In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.
These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.
These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.