Transhumanism is a Fundamentally Good Idea

Thank you for waiting on me.I: Biological LimitationsThese many limitations aren't necessarily bad. If we were able to genetically and mechanically alter someone's limitations to remove them, the first group to put this power to use would be the Military and powerful crime lords, especially drug cartels. Every technology we invest in must be done so with the future in mind. What are the negative effects and how would the technology be wrongly used."If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." - Edward A. Murphy. Murphy's Law.We do not require Trans-humanism to overcome diseases, which are being dealt with right now. Year by year, researchers are finding new treatments and cures to deadly diseases that don't require augmentation.(1) In time, they can even heal Huntington's Disease(2) "Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection." -MITnewsEven with current diseases, wiping them and human limitations out would have great negative effects to the world.[1] http://web.mit.edu...[2] http://www.eurekalert.org...II: Standard of LifeYes, Standard of Life might increase... For the wealthy. The Cost of even a small trans-human operation would cost too much for the average human to afford, with only 3.5% of the United States earning $100,000+ and much fewer earning $250,000+.(3) With the United States being one of the wealthiest nations in the world, it's easy to say even less than 2% of the world could afford such an operation. The odds of the 80% of humans living on only $10 or less a day ever affording even partial trans-humanization or close to zero.(4)Standard of Life would drop, as healthcare costs rise. Making a human better is expansive. Making a semi-android better would be even more expansive. We see this same trend happening in vehicles. The cost of maintenance and fixing the vehicle goes up as the machine gets more high-tech. This trend is a principal followed by most examples, including:Game Consoles.Televisions.Computers.Houses.Air Conditioners.The more high-tech you make the Human Body, the more costly hospitalization becomes, especially in the case of replacing vital components.Because of the cost, and unlikelihood of anyone earning less than $250,000 ever getting upgraded, a massive divide would occur. Those who could upgrade would be superior to others. Every Upgrade would leave behind more rows of inferior people, who are lesser in value than shinier models of human. This would void every philosophical and political ideal of human Equality, especially among poorer people who can not afford the original upgrade.The idea of equality now is intact regardless of wealth and personal assets because we are all human. Such an idea would cease to have merit when humans are literally no longer equal. Human's would literally be inferior to Tran-humans. Standard of Living would be plagued by the greatest viruses ever seen. You run a 1 in 429 chance of dying each year from cancer and diseases in the United State,(5) compared to the high odds of getting a damaging hardware/software virus. Computer Virus's would become a leading and highly effective form of mass genocide.Another issue is battery life. A walking machine needs more power than the 10-100 millivolts the human body produces to run(6) since a simply computer requires 120,000 millivolts.[3] http://factfinder2.census.gov...[4] http://www.statisticbrain.com...[5] http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk...[6] http://science.howstuffworks.com...III: A Cure for the Human ConditionSuch an ideal is evil. The removal of free will and control of a human's mind to prevent crime. The implications are even more terrorizing than the current crime-rate. Governments and even smart terrorists like Anonymous could control every person on Earth. The effect of being a good human who doesn't do crimes like this would only apply to people who accepted Trans-Humanization. Terrorists and other groups could escape the process. If Al Qaeda can hide from the Military for 10+ years, so can other terrorist groups and Anonymous.Altering a human's brain in such a way would leave all human's open to control, like avatars in a video game. A government could (and will) remove all free-will and independence from it's citizens. This issue is a major concern even in the United States after the issue with the NSA. We would become open programs for the government and other groups to spy on and command.A terrorist group could begin re-argumentation of any number of humans, reversing their way of thinking from positive to negative. Pro has even acknowledged Terrorism as being a current problem."Mass shootings, terrorism and economic disaster are prevalent."Free will: noun1. The ability or discretion to choose; free choice: chose to remain behind of my own free will.2. The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will.(7)3. Voluntary choice or decision2. Freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention (8)According to the above definitions, any force that influences or decides a human's choices restraints their Free Will. Free will is also defined on a philosophical level as being free to choose a course of action to fulfilling a personal desire. If we were prevented from choosing that action because we were programmed not to choose it, than we would no longer hold free will."On a minimalist account, free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire. David Hume, for example, defines liberty as “a power of acting or of not acting, according to the determination of the will.” (1748, sect.viii, part 1). And we find in Jonathan Edwards (1754) a similar account of free willings as those which proceed from one's own desires."(9)Another perspective was brought up by Harry Frankfurt, where Free Will involved both First-order and Second-order desires. First Order would be to want a new car. Second Order is to not want a new car. Both are apart of having Free Will. To program the human to only want good things and not have the unconstrained choice to not want, while programming them to not want to make bad choices while removing their unconstrained ability to want to make a bad decision, would counter and eliminate Free Will from all human."Harry Frankfurt (1982) presents an insightful and original way of thinking about free will. He suggests that a central difference between human and merely animal activity is our capacity to reflect on our desires and beliefs and form desires and judgments concerning them. I may want to eat a candy bar (first-order desire), but I also may want not to want this (second-order desire) because of the connection between habitual candy eating and poor health. This difference, he argues, provides the key to understanding both free action and free will. (These are quite different, in Frankfurt's view, with free will being the more demanding notion. Moreover, moral responsibility for an action requires only that the agent acted freely, not that the action proceeded from a free will.)"(9)Such an implication is evil on it's own, and only made worse by government and terrorist misuse of such a power.[7] http://www.thefreedictionary.com...[8] http://www.merriam-webster.com...[9] http://plato.stanford.edu...IV: DurabilityThe human body lasts a long time. Most cancers begin or are diagnosed after the age of 55-60.(10) Most other physical issues like heart disease and Alzheimer follow the same trend. With great durability, the natural human body is among the most durable objects on this world. A broken bone heals over time and cuts fade away. Not quite the case with hardware. Broken components must be manually replaced at ultra-high costs. Hard drives have a life expectancy of 5 years if uses constantly,(11) which means 5-10 hours a day, as opposed to the 24/7 use of the human body. The average life expectancy of a human is 67.88 years(12), compared to the 4 year life expectancy of a computer.(13)[10] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org...[11] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com...[12] http://en.wikipedia.org...[13] http://www.uniblue.com...V: Overpopulation.If we void the variable of affordability, the average human could theoretically live forever. Eliminating disease and most other forms of death, including crime, we would begin overpopulating the Earth in under a century, and we do not have alternative planets to occupy, and won't for well over a few centuries.Death and diseases are necessary evils, and immortality and anything similar to it would have major negative effects.Conclusion:Trans-humanization opens negative doors bested left closed, and at most provides only short-term positives that degrade into negative effects. With this, and viewing the big, long-term picture, we find Transhumanism is not a fundamentally good idea. The Negatives immidately outway the good, and what good there is quickly turns sour.