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I think so, yes, but I think you have already used the phrase "less human" in a way that I was trying, however perhaps poorly, to move away from. I mean it in the same way that is meant when someone, after a long day of grimy work, emerges from a shower and says, "Ah! I feel human again."
Consider it this way: is it a tragedy, to be orphaned? Like--if there was a shortage of orphans, would it be okay to deliberately make some?
Because yes--yes, of course!--it is better for a child to be raised by loving and involved adopted parents (of whatever kind) than to be institutionalized, "raised" in the absence of intimate family relationships. Adoption is a little bit (if you're willing to limit the metaphor) like chemotherapy, or post-trauma limb amputation. You do it to save people from greater harm, but it's not the sort of thing you would do absent the initial tragedy. You don't adopt children because adoption is totally cool and we should make more orphans so more people can do it, you adopt children because something tragic has occurred that can't be perfectly fixed but maybe we can mitigate the harm.
Well, sure, probably she can't complain, at the personal level: she agreed to be used. She rented out her womb. But whether it's good public policy to let people rent out their wombs is not just a question of personal liberty. If we let people sell their organs, or become prostitutes, or replace their brains with digital machinery, that doesn't just change the lives of those who have consented to the change. It changes the cultural landscape. (If we allow people to sell themselves into slavery, this would be bad for society even if each individual involved was fully consenting.) Hence my reference to egregores like Moloch--everyone can individually be doing what is actually best for themselves, given the circumstances, and this can give rise to horrifying circumstances that no individual within the system can, or would even choose, to change.
I would like transhumanism to be deliberate, in other words, rather than allowing it to emerge accidentally.
I'm not saying you should be mad if future humans are bio-printed. I'm saying bio-printed people won't be humans, so it's a better future where our decision to bio-print transhumans fully accounts for the differences that will emerge between evolved beings, and designed ones. Especially if (when) the designed ones become noticeably superior in every way, given our own tendency to use as commodities those beings we regard as beneath us. If transhumans share this tendency, such future humans as may remain will be in some trouble.
Obviously not if the only way to manufacture orphans required their parents to be put to the sword.
But even today, that's not the case. Let's consider the entirely plausible hypothetical where someone's preserved eggs and semen outlasted them. There are couples who are entirely infertile, and unable to have biologically related children. Would I object if they wanted to create a child by going to a gene bank and getting a surrogate to birth a child whose biological parents were no longer alive?
Not at all. I see nothing wrong with that, everyone wins. Even the kid, because as far as I'm concerned, it's far better to be alive than not, and that's while grappling with severe clinical depression. Life is good! More lives are good!
Would anything change if instead of a surrogate, the couple seeking to adopt used an artificial womb? Not as far as I'm concerned, assuming mature technology with no deleterious effects on the child.
I hope that it illustrates that its possible, and good to at least sometimes create orphans when demand exceeds supply.
And I'm entirely fine with this change in the social landscape, or at the very least, I won't seek to oppose when it conflicts with my desire to maximize human liberty. I understand why people might disagree, I just consider it none of their business what I or other sane adults get up to in our spare time, of our own volition.
If someone tries to stop me from enhancing myself, with my own funds and my own body and mind at stake, then I'm not a man easily moved to violence, but I'd be looking for a gun.
The alternative to radical transhumanism is growing old and infirm, my brain rotting away and becoming riddled with holes like cheese gnawed by microscopic rodents. If the alternative is the same death that murdered the 97 billion anatomically modern humans before us, I am willing to fight to live. There is no way that is feasible without transhumanism.
Fortunately, as far as I'm concerned, this unlikely to come to pass, and the bio-chauvinists and luddites are unlikely to stop all progress.
I acknowledge Moloch as the Great Enemy. I do not think surrogacy or artificial wombs feeds it, and certainly doesn't strengthen it more than it strengthens us.
This is sadly a lost cause. But even I want transhumanism to be optional, and I have no issue with people who don't seek to embrace it. If people want to cling to the baseline human form, let them. I'm for being generous to them, giving them food and shelter, outright UBI. All I ask is that they don't get in the way of those with higher ambitions. And if their excuse is that they can't let me do as I wish, when it doesn't directly harm them, then the only option is war. I don't want that, but I'll do it if necessary. The tree of liberty might need regular watering.
I disagree that such people aren't human. I do, however, think that they are a better class of human than we are. Smarter, stronger, likely more moral and less prone to our failings. I seek to become them, and if that's not an option, ennoble my descendants.
Are baseline humans quite rightly concerned by the possibility of such a superior clade? Hell yes.
If they're not slightly anxious about potential replacement by beings smarter and more powerful than you, then they're a moron. You will inevitably find yourself at their mercy.
I, however, think it is possible to carefully engineer such posthumans, being they biological or otherwise, to still have empathy for their precursors. To actually extend us mercy, when we're at theirs. Any who can join them, should. We should also coordinate to prevent a Molochian tragedy where the universe is colonized by ever spreading swarms of minimally sentient Von Neumanns. But this doesn't stop me from being ready to fight to be better, and more free.
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