumans use technology to augment reality. This helps avoid the temptation to define any tool-user as a transhuman; a primitive man with a spear is more capable at hunting than a primitive man with his bare hands. A person driving a car is more mobile than a person walking. A person who watches a movie while browsing <a href="http://imdb.com">IMDB</a> on their iPhone knows more about the movie than someone watching it passively (though the passive viewer may well be enjoying the movie more). By our definition, the iPhone user comes close to transhumanism. We might call her a proto-transhuman. However, these is still significant effort involved; she must look away from the movie and focus on her iPhone to search IMDB.<br/><br/>So, where are we now? Some people (early-adopting geeks, for example), already consider quick access to information to be something like an extra limb; as one of those affected with this feeling, I can vouch for it. Are we transhuman or not? Again, we're on the way there, but we haven't yet achieved the fluidity of control and automation needed yet.<br/><br/>As for where we're going next, let's begin by discussing how we got where we are.<br/><br/><h3>The Evolution of Information Access</h3><br/>For the majority of human history, access to information has been difficult. Even after the invention of the printing press, one had to have either a personal library or access to a public library. Information could be obtained, but not in a timely manner; poring over books was the purview of academia. And even academics could only access this information when they were actually at their libraries.<br/><br/>As a result, the human brain has been the only way to store a significant amount of information for quick retrieval. As a storage device, the brain is not that great; storing something permanently requires multiple writes (our recall of a fact is better the more times we have heard it). It can be finicky at retrieving information; everyone who has ever had something 'on the tip of their tongue' can attest to that.<br/><br/>The next revolution in storage was electronic storage; in other words, computers. Of course, early computers couldn't hold a ton of information, but more importantly; that information was still stuck in one location. To look up a fact on a computer, you had to physically travel to the computer with the information on it (or to a terminal connected to that computer; typically, these needed to be pretty close to the mainframe).<br/><h4>Enter the Internet</h4><br/>And here we come to the revolution; the Internet allows us to access virtually any piece of information from any computer in the world. And wi
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