I was never really happy with the politics of some of the prominent people in transhumanism (In short, I am not a Libertarian.), but now there appears to be a new ideological stripe emerging in the movement thanks, in part, to James Hughes.
I guess the only problem I have with Democratic Transhumanism is that it still has strong utopian feeling in it. This worries me because, this sets us up for a big disappointment when the new technology turns out not to cure everything we thought it would. Remember all the utopian thinking about the Internet in the late Eighties and early Ninties? Or nuclear energy? Or the computer?
I guess my position is that of a tranhuman realist. I believe that all this utterly plastic technology will arrive, probably sooner than we expect, that will allow us to radically alter our biology, but I don’t believe this will result in utopia or dystopia. Uexpected good things will happen and unexpected bad things will happen, the only thing that is certain is that things will change. Some of us will be exchanging the agony of the human condition for the agony of the post-human condition. The universe may be meaningless, but at least it’s interesting.