The most anti-transhumanist popular SF | Page 2 …

Star Trek and Dune came out in the late 1960s. Transhumanism, as we think of it in a modern sense of a utopian ideology, only really get real traction in the 1980s or thereabouts.

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We are only now even starting to scratch the surface of what might even reasonably be considered transhumanism with our personal data networks and the very beginnings of even rudimentary MMI technology being released to the public.

None of the Star Trek series, for example, were released by the time that transhumanism 'became a thing', if it even has now. When Star Trek was big, people tied- and still do, in many respects- genetic engineering to eugenics and the Nazis; look at the debate going on over, say, sex-selective abortion.

In the respect that transhumanism has made it big in Sci-Fi, I think that was probably a product of the information revolution in the late 80s and early 90s. To that end, however, I think that its proponents vastly underrated the difficulties of creating a useful MMI and vastly overrated the potential utility of practical mechanical augmentation, while underrating the growth patterns and effects of our information networking society. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in 15-20 years we've passed what originally was conceptualized as transhumanism by, in many ways, simply due to a different understanding of technological growth patterns. Just like how sci-fi from the early 20th century shows colonies on the moon, humanoid robots, and video phones but no email.

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The most anti-transhumanist popular SF | Page 2 ...

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