Transhumanism is just the next step in technologically advanced life – are you opposed to people who use hearing aids or pacemakers? Improving quality of life by developing technology to sustain a fully functioning body isn’t stupid or pointless, it’s already happening and it’s saving people’s lives.

The argument does not convince me. It’s not as if having a life expectancy of years or decades is the limiting factor in my own inability to make long-range plans any further ahead than tomorrow’s pizza. And can you seriously tell us that the tripling in average life expectancy in the last 2000 years, between imperial Rome and now, has brought any corresponding increase in cultural foresight? I am imagining 5000 years of immediate gratification…

Maybe, but maybe not. Because you’re sort of comparing apples to oranges here. Average life expectancy may have tripled over the last 2,000 years. In fact, over a much shorter time period, I think, but that depends entirely on exactly what you’re measuring. But I believe the upper limit on lifespans is about the same or has increased only slightly. Most large towns in medieval Europe might have had one dodderer who made it to 80, compared to most extended families today. But today just like back then, we still aren’t seeing anyone live to 150. Even if people do live for the moment as much today as they did 2,000 years ago, that’s not too surprising because the hopes are the same even if the reasonable expectations have increased.

To put it another way, as a 23-year-old American today, I have a very good chance of making it past 75. A thousand years ago, a 23-year-old would already have beat the odds. But whether in 2006 or 1006, I’m not going to see my great-great-grandchildren, I’m not going to be around when a tree I plant today falls, the institutions I take for granted will (probably) outlast me regardless of what I do… and so on.

It’s not certain, of course. Hell, agelessness could make things even worse, if birth rates don’t drop proportionally. Endless war as population control instead of normal age and disease. But advances like that really would make a pretty big difference in lifestyles and/or ways of thinking.

It’s not the wild speculation I object to, that can be fun. It’s the people who are utopian about it all without considering the possible downsides, or avoid thinking about practical ways of handling problems in favor of waiting for something to come along and make it all better.

The argument does not convince me. It’s not as if having a life expectancy of years or decades is the limiting factor in my own inability to make long-range plans any further ahead than tomorrow’s pizza. And can you seriously tell us that the tripling in average life expectancy in the last 2000 years, between imperial Rome and now, has brought any corresponding increase in cultural foresight? I am imagining 5000 years of immediate gratification…

oh, and being able to say “resistance is futile” would be cool too but I’m flexable on that…

The average person didn’t notice the number of internet hosts going from 1,000 to 2,000. Going from 1M to 2M- the internet was ‘suddenly’ on many more people’s radars. When $1000 went from being 1/200th to 1/100th the cost of one computer- again, not too noticable. When $1000 goes from getting you 1 laptop to getting you 2 (or even from 5 to 10- the $100 computer project)- same trend, different effects.

Njorl -
Kurzweil promotes eating a high-veg, low sugar, low-fat (except the good fats) diet. He writes that without good eating habits (and exercise, not-smoking, and reducing stress, etc) a person isn’t going to live long enough to take advantage of newer medical technologies. i.e. Heaps of money won’t make up for eating saturated fats. Kurzweil is (according to at least one of the sadly,no writers) the leader of the group.

The only way I see this coming about is as the final triumph of consumerism. Make everyone want it, make it so expensive it takes essentially an eternal mortgage to pay for it, and you can enslave humanity forever! It won’t happen, but it would make a nice little black-humor sci-fi short story. I’m sure it’s been written, probably twice.

Our civilization here sucks. Why export it across time and space? The whole idea of eternal life revolts me. “To everything there is a season,” and so on.

Can’t I persuade you to have scissors for hands, and be programmed to sculpt shrubbery?

It can’t be denied that a lot of the people that are into this “movement” (a bad way of describing it) are sci-fi freaks. Much of this is theorizing about the future we are building, not about what the future should be.

The line between human and artificial is becoming blurred RIGHT NOW, and is likely to become only more blurred. The enthusiasm of people that want to hurry this along doesn’t change the fact that this is a trend that will continue, and something that should be of interest to us all, if only because it’s nice to know what the future may hold for us.

Test tube babies? Heart transplants? Artificial hearts? Dialysis machines? The Sims? All of that would have sounded very Frankensteinish a hundred years ago. Imagine going back in time to 1906 and trying to ask relatives to donate their dead son’s heart for a heart transplant. People would have thought it was ghoulish, unnatural, something only a sick mind could think of. That is still the reaction in much of Europe to requests for voluntary organ donorship.

Talking about the direction of technology is fun stuff, but it’s not silly. This puerile mocking reflects poorly on your own curiosity.

I call it “Utopiary”.

Yes, but Kurzweil explicitly says that he’s not using “singularity” in the mathematical sense. “Technological singularity” is kind of based on gravitational singularities concealed by event horizons: essentially, a point beyond which we lose all power to make predications.

Ditch the sophomoric, cartoonish comparisons with the Terminator and instead look at cochlear implants. Right there is a cybernetically enhanced organism, or cyborg.