Transhumanism vs Solution for Human Deficits

The Transhumanism movement advocates the use of technology to allow humans to evolve from human to transhuman, or posthuman.

Companies such as Primo Posthuman have been planning since the turn of the century to create smart skin that can allow humans to become H+, or better than human.

Their website highlights their plan to allow us to be super human, and highlights various parts of the human skeleton that could be enhanced using present and future technologies.

They quote the histories of our eyesight, and how we have moved on since magnifying glasses, to basic glasses, to contact lenses, cataract removal, corneal sculpting to the use of silicon retinal implants in 1999. They use this history to assume there has to be a forward trend that includes total bionic eyes to see 'better than human'.

The company sites the history of human hearing from technological advancements like speaking tubes in the 1700's, ear trumpets in the 1800's to hearing aids in the 1900's, cochlear bionic implants in the 1960's to digital signal processing in 1984. Again, they assume we must continue this trend and completely replace our 'sub-standard' human ears with more advanced, finely tuned digital frequency hearing systems allowing much improved 'parabolic' hearing.

We apparently need to have total skin augmentation because our history has shown the use of dyes, tatoos, piercings, and skin tissue was the first to be engineered and grafted. Therefore according to the transhumanists, we must completely replace our human skin with synthetic active skin, that does not require the need of clothing. It will be multi textured, and can change its colour, just like 'real' skin!!

They even go so far as to suggest that we require a spinal upgrade by using a
1,000,000 terabit/sec optical backbone (one billion times more capacity than a human spinal cord). We will require an in vivo fibre optics communication back bone to allow us to 'hear our body speaking'.

Due to the fact that at some stage in our history the human race shrunk down to only 10,000 separate blood lines, we have a limited gene pool, and therefore suffer to this day from DNA mutations, the most common being, myopia (short-sightedness), and as humans we do suffer from blindness, deafness, and disablilities. These are problems that prevent people experiencing full human functionality. These are the areas that I believe technology can help. Those of us who wear glasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, pace makers, cochlear implants are not posthuman, we are repairing the faults of mutated DNA.

The difference between this argument for Solutions for Human Deficits vs Transhumanism needs establishing. On one hand you are making yourself more human, if you like, and the other is making you more artificial, more robot.

The transhumanist movement will continue unabaited with their ideological future of immortality, but as human beings we need to be very careful that we do not stray too far from our natural path. Yes, we need to evolve and we will, but we do not need technology to do this, just patience.