Of Left and Right Transhumanism, Again

About a decade ago I had occasion to remark that while transhumanist thought may be said to have been more evident on the left than the right a century ago the existence of left transhumanism scarcely seems a memory where the mainstream is concerned today. This is arguably because of how completely the left has been cut out of the conversation--the bounds of "civil" discourse set by the centrism predominant at mid-century locking it out, and nothing changing that ever since (the left, indeed, coming to be more thoroughly excluded as the "center," deeply conservative from the start, only shifted rightward). However, there also seems little sign of interest in the matter these days on the left.

Why is that?

It may be that in a period like the 1920s, when many on the left felt confident that the future belonged to them, there appeared room for such visions--such that Leon Trotsky, for example, could be seen waxing transhumanist in the seemingly unlikely place for such that is the closing pages of his book Literature and Revolution. By contrast, after decades of catastrophic, bitter political defeat and disappointment (without which the aforementioned marginalization of the left to the degree seen today would not have been possible), the feeling can only be very different--with other issues far more pressing, leaving little time or energy for such concerns. It may even be that, so long accused of being "visionary," with anti-Communist cliché endlessly sneering at the left's claims to rationality and mocking it as a quasi-religion, those on the left hesitate to give their enemies any more ammunition by taking up such concerns as transhumanism.

Of course, were the issue of transhumanism to become more pressing this would change. Some claim that it already has in the wake of recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, with one team of Microsoft researchers, who strike this author as having been rigorous in their assessment and cautious in their analysis of the new GPT-4 (certainly by the standard of a discourse which seems to think "What sorcery is this?" an intelligent response) suggesting that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), in however "early" and "incomplete" a form, may already be a reality. Considering their assessment I am inclined to emphasize the "early" and "incomplete" in their judgment--and to suggest that the developments and additions to actually turn what may be early and incomplete AGI into an undeniably complete and mature system (like the system's being equipped with elaborate planning-oriented and self-critical "slow thinking" as well as the "fast thinking" faculties that have so impressed observers, and its being modified so as to learn continually and retain what it learns via a long-term memory facility) may be a long way off. All the same, the extent to which people of ideological tendencies which have not felt the need to address these matters find themselves having to do so may be telling with regard to just how much these new developments really matter.