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Humanism and the Inhumanity of Transhumanism (anarchistnews.org)

submitted 6 days ago by technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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There is a—much worse—far right version of transhumanism. It has been promoted by a sector of the capitalist class. This is the Silicon Valley “tech bros,” leaders of the “billionaire class,” and its well-paid minions.

In this vision, we will have nannites in our blood and computers surgically placed in our heads, so we can take orders from the Master Computer. A Marxist economist explains, “Transhumanism asserts that humans can transcend existing biological limitations with the aid of technology to achieve indefinitely long life-spans and augmented cognitive abilities….AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] [is] generating such rapid and unprecedented technological advances that there will be a fundamental rupture in human history….Humans will eventually upload their consciousness to robots, creating self-improving super beings that will, in great numbers, establish themselves throughout the universe.” (Hart-Landsberg 2026; p. 115)

This is an image of totally alienated humans, with machines like people and people turned into machines. It imagines the abolition of the working class. This might be a humorous caricature of modern capitalism—or an imaginative piece of science fiction—if leading billionaires did not take it so seriously.

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[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They do. You have a little brain that makes your legs go. A doctor demonstrates this by hitting your knee with a little hammer.

That's called a somatic reflex. It doesn't function on its own and requires external input to do anything (be it a brain or a small mallet). In the case of your knees, it contains a nerve sensor that sends a signal to your spinal cord, which responds with a signal to the motor neurons in your leg muscles. It's not doing that action independent of your brain, and people with paralysis in their legs do not have this reaction.

There is. We can annihilate everything that you would consider "you", and that brain would still handle all communication between your organs and extremities.

Still a singular brain, which was my point. The "self" isn't relevant.

All of that is handled by numerous nested information processing networks, each of which can function completely on their own so long as the conditions for their survival (oxygen, sugar, etc) are met.

Still not analogous to AI. A bunch of sensor nerves that still communicate back to the central brain that fire synapses in the brain is not analogous to AI matrices. The mechanisms that make up our cognition and reactions are deterministic, whereas AI logic is pseudorandom. It's why you can ask an AI a question multiple times and get a different answer each time. It's why AI has a hallucination problem.

Also, just because you could hypothetically keep a hand and its nerves alive doesn't mean it will become Thing from The Adams Family. The nerves there will not become brains, and even if the sensory neurons continue working, they won't be sending any information to the motor neurons in the fingers. They are wholly dependent upon the central brain, not at all like a bunch of standalone AI systems working in concert.

[–] Nouvellalia@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

This whole idea of a central computer style brain hooked into dumb synapses is very outdated. There is a wealth of information on this subject that has been developed over the last three decades if you want to study the science.

It doesn't function on its own and requires external input to do anything

Are you under the impression that your brain would have done anything of note if it never received external input? Without external input your brain would have produced nothing more than static, to the point that your organs would have eventually shut down.

Still a singular brain, which was my point. The "self" isn't relevant.

I think maybe we're hitting upon a terminology mismatch. There is one thing called a "brain". I agree.

This brain is made up of many smaller, independent, information processing subsystems. This is more analogous to "a bunch of autoregressive transformers snooshed together" than it is analogous to "a single system for processing all information".

Any system that seeks to recreate human cognition will have to do so with "a bunch of independent systems for processing information, squished together", and not "a single master program, like we thought in the 1800s".