The Other Road

For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down. — Hermann Hesse, Demian Despite having spent most of my life marinating in transhumanist ideas, I never cared about AI. Because I’m a classical transhumanist: I want to use technology to change myself, so that I can do more. Because I, personally, want to learn and think and act, and not have a machine learn and think and act on my behalf. And in this worldview, AI is not interesting, except as a stopgap technology to unlock the transhumanism tech tree faster (but of course, technology has plans of its own). Now, the trajectory of technology has shaken out such that we’re closer to AGI than to transhumanism. But, realizability aside, I find it surprising and demoralizing that the “AGI future” seems to be much more popular than the “transhuman future” (more clearly: transhuman, but human-descended). I thought “become as the gods” would be more attractive…