@turingcop gives us his take on:
“Steve Fuller has a wildly provocative article over at IEET entitled “We May Look Crazy to Them, But They Look Like Zombies to Us: Transhumanism as a Political Challenge”
As the title suggests, the article seeks to portray the political challenge of posthumanism as an existential conflict between transhumanists (who are committed to indefinite life extension) and a bioconservative hoi polloi who believe:

that they will live no more than 100 years and quite possibly much less.
that this limited longevity is not only natural but also desirable, both for themselves and everyone else.
that the bigger the change, the more likely the resulting harms will outweigh the benefits.

Fuller’s argument goes as follows:

i) Biocons are comprehensively wrong. 1, 2 and 3 are false (Transhumanist assumption)

ii) The Biocons are thus programmed for destruction – not only their own but ours.

iii) The Biocons are thus relevantly similar to zombies.

Or to employ Fuller’s overlit prose:

These are people who live in the space of their largely self-imposed limitations, which function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are programmed for destruction – not genetically but intellectually. Someone of a more dramatic turn of mind would say that they are suicide bombers trying to manufacture a climate of terror in humanity’s existential horizons. They roam the Earth as death-waiting-to-happen.

This much is clear: If you’re a transhumanist, ordinary people are zombies.

It follows that, for transhumanists,the zombie apocalypse is an ongoing political reality and a substantial proportion of those reading this are its benighted vectors. Fuller derives only three political options from extant zombie survival guides:

a) You kill [the zombies] once and for all

b) You avoid them.

c) You enable them to be fully alive.

All three have their costs, but a) is, in many ways, the most attractive. After all, b) may be just too resource intensive, while c) is similarly problematic. As Fuller concludes:

Here there is a serious public relations problem, one not so different from development aid workers trying to persuade ‘underdeveloped’ peoples that their lives would be appreciably improved by allowing their societies to be radically re-structured so as to double their life expectancy from 40 to 80. While such societies are by no means perfect and may require significant change to deliver what they promise their members, nevertheless the doubling of life expectancy would mean a radical shift in the rhythm of their individual and collective life cycles – which could prove quite threatening to their sense of identity.
Of course, the existential costs suggested here may be overstated, especially in a world where even poor people have decent access to more global trends. Nevertheless the chequered history of development aid since the formal end of Imperialism suggests that there is little political will – at least on the part of Western nations — to invest the human and financial capital needed to persuade people in developing countries that greater longevity is in their own long-term interest, and not simply a pretext to have them work longer for someone else.
I think there’s scope for a transhumanist critique of the Zombie Argument and a posthumanist critique. I’ll say more about the former than the latter in what follows since Fuller’s piece is largely directed at a transhumanist constituency rather than a posthumanist one.
Suppose we understand transhumanism (H+) as a kind of humanism with added gizmos (or control knobs). Then (as I’ve argued in Posthuman Life) H+ is minimally committed to traditional humanist values: in particular, the cultivation of autonomy and rationality. We may construe autonomy as a matter of degree. A person is more autonomous, the more their range of worthwhile choices increases.
A commitment to autonomy seems like a good way to support H+ since increasing our powers to modify nature and ourselves will plausible increase the ambit of our worthwhile choices. It will make us more autonomous. (We may even add a rider that the cultivation of any power implies a commitment on the part of rational beings to its open-ended extension)
Now I take it that a commitment to rationality includes a commitment to some form of public reason and accountability. I’m not excluding the possibility of emancipatory political violence here, but the rationale for violence must be genuinely emancipatory and framed in terms that could enlist the support of reasonable interlocutors in the game of “giving and asking for reasons”. A commitment to public reason implies a commitment to the politics of recognition: treating others as rational subjects capable of being swayed by the better argument while being reciprocally committed to abandoning one’s claims in the light of persuasive counter arguments. To use Rawlsian terminology, transhumanism has a political as well as a comprehensive component. The political component provides a side constraint on the way in which its comprehensive aims (life extension, intelligence augmentation, etc.) can be promulgated.
I don’t think Fuller’s zombie argument can pass through this political filter. Not only does it assume that other interlocutors are comprehensively wrong, it portrays them as essentially wrong. Non-transhumanists are not fellow people whose reason one can appeal to, but zombies, a plague on the Earth.
Casting one’s political opponents in this way isn’t humanism with control knobs; it’s anti-humanist zealotry with control-knobs. For a humanist, it constitutes a political betrayal of the project of humanism that transhumanists hope to continue.
And holds even for those who accept the conclusion of the zombie argument but opt for persuasion. If we fail to engage with others as rational beings, we’re betraying the core commitments of humanism and foundering into irrational violence. So the zombie argument not only begs the question too strongly in favour of transhumanism, it is pragmatically self-vitiating because it fails the public reason test.
Having set out the bones of a transhumanist rebuttal of Fuller, I’ll content myself with a brief sketch of a posthumanist one. The Speculative Posthumanism that I’ve espoused in Posthuman Life is characterised by a position I call Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism (AUP). AUP holds that the space of possible agents is not bound (a priori) by conditions of human agency or society. Since we lack future-proof knowledge of possible agents this “anthropologically unbounded posthumanism” (AUP) allows that the results of techno-political interventions could be weird in ways that we are not in a position to imagine (Roden 2014: Ch.3-4; 2013; forthcoming). AUP note is an epistemic position that is consonant with some of the claims of critical posthumanists, but also with forms of naturalism and speculative realism.
The ethical predicament of the Speculative Posthumanist is (as I’ve emphasised elsewhere) more complex than that of the Transhumanist or their Promethean and Accelerationist cousins (Roden 2014, Chapters 1-2; Brassier 2014). Given AUP there need be no structure constitutive of all subjectivity or agency. Thus she cannot appeal to an unbounded theory of rational subjectivity to support an ethics of becoming posthuman. It doesn’t follow SP implies the rejection of the transhumanist objection. It holds locally for beings of a kind for which the politics of recognition makes sense (e.g. as long as we’re not Jupiter Brains or swarm intelligences). But whether or not this is true, AUP seems to go with a far more pluralist value theory than H+. If we have no a priori grip on the kind of agents that might result from some iteration of future technical activity, we have no grip on what will be important to them. Would life extension make sense to a being that lacked a conception of its self as a persistent agent? We might think that such a being could not be a candidate for properly posthuman status, but I’ve adduced plenty of arguments in PHL and elsewhere to undermine this intuition. In addition, AUP is consistent with multiple posthuman becomings, some of which may involve quite subtle adjustments to gender identity, sexuality, embodiment, and phenomenology which may or may not involve a commitment to life extension. In fact it does not seem irrational to adopt certain forms of posthumanist alteration at the serious risk of life or in the knowledge that one’s life might be shortened (space colonisation, anyone?).
So AUP tells against the claim that only one position regarding life-extension is the right one. It doesn’t preclude it either, but provides strong supplementary grounds for not portraying our Biocon friends as zombies.”
Tell David what you think @ http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=5869