futurists. they are the apostles of the coming age. unfortunately, like any holy man, charlatan or otherwise, they prognosticate with the caveat that all of this is in their imaginations. sure, some clever technologist may find a way to create a reality-based machine that carries out the function dreamed about, or another technologist may create some technology unaware of the convergence with a dreamer’s dream. that’s possible. but what’s more likely is that something completely different will come to pass. i suppose transhumanism is the idea that we are less and less bound to our human frailties: weak bodies, gullible minds, intractable desires. but the problem is that some of us, specifically the ultra rich, have made it over that hill and only a few of them have the resources yet so far none of them have transcended. billionaires and geniuses alike still have to breath, eat, shit, piss and sleep — oh, and don’t forget the most important function of all: fuck and have babies. rich people still get cancer and die. see steve jobs for reference. evolution’s human is a collection of 37 trillion cells and hundreds or thousands of distinct organisms living in one body. it’s never going to be easy to reproduce. it took two and a half billion years (or more) for evolution to assemble the rules of matter into life forms as complex as humans. even if we were to speed that process up by six orders of magnitude, it would still take us 2500 years to achieve similarly. the best we can hope for right now is to maximize the biochemical machines we have without somehow managing to self-destruct. but we are lazy, or as biologists say, we conserve a lot of energy. why bother transcending when we can sit around watching television all day smoking pot and drinking ourselves into oblivion? who would be the first to create a human that doesn’t suffer? that’s transhuman. take away my pain and my conscience so i don’t have to be bound by them anymore because this thing we call life spends every moment of its existence fighting itself just to survive. the never ending fight is what propels us forward — but it’s also what drives us to dream of largesse. it seems, then, that the dream of the transhuman is to give up what it is to be human. ironically, the second we transcend, all motivation would be lost and we would cease to be transcendent. without motivation we are so much matter and energy floating in space. why does this ghost haunt? it wants its body back.