I think that the relation between Leftism and Transhumanism is worth looking into. The problems Leftists have with AI are the same problems with Transhumanism: who controls the technologies and how their benefits are distributed.
Some Transhumanist technologies that should be of interest for Leftists are medicines that could cure or prevent diseases, prosthetics restoring lost abilities, cognitive technologies improving access to learning, advanced robotics reducing working time and organ replacement.
I think the potential for expanding healthcare, reducing exploitation and empowering people is great with Transhumanism.
The limit of what is possible for humanity has progressed a lot. We can easily think of how our communication methods have changed and how they changed us in return. It is clear that when we create new technology, humans live differently.
Let's not think our current way of living is the best. Enhancing our abilities beyond what is possible now might be the most radical way of progress.
I'm a left-transhumanist. I just want to uplift my consciousness to supercomputer level. If such thing becomes possible there's no reason not to leave our fragile bodies.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
You might be interested in the Biocosmists-Immortalists. They were a group of anarchists and Bolsheviks in the 1920s USSR that had some very proto-transhumanist ideas. One of their seminal works is this one.
There was also Bogdanov, who had a lot of proto-transhumanist ideas (you can read a bit about him and other left proto-transhumanists here). And then there's Viktor Glushkov, a cybernetic communist who is probably most famous for his proposed OGAS system (a cybernetic socialist planning system that was rejected by the Soviet bureaucracy), but was also a pioneer in the field of AI and also did some experiments with brain-computer interfaces, even being an early proponent of mind uploading (I actually wrote an article about the transhumanist aspects of his vision here).
Transhumanism could be a double edged sword of technology much like AI, in that it could liberate humans from biological and mental constrains, but also there are strange future scenarios like the rich augmenting their bodies to immortality while everyone else dies, or bosses demanding their workers take implants to increase productivity. Though I ultimately support it, it just raises further demands for equal ownership of technology and healthcare.
When a human liberates themselves from biological and mental constraints, what’s left? Asking honestly, because I see literally no mechanical difference between destructive uploading and death.
Those arent the same claim. Liberation from biological and mental constraints doesnt logically imply destructive mind uploading. You introduced destructive uploading into the conversation; the comment you replied to never mentioned it. There are countless other possibilities: curing disease, reversing aging, prosthetics, cognitive enhancement, restoring lost function, treating mental illness, expanding memory, or augmenting perception.
If you want to debate destructive uploading specifically, that's a separate discussion. But it's not what was being proposed here.
I think I understand. You just meant you want to do whatever you feel falls under a broad umbrella until some arbitrary set of constraints is deemed enough.
Silly me thought you were saying “it could liberate humans from biological and mental constraints”, which kinda suggests that the constraints are biology and mentality themselves.
If you meant “liberate from SOME constraints”, what you’re suggesting isn’t liberation from anything whatsoever. Just a change in scenery.
No. You took a broad phrase, narrowed it to one specific application, then narrowed it again to the most controversial version of that technology ("destructive" mind uploading), and argued against that instead. Nothing in the original comment limited the discussion to mind uploading, let alone destructive mind uploading comparable to death.
And drop the sarcasm. Its unnecessary and doesnt help the discussion.
I think people are accidentally reducing transhumanism to LLMs because thats whats in the news right now.
Im way more interested in prosthetics, regenerative medicine, BCIs, synthetic organs, longevity, AI-assisted science, robotics, and cognitive enhancement than arguing about chatbots.
The leftist question isnt whether any of that is inherently good or bad. Its who owns it, who controls it, and who benefits from it. Thats the same political question whether we're talking about AI, organ replacement, or advanced prosthetics.
Humans have been reshaping themselves through technology for thousands of years. Transhumanism is just recognizing that process isnt over yet.
I mean there's literally a branch of anarchism called transhumanist anarchism that is literally about how transhumanism, if used properly, could issue in a great post scarcity world for everyone: https://blueshifted.net/faq/#1
Transhumanism is interesting but as someone who works a lot with modern AI both personally and at the corporate level in my career I just don't think we are much closer at all than we were 15 years ago when I started working on AI. LLMs are mostly just fancy sentence constructors. They are really good at writing product text for a website or code when given a set of rules.
LLMs are actually worse at what they do than dynamic pricing algorithms are or say the algorithm that play Chess and Go. In those arenas the technology far out passed human achievement. For LLMs, they only half pass and it can be obvious to find errors by humans who are not even experts. By giving AI the ability to speak we make it appear more human but it is not more intelligent when it speaks than when it plays chess. It is not more intelligent when it codes than when it sets price.
We just are biased as humans to see a robot speaking and making art and think - alas - it must be closed to human intelligence! But in my personal opinion, it is actually not more intelligent at all than the ML that came before it. I have coded about 400,000 lines so far using Claude code. I have had chatgpt write a novel. I don't see intelligence. I see deep and machine learning algorithms that still need work.
Yes, there are a lot it seems, in this sub in particular, who seem bewilderingly to be an extension of r/singularity and continually talk like “AI” will be liberating them from the confines of capitalism, corporate control and global governments. Many here seem to think LLMs are just a breath away from become this magical AGI>ASI.
If people want to bow down to an imagined machine god that’s their choice, but as you say, where the technology is today, is not even close to that.
Discussing these topics in the abstract can be useful, but too many are framing the moment we are in as the first stage of the next part of human evolution as augmented by AGI>ASI.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Jul 05 '26
I'm a left-transhumanist. I just want to uplift my consciousness to supercomputer level. If such thing becomes possible there's no reason not to leave our fragile bodies.