Technology can be used to slice through certain social and humanitarian problems like a hot knife through butter. Read about oral rehydration salts. This cheap solution eliminates the life-threatening dehydrating effects of diarrhea when water alone isn’t enough. You can talk about corruption in African governments all day long, but when humanitarian agencies actually deliver this physical substance to people suffering from diarrhea, it is life-saving.

Oral rehydration salts are being deployed now. What about the near future? Everyone in Africa needs a self-replication capable fabber based something like the RepRap project. This could be done in five years, if humanitarian organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put a tiny portion of their budget towards realizing it. But I’m not seeing it. Self-replicating factories are the path to dirt cheap products for everyone, not just the developing countries but the developed countries as well. Leaders are lacking the vision to push towards solutions that automagnify even when we stop writing the checks.

In the longer-term future, we need to think about reprogramming human motivations themselves. Imagine a drug or brain implant that, when administered, causes people to enjoy cooperation more and work harder to resolve conflict, without any negative side effects whatsoever. (Or imagine some other cognitive modification agent, if cooperation and resolving conflict bothers you.) MDMA is already part of the way there, albeit with unwanted side effects. These side effects don’t fundamentally reflect any “hubris mechanism” on the part of the universe, but merely our insufficiently advanced science and technology. If politicians would realize that technology actually has the potential to improve human nature for the better, they would invest billions in psychopharmacology and cybernetics. This is not happening today, but it’s only a matter of time. I want to see it happen sooner rather than later.

Our efforts to hypnotize ourselves into being better people can only go so far. Every time a new baby is born, he or she reflects our 100,000 year old genome. It’s like starting from scratch all over again, with every generation. Why can’t we take permanent steps forward, by tweaking the genetics of babies before they are even born? It’s not eugenics, because it’s not based on arranged marriage, and no one has to be oppressed to make it happen. It can be entirely voluntary. Even if germline genetic engineering is ruled unethical, gene therapy will allow deep modifications to adults who are legally able to make their own decisions. If gene therapy doesn’t work, there will be implants… and I could keep going, listing numerous alternative paths.

That’s the problem with naysayers to the transhumanist vision: if one particular path is too “radical” or culturally objectionable for the mainstream to accept, then it will be pursued in niche environments, and if the results are beneficial, the mainstream opinion will change quickly. We have no reason to assume that evolution placed humanity at a global optima. Experimentation and intervention will allow us to seek out morphological configurations that even the greatest skeptic will see as obviously beneficial. For every skeptic Y, there is a biological modification to the body or brain X that they would clamor for. This will help get the wheels greased and turning for large-scale self-directed modification of the human species as a whole.

This is just a matter of time. The question is “when”, not “if”. Some transhumanists would like to think that biological self-modification could be delayed indefinitely or outlawed globally, but I don’t think this is very realistic. Maybe they are just looking for an excuse to acquire supporters.