Top ten transhumanist technologies

RETRIEVED: 03/01/2017
SOURCE LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION


Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn’t be expensive — indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over.

Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. We realize that the longer you look forward, the more uncertain the predictions get, but one thing is quite certain: if a technology is physically possible and obviously useful, human (or transhuman!) ingenuity will see to it that it gets built eventually.

As we gain ever greater control over the atomic structure of matter, our technological goals become increasingly ambitious, and their payoffs more and more generous. Sometimes new technologies even make us happier in a long-lasting way: the Internet would be a prime example. In the following list I take a look at what I consider the top ten transhumanist technologies.

The List

10. Cryonics
9. Virtual Reality
8. Gene Therapy/RNA Interference
7. Space Colonization
6. Cybernetics
5. Autonomous Self-Replicating Robotics
4. Molecular Manufacturing
3. Megascale Engineering
2. Mind Uploading
1. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

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