I Have a Philosophy to Sell You.
When selling a product, it's useful to do two things: flatter the audience, and convince them that they need what you're selling.
Transhumanism is a hard sell because it is neither flattering to humanity nor needed by everyone. Here I mean transhumanism in the sense of wanting to eventually modify oneself substantially rather than just considering the issues abstractly.
Transhumanism is not flattering to humanity because its whole point is that humanity isn't the be-all, end-all of existence. Not the end of the road. This contradicts thousands of years of Homo sapiens-obsessed, Homo sapiens-centric theological and social teachings and habits. This obviously can marginalize transhumanism: how can you convince someone that they should want to change when they identify humanness with the very foundation of their being?
Two: it's not imminently necessary to modify our brains and bodies. (Unless we want to live longer than a century or so, and many people don't.) Human existence isn't so terrible, at least not if you live in a developed country, where things are pretty damn good by ancestral standards. A friend of mine argues that daily life now is probably at least half as good as human life can possibly be, in terms of subjective happiness, even given superabundance. I'm not entirely sure about that, but the fact that it's even plausible demonstrates that radical expansion of our technological powers isn't the first thing that comes to mind as necessary to most folks. They identify it with only incremental improvements to human happiness.
The real benefits would derive, I think, from throwing out the whole Darwinian structure of pain and pleasure tied to ancestral correlates of fitness and replacing it with something more reasonable and customized to the needs and desires of the user. But communicating this radical possibility is substantially more difficult than focusing on the foothills of self-modification -- prosthetics, psychopharmacology, etc. The result is some degree of fragmentation in the transhumanist community -- some transhumanists that think transhumanism is about prosthetics, only moreso, and others that are envisioning a complete restructuring of the human organism based on new foundational principles.
There is also conflict with respect to interacting with interested dabblers on the fringes: the prosthetic crowd would prefer to offer their vision, because it's more palatable and supported by near-term demonstrable advances, while the restructuring crowd offers their own which they consider more philosophically significant and deep. It can be hard to tell who is who, but a 30-minute conversation over a beer or two is generally enough to figure out where someone is coming from.
References on Comparative Difficulty of AI Pathways?
I am working on a project that requires references on the comparative difficulty of neuromorphic AI (human brain-simulating, a la Blue Brain) vs. non-neuromorphic AI (not a simulation of the brain). As the terms used to discuss these issues are not always standard, and are sometimes even made up on the spot, locating references via conventional search is not easy. Do any come to mind?
Papers or books preferred; blog or forum posts can't really be referenced.
Transhumanism as Universal
Transhumanism, as it stands today, is a philosophy that emphasizes the future of human enhancement and the risks and opportunities presented when one species (Homo sapiens sapiens) differentiates into millions or billions of new species through technological self-transformation. Transhumanists argue that unless we blow ourselves up, this differentiation is very likely to occur, whether we like it or not. I should also emphasize that transhumanists are not unequivocally in favor of every possible enhancement pathway, and in fact may be more concerned about the potential downsides of these technologies than the upsides. Like me, for instance.
What will transhumanism be in the future? Well, if humanity survives and develops technologies that people can use to profoundly modify their bodies, including their mental and physical capacities, then transhumanism will not be a "futurist philosophy", but merely everyday life. It will be hard not to care about the risks and benefits of self-modification technologies at that point, because they'll be directing everything around us and the course of world history. Everyone will become de facto transhumanists, so the term will lose much of its present meaning. Do people that use computers call themselves "computerists"? No, but that's what many of us are, whether we explicitly recognize it or not.
Transhumanists argue that we need a head start -- why start caring about these issues when they're already coming full force, and everyone is more or less forced to care about them? We can start now, analyzing the possibilities and deploying strategies to increase the probability that things go well and our species doesn't go extinct. Some transhumans may not be so nice, and there'll need to be systems in place to ensure that these individuals are kept in check and prevented from acquiring too much power. Traditional political banter is only peripherally relevant to this task, because politics as we know it is predicated on an all-human society with human motivations, human intelligence, human habits, and human levels of capability. We have to do something far more difficult -- build a model of a world unlike anything else that has existed before. All of history has only contained one truly intelligent species -- us. When we're confronted with billions of new intelligent species, how will we react? Will those that had the foresight to prepare in advance be able to soften the technological torrent, bend it in a way that is beneficial both to humans and transhumans? I do think so, and that's why these investigations are extremely important now.