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Transhumanism and Accessibility

I recently read an entry on njms' gemlog about longtermism, and they made an aside about transhumanism that I wanted to supplement with my own experience. For context: I am disabled. Specifically, I have Usher syndrome, which causes hearing and vision loss, and have worn hearing aids since I was very young. Wearing hearing aids makes me a proto-transhuman, in a sense: I am using technology to transcend the limitations of my body.

How I escaped longtermism | njms

I am very against transhumanism for two major reasons, both relating to accessibility: first, that costs make these technologies inaccessible to the people who would most stand to benefit, and second, technology becomes a stand-in for practical accessibility, making the costs required.

On the first point, an example: I bought a new pair of hearing aids this year. They cost me $4400 USD for the pair, and insurance doesn't cover it. I don't know the prices of the hearing aids I wore as a child, but I can reasonably guess they never cost less than $3500. Particularly among the disabled community, the market for assistive high-technology is small enough that where it does get developed, it is expensive. Due to these costs, any "transhuman" tech advance will be limited to people who can afford it, leaving many behind.

I was lucky to have parents who could afford to buy hearing aids for me. But, that leads to the second part of my distaste for transhumanism, and it's the reason why my parents felt spending ~$4000 was the best course of action: technology that makes people "normal" becomes a stand-in for actual accessibility. As an example, at my last job, company policy changes were typically announced at company-wide all-hands meetings. For obvious reasons, I prefer major announcements be provided to me in writing. Written announcements are a no-brainer for accesibility reasons, as well as just for future reference, but since everyone, including me with the benefit of hearing aids, could hear the announcement, it wasn't provided. Because the technology existed to adapt me to the hearing world, no consideration was given to ways to adapt the hearing world to me. There's an attitude of "why should we provide any accomodations when they can just use their technology instead."

This attitude becomes an issue when people don't *want* to be made "normal." There are serious drawbacks to these technologies - in the case of my hearing aids, they can hurt to wear for extended periods of time. As another example, users of a retinal implant were left high and dry when the company supporting their devices went bankrupt. There are real reasons to not trust the technology. As a personal aside, I want to note something specific to me, though it may be shared by others in a similar position: if there existed a way to have my hearing brought to normal levels with no drawbacks - no pain, no weird behaviors, just natural hearing - I wouldn't do it. It has been 30 years now of quiet for me, and I regularly get somewhat overwhelmed from the noisiness of the world. I would rather keep my peace and quiet.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

so yeah. The intersection of technology and ableism has created an idea that technology can be used to make disabled people able to use the world around them, to the exclusion of ideas about making the world more accessible to all types of people in simpler, lower-tech ways. This then gets combined with the costs of these technologies to create a world hostile to the poor and disabled.