But are you really evaluating the content of transhumanism from outside your social context? Most transhumanists are humanists, and thus can trace their philosophical lineage back through the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic monks translating Aramaic texts into Latin, Zoroastrians and Muslims translating Greek texts into Aramaic, and Hellenistic post-Socratic philosophers writing their ideas down in reaction to pre-Socratic ideas (and this is just where the paper trail ends). All of that context has helped shaped modern humanism, and through that context humanists have notions of what they consider epistemologically sound and what values they support. These influence how humanists evaluate the content of transhumanism. At best we might say that because transhumanism was developed by humanists, the humanist interpretation of transhumanism is privileged because it gives perspective on the origins of the ideas, yet that doesn't mean we can't find other contexts in which to make sense of transhumanism. To deny them, or even just be annoyed by them, is to exert pressure against the very process that generated transhumanism in the first place: successive reinterpretation and expansion of ideas that have their origins in pre-Socratic Hellenism. There is no way to consider transhumanism, or any idea, outside of a context; to do so is to blind oneself to the lens through which one sees the world.

I think there's a rule-of-thumby reading of this that makes a little bit more sense. It's still prejudiced, though. A lot of religions have a narrative that ends in true believers being saved from death and pain and after that people aren't going to struggle over petty issues like scarcity of goods and things. I run into transhumanists every so often who have bolted these ideas onto their narratives. According to some of these people, the robots are going to try hard to end suffering and poverty, and they're going to make sure most of the humans will live forever. In practice, that goal is dubious from a thermodynamics perspective and if it wasn't, some of our smarter robots are currently doing high-frequency trading and winning ad revenue for Google employees. That alone has probably increased net human suffering -- and they're not even superintelligent I imagine some transhumanism fans must have good reasons to put these things in the narrative, but I think it's extremely worth pointing out that these are ideas humans love aesthetically. If it's true, great for us, but it's a very pretty version of the truth. Even if I'm wrong, I'm skeptical of people who try to make definite assertions about what superintelligences will do, because if we knew what superintelligences would do then we wouldn't need superintelligences. It would really surprise me if it looked just like one of our salvation narratives. (obligatory nitpick disclaimer: a superintelligence can be surprising in some domains and predictable in others, but I don't think this defeats my point, because for the conditions of these peoples' narrative to be met, we need the superintelligence to do things we wouldn't have thought of in most of the domains relevant to creating a utopia)