I should also mention, in passing, the option of a non-utopian transhumanism, something that is far more common than my discussion so far would mention.
This is worth more attention, I think. Look back at the archaeological record and it comes out that phase changes in human lifestyles are often successful for decidedly non-utopian reasons. Skeletons from before the Neolithic Revolution, for example, are taller (a common proxy for nutritional quality) and older at death than those from after; as best we can tell, it looks like early agriculture led to a decline in quality of life. (Neither of these proxies consistently made up the lost ground until the 20th century, although life expectancy caught up somewhere in the Middle Ages if infant mortality is factored out.) Agriculture succeeded anyway because it allowed much higher population densities, pushing the older hunter-gatherer societies to the margins.
There’s no anthropological consensus on the causes of the Neolithic Revolution, but it’s very unlikely that the first Fertile Crescent tribesmen to domesticate grains did so with eight thousand years of labor and disease in mind. The analogy to transhumanism is fairly straightforward. I don’t think we can usefully proclaim any specific outcome (like Robin Hanson’s ems, for example) to be historically inevitable, and I certainly don’t think the argument’s strong enough to support a general precautionary principle (quality-of-life proxies since the Neolithic have largely trended upward, bar a few blips, and we can probably attribute most of that to improved technology). But if you’re looking for something to temper utopian hope, you could do worse.
This is worth more attention, I think. Look back at the archaeological record and it comes out that phase changes in human lifestyles are often successful for decidedly non-utopian reasons. Skeletons from before the Neolithic Revolution, for example, are taller (a common proxy for nutritional quality) and older at death than those from after; as best we can tell, it looks like early agriculture led to a decline in quality of life. (Neither of these proxies consistently made up the lost ground until the 20th century, although life expectancy caught up somewhere in the Middle Ages if infant mortality is factored out.) Agriculture succeeded anyway because it allowed much higher population densities, pushing the older hunter-gatherer societies to the margins.
There’s no anthropological consensus on the causes of the Neolithic Revolution, but it’s very unlikely that the first Fertile Crescent tribesmen to domesticate grains did so with eight thousand years of labor and disease in mind. The analogy to transhumanism is fairly straightforward. I don’t think we can usefully proclaim any specific outcome (like Robin Hanson’s ems, for example) to be historically inevitable, and I certainly don’t think the argument’s strong enough to support a general precautionary principle (quality-of-life proxies since the Neolithic have largely trended upward, bar a few blips, and we can probably attribute most of that to improved technology). But if you’re looking for something to temper utopian hope, you could do worse.