Happy transhumanist awareness day!
Today is transhumanist awareness day* and let me start by saying proudly, I’m a transhumanist. People mean a lot of different things by “transhumanism”, so I want to say a little about what this means to me.
I like to augment my natural abilities with technology to fundamentally change what I can do. This means all the boring things, like transcontinental flights, pocket supercomputers, and wearable thermoregulation augmentation. But also, it means I love to exchange boring walking and running for more interesting kinds of locomotion.
Feet are okay. They get the job done, and I appreciate how feet have carried humans for millions of years. However, with today’s technology, we can do far better than vanilla feet. Why have one general purpose way of stomping about when you can embrace EXTREME SPECIALIZATION. You can exchange your pathetic shoes for WHEELS or SKIS or SPRINGS!! Okay, I haven’t actually tried attaching springs to my legs (yet), but those other two are extraordinary!
When you put on a pair of inline skates, you’re not riding a wheeled thing, you are becoming a wheeled thing. You learn to flow across concrete, gliding across the pavement like you were designed for this purpose. You can leave your crude shuffling behind and become something faster and more graceful.
After you’re done skating you can put on your shoes again. Transhumanism is all about optionality. You put on your shoes, get in your car(!), and drive upwards until you hit snow. Then you scan your pocket supercomputer, put an RFID card in your pocket, and hop on a chair that lifts you through the air to the top of a steep, snow covered mountain.
Then the real fun begins. From your legs extend one or two long flat surfaces. These are your snow travel modules. You can slide down the smooth surface of the mountain at 40 miles per hour like an insane person, because you are no longer human, you are something more. The very snow under your skis has been smoothed by a giant machine, optimized for your thrilling enjoyment. If you’ve spent enough time on the snow, you can feel edges engage with the snow. They are a part of you, and you feel them proprioceptively as you lean into turns and propel yourself one way then the other.
You’re a master of the mountain in a way your ancestors could never dream of. To them your present location would be a barren deathscape, but to you it is an alien paradise. You are something that has never existed before on this planet. A creature adapted for tramendous speed and agility atop the frozen slopes, with slick hard planks extending from your legs, providing you with stability and control and floatation across a variety of different snow conditions.
So yeah. I’m a transhumanist, baby. I’m so happy I get to live in this era of incredible opportunity. I hope we can take it way further. To expand these opportunities to everyone on earth. Wheels for every foot! Skis for every leg! And that’s just the beginning. Wings sound pretty cool. I also hear jet packs are about to be in. Let’s see where we can take this!
*according to me, right now