The singularity as Vernor Vinge explains it is an event analogous to the monkeys learning to think, only we're on the other side of the monkey barrier. Whether this event involves computer networks, biological evolution, techno-biological evolution, or some other species entirely isn't actually the point. The point is that the post-singularity universe will be as incomprehensible to us as our world would be to monkeys. I believe there is every possibility of a singularity in the future -- for the simple reason that if something happened once, it can happen again. I do not believe in transhumanism.***

Transhumanists are annoying because they are technological optimists, and technological optimists are annoying. When I hear things like, "we'll all download our consciousness into computers and live forever!" I have to roll my eyes and point out that computers crash, and computers require power sources, and power sources go down, and heck, the universe itself isn't going to live forever, so just get a grip, guys.

We could all become brains in jars, but the natural forces that pry brains out of jars will continue to exist, and when you pry a brain out of a jar, guess what? It's a brain. Small, gray, squishy, wrinkled, non-mobile.

Any meaningful post-humanity would have to be at least quasi-biological in nature -- that is, it would have to have some kind of self-repairing and self-replicating function, and some kind of redundancy, built in. Are we thirty years away from this kind of thing? Who knows? But the fact that we don't actually have that kind of technology yet strikes me as a non-trivial entrance barrier. Technological optimists remind me of the underpants gnomes on South Park:

1. Collect Underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

Transhumanists, in fact, are the most annoying kind of technological optimist -- the technological triumphalist. They assume not only that we can do anything we imagine and it will work the way we expect it to ****, they assume that we will, we should, and that it will be better.

Well, sometimes it's not better. Sometimes it's just cheaper, which is only better for certain values of better. Nature already works pretty amazingly well, and we already manipulate it pretty extensively. I'm not convinced that trading in my human body for some transhumanist blow-up doll with "smart skin" and a built-in Internet connection would necessarily be trading up.

Transhumanists are annoying because the movement is vaguely cultlike, and they present their views with the earnestness, the glassy stare of true believers. Transhumanism will save the human race, indeed, it is the only thing that can! Transhumanism is the future, indeed, the only possible future!

There's a reason transhumanism is sometimes ridiculed as "the rapture of the nerds."

When some transhumanist geek starts rhapsodizing about how someday we will all download our minds into computers, the question, "why would I want to do that?" is the one he can't really answer.

Like all cults, transhumanism assumes that all humans have the same goals and values -- or, if they don't, they should. And that's annoying.

*When I say "transhumanists are annoying" obviously I don't mean you. Whoever you are. I mean those other transhumanists, the ones over there.

**I say "reasonable" because the concept itself seems a reasonable possibility. However, in the 1993 Vernor Vinge paper linked above, he starts off with an assertion that I think is a little unreasonable: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence." I don't believe Vinge remains so confident on that "thirty years" bit, or even that the singularity will happen.

***When I say I "don't believe in transhumanism" I mean transhumanism as a movement or ideology.

****The part of technological optimism I mostly object to. You know, the optimism part.