Those who look forward to a future of increasing technological manipulation of human beings, and of other biological organisms, always imagine themselves as the Controllers, not the controlled; they always identify with the position of power. And so they forget evolutionary history, they forget biology, they forget the disasters that can come from following the Oppenheimer Principle — they forget everything that might serve to remind them of constraints on the power they have … or fondly imagine they have.
And we might, were we at all sympathetic to the “opponents” of transhumanist desire, wonder whether it would have been better to remain human—characterized by a needy openness that exists only by virtue of constant exchanges with a world we do not master—even if our capacities were fewer, our status (in some sense) lower, and our suffering greater.