But What About the "Reasonable" Robot Cultists?

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot:

Some individuals who call themselves "transhumanists," on their personal blogs, engage in the kind of hyperbole that you describe for various psychological or social reasons. However, on the whole the stuff that I read from groups such as the IEET seem well reasoned.

How is it that the transhumanist "movement" and belief-system with which IEET is decisively associated provides any contribution at all to the things you find reasonable among its publications? Would it be possible to say these reasonable things without this affiliation with transhumanism? If it is possible to say these reasonable things without affiliation with a Robot Cult, then what is gained through that affiliation exactly?

Since you don't deny that the superlative futurology I analyze is typical of transhumanism I wonder how you would go on to deny (if you do) that it is not only typical but in fact definitive of transhumanism? Some transhumanist-identified people say some reasonable things about technoscience that are also said by many (indeed, mostly) non-transhumanist-identified people, but they also say flabbergastingly unreasonable things -- about robot-bodied superlongevity and robot-slave superabundance and Robot God superintelligence -- that pretty much only transhumanists and other superlative futurologists say. I am strongly inclined to think, therefore, that it is the unreasonable things that define the discourse, while the reasonable things are incidental to it.

I think that it is good to develop a positive attitude to technology

I couldn't disagree with you more. I think, very much to the contrary, that it is good to insist on progressive, democratizing, consensualizing, equitable, diversifying technodevelopments while at once resisting regressive, ant-democratizing, exploitative, incumbent-elitist, eugenic technodevelopments.

And I think this insistence has nothing at all to do with having a "positive" or "negative" attitude toward some abstraction called "technology in general" that has no positive existence. Indeed, I believe that the effort to inculcate such a "positive" attitude toward this "technology in general" functions in fact to mystify our relation to and grasp of actually-ongoing technodevelopmental social struggle, transforming it into an alienated relation of consumers to a socially-indifferent accumulation of a toy-pile that will presumably "emancipate" them through a kind of brute-force amplification -- even though freedom as such has nothing whatever to do with force in fact.

The universe is stranger than we can imagine and so will be our technological progress.

That doesn't mean the Robot Cultists will get their ponies.

The solution to many of the problems we face today will require radical re-thinking, including how we think about technology and its possibilities

No doubt, no doubt.

But this re-thinking will mostly happen, as it should, in the midst of the work itself, and in the thinking of what we are doing as we are doing that work. It won't be engineered in the abstract, in advance, absolutely separate from the struggle itself.

"The Future" superlative futurologists are genuflecting to and blueprinting in the present is just a funhouse mirror reflecting the present and their alienation to the present (including the openness which is the substantial futurity actually inhering in the diversity of stakeholders to the present) back at them.