transhumanist fears

To clarify: this has nothing 
to do with current trans
-gender clash, stir and
social upheaval. Trans

-humanists are the crowd 
that looks forward in wonder
and anticipation to human 
upgrades, via tech. Us 

merging with it, with 
what wonders become 
available and compatible. 

Little apps and adaptations, 
to begin with - with big 
effects for the individual!
Commonly cited are small
things like hookups to access
online lookups directly from
one's brain. All facts of humanity

at one's mental fingertips.

Mathematics apps making
computation easy and error-free.
Why not logical deduction/induction
apps as well? Fallacy free clean conclusions
inevitably reached much faster
and surer
than by the unaided mind. Transhumanists
tout the incredible boost in instantaneous

knowledge 
and 
functional intelligence
such plug-ins could bring.

They say

the adaptive advantages will be
too strong for humanity as a whole
to hold out. No conflict would be
necessary, no force or violence.
People will see the competitive 
edge to jack in and thrive, 

versus the alternative: just 
to opt-out and fall behind.
Lose the evolutionary race
within one or two generations.
Unaugmented humanity would
be gone, or sunk to insignificance 
within a handful of decades, tops

and it would all be opt-in, 
or all of anyone who wants 
to matter, after that. Humanity
as a whole would be doing so well
the pockets and populations of opt-outs
could be taken care of in a charity
way afterwards, like dependent pets.

Anyway, at the risk of being 
a Luddite, I wonder if they've really
thought this first part through. 

What it's going to be like 
for the early adopters. The 
beta-testers, the live-fire
living experimenters
and: experiment.  

I don't worry about firewalls,
so much. Not conjuring viruses 
corrupting the mind in one sick 
swipe, awful hard to debug - although
it does seem a possibility. Or purpose
-designed invasive apps to control

masses of us in tiny, undetectably 
subtle ways that add up huge for 
someone's agenda in the aggregate
- that old, old dream of MC ULTRA
and other conspiracy DJs, finally
given an opening. A plausible 
vector. No, I don't worry so much
about that. 

I'm thinking of the mind 

itself. I wonder what, besides bonus 
information quick, will the effect be 
from inside one's conscious experience
and one's 
ability to tell. 

I mean: to a very encompassing extent,
your mind IS you. Ask anyone who's
ever been mentally ill, or out of their 
mind on drugs, or had anything like
a panic attack how easy or even
possible it is to hold 

oneself 

out of it. 

Ask a paranoiac who has it bad 
how easy it is to throw off an 
impression of reality, once 
grasped and held as real

The mind is capable of holding 
quite stiff and strong to what once 
is grasped as real. 

It gets in. 

And once in, it becomes 
baseline. Reality, duh. 
What we all calculate 
and figure from. 

I don't think getting out of it 
will be as simple as sliding 
a toggle switch to off. 

Worst case, one's judgment adrift 
and anchored within all this - the 
mind, and what's encompassed 
by it - might become completely 
compromised purely as a matter 
of the change in the quality 
of experience. We might
not 
even
be able to tell 

whether this is or isn't 
a poem. 

I'm talking worst-case here, 
but it's not hard to imagine 
even worse. Purely to solidify 
anyone's inputs, let me assure you:

it is. 

A poem