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Erik Richardson

Teacher, Richardson Ideaworks, Inc.

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Aren't transhumanists committing the Jurassic Park fallacy?

Given that even the smallest disruption or perturbation in a complex system can be amplified, and given that there are still so many important aspects of the mind-body interaction in human medicine, it seems like moving forward with the technological enhancement of human beings—ranging from putting computers inside us to putting us inside computers—is to court the same kind of disasters we always get when we tinker with things we don't yet understand.

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Topics: biotechnology chaos theory singularity transhuman
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    Lace Nguyen 100+

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    May 8 2011: I think the original point is whether technology will outrun our wisdom, and what would happen then. Scientists are too blinded by how to create generations of transhumanists, but failed to see how that society, full of gaps - including the modern 'genetic gap' - would function. Who's in charge? The problem is first, the brave new world undermines society's sense of-value, when talents, intelligence and creativity are not acquired by self-training, but the mass are not Delta and we're not conditioned to accept that disparity, which threatens social structure. Back to Richardson's point, this scary future will not happen if we don't go that fast in creating cyborgs but upgrade the general standards of human beings first. Second, while accelerating evolution, we are building a society without history, without the trials-and-errs of its own, whose collapse would be disastrous. By compressing the course of evolution into a handful of years, I doubt, we are jumping out of the current equipoise.

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