Well I happened to be pointed towards an article with interesting implications earlier. You can read it here. What is interesting about this is that if it is possible to do emergency surgery on a fetus, return it to the womb, and then have it be born later, it means that if techniques can be perfected it would be possible to make enhancement modifications to a fetus and return it to the womb. I guess that I’m talking about transhumanism/human enhancement here. Until now I had assumed that to create enhanced children you would have to do just that in a synthetic environment, or you would have to transfer a fetus to an artificial environment for the enhancement and leave it there. And I have indeed seen fiction that had such a procedure (remove fetus and leave it out) before (yeah I’m just talking about gundam seed). But perhaps this does not have to be the case. It does not seem to me like there would necessarily be great advantages to doing so from the enhancement side, but any given creature is more likely to survive in its natural environment and of course for the fetus that means the womb.
I would be a little interested in hearing more about surgeries of this kind but it is not my area of interest so I will not seek anything out. I will say quickly about transhumanism that it usually strikes me that those who are its greatest advocates are those who feel the most socially (especially people who are autistic) and/or physically deficient. And as a result they envision either being transformed into perfection themselves or a race of near perfect beings as a following generation. But it occurred to me lately that it would be easier to induce specific “flaws” that seem to lead to other benefits than to basically try and recreate humanity, or even to isolate and correct potential flaws. Actually the thing I was thinking about was intentionally creating children that have “high functioning autism” known commonly as “asperger’s syndrome” in the hopes of creating a genius generation. This thought came about because I used to discuss transhumanism with a variety of people online who identified themselves as being “aspies” and it seemed like each of them were obsessed with it to varying degrees. I often thought that almost any of these people had the intelligence to achieve such ends but they had totally lost sight of the fact that they were geniuses now in the midst of their feelings of isolation.
It isn’t easy being different, and it might be worse when you are different in ways that you will not be rewarded for socially. For example a lot of professional athletes (mostly distended looking basketball players) actually have freakish physiques in some ways and are known for not being the smartest people in the world. But because professional sports are a worldwide obsession they are rewarded and idolized for these differences instead of being penalized. Not so for a person who might have a 140+ IQ but also has Asperger’s syndrome. At best they can possibly hope for academic renown or professional esteem among colleagues, but they are very unlikely to become renowned and beloved within their country let alone the world.
Well allegedly the incidence rate of autism keeps increasing yearly but whether it’s genetic, which would imply that it is an evolutionary trait (less emphasis on the physical and social, more emphasis on the intellectual, not that people with autism are necessarily deficient physically), or environmental (polution, vaccination, stress on the mother during pregnancy, etc.) which would imply that it’s some sort of unnatural mutation is unknown. I personally suspect a combination, maybe genetic mutation was caused by something people did but now that the trait is there it is within the population. Hell who knows maybe even depression is an evolutionary trait for population control…
But back to what I was saying, with the decline of physical requirements on daily life it makes more sense to head in an intellectual direction. And it occurs to me that it would be a lot easier to figure out how to induce a trade-off condition like asperger’s and possibly even more beneficial in the long run. Of course what I’m talking about it is a perversion of nature and a giant human rights violation.
So let’s be clear on something, I am not advocating this at all. This is merely my impression from various information that I have gleaned over the years. Personally I think that if the human race really will (re)turn to sludge without transhumanism that is fine. I actually do think that the future is very dark for living beings in the world and it is all each of our faults. So it is only right that after making such colossal mistakes and not uniting to change anything that we would have to pay the price. What that is remains to be seen. I would actually prefer to live until the end of humanity if at all possible but if I do not it won’t exactly be a regret.
I will let you judge for yourself whether these thoughts are delusional, cynical, anxious, or just pessimistic.
The Sky Before Dawn 