Darwinian malware had no choice about being born. Under a regime of natural selection, the lives of most sentient beings are “nasty, brutish and short”. Elsewhere I’ve urged upholding the sanctity of human and nonhuman life in law - not because I believe in such a fiction, but because failure to do so will most likely lead to worse consequences.

Would a notional benevolent superintelligence opt to conserve a recognisable approximation of Darwinian life-forms?
Or optimise our matter and energy for blissful sentience?
I don’t know.
But in the real world, a policy framework of compassionate conservation would seem to be a workable compromise.

I think compassionate stewardship of the living world is morally preferable to uncontrolled habitat destruction.

It was J. L. Austin (of all people!) who acknowledged that "common sense is the metaphysics of the stone age". Folk physics is not my point of departure. What counts as "common sense" is time- and culture-bound. My common sense most likely differs from your common sense. By "commonsense realism", do you mean perceptual naïve realism? Either way, we want to explain the technological success story of modern science. Anti-realism leaves the technological success of modern science a miracle. Maybe we can take an agnostic instrumentalist approach. Yet a lot of us want to understand reality. Why does quantum mechanics work? What explains the Born rule?

Most scientists are materialist physicalists. Materialism leads to the insoluble Hard Problem of consciousness:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#whohardprobsol
Most scientists treat the mind-brain as pack of classical neurons. Treating the mind-brain as an aggregate of decohered, membrane-bound neurons leads to the insoluble phenomenal binding/combination problem:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#categorize
I don’t know if non-materialist physicalism is true; but it’s my working hypothesis.

If pain-ridden Darwinian ecosystems exist within our cosmological horizon, then I would indeed hope future transhumans will send out cosmic rescue-missions. It's a tragedy that no such rescue-mission ever reached our planet; it could have prevented 540 million years of unimaginable suffering. Here on Earth, delegating stewardship of the global ecosystem to philosophers would be unwise. But pilot studies of self-contained happy ecosystems are feasible even now. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives are an insanely powerful tool of compassionate stewardship. However, before we start actively helping sentient beings, we must first stop systematically harming them:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#slaughterhouses

What do you think it feels like to be eaten alive? The horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" are too serious to be written off with jokes about eating lettuce. For the first time in history, it's technically possible to engineer a biosphere where all sentient beings can flourish. I know of no good moral reason for perpetuating the horror-show of Darwinian life.

Sometimes, wisdom consists in not acting even when you could act. We should leave other species alone, to the extent possible, eg by way of nature reserves. — Olivier5

Biotech (genome editing, synthetic gene drives, etc) turns the level of suffering in Nature into an adjustable parameter. Yes, traditional conservation biologists favour preserving the snuff movie of traditional Darwinian life: sentient beings hurting, harming and killing each other.
Intelligent moral agents can do better.

Further, what's wrong with the original, biological human; isn't Transhumanism better suited for a virtual world? — ghostlycutter

Aging is a frightful disorder. Medical science should aim for a cure.
More generally, mental and physical suffering are vile. A predisposition to suffer is genetically hardwired. For example, hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from chronic depression and pain. Even nominally healthy humans sometimes suffer horribly as a function of our legacy code. In the absence of biological-genetic interventions, the negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill will play out in immersive virtual worlds no less than in basement reality.
What's more, we shouldn’t retreat into escapist VR fantasy worlds until we have solved the problem of suffering in Nature and have created post-Darwinian life.
In short, transhumanism is morally urgent.

In my view, instrumentalism threatens to collapse into an uninteresting solipsism. Instead, we'd do well to interpret the mathematical formalism of modern, unitary-only quantum mechanics realistically. Just as the special sciences (chemistry, molecular biology etc) can be derived from physics, likewise science should aim to derive the properties of our minds and the phenomenally-bound world-simulations they run from fundamental physics. This is a monumental challenge. But if there isn't a perfect structural match, then presumably some kind of dualism is true.

Let's stick to physicalism. I explore the quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument. It’s counterintuitive:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#quantummind

Anyway, I suspect felids are not particularly interested in your advice. You are welcome to change yourself into some computer if you want to, but leave cats alone. They can make their own life choices — Olivier5

What makes you suppose I want to change myself into a computer?!
(cf. http://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#braincomp)

Either way, power breeds complicity, whether we like it or not. Humans would (I hope) rescue a small child from the jaws of a lion. It's perverse not to rescue beings of comparable sentience. No one deserves to be disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive. Of course, ad hoc solutions to the problem of predation are unsatisfactory. Hence the case for a pan-species welfare state and veganising the biosphere.

Consider lucid dreaming. When having a lucid dream, one entertains the theory that one's entire empirical dreamworld is internal to the transcendental skull of a sleeping subject. Exceptionally, one may even indirectly communicate with other sentient beings in the theoretically-inferred wider world:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/researchers-exchange-messages-with-dreamers-68477
What happens when one "wakes up"? To the naïve realist, it's obvious. One directly perceives the external world. But the inferential realist recognises that the external world can only be theoretically inferred. For a good development of the world-simulation metaphor, perhaps see Antti Revonsuo's Inner Presence (2006):

You remark, "To say that something is theoretical is to say that it is mind-dependent." But when a physicist talks of, say, the theoretical existence of other Hubble volumes beyond our cosmological horizon (s/he certainly doesn’t intend to make a claim of their mind-dependence. Of course, how our thoughts and language can refer is a deep question. Naturalising semantic content is hard: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#aboutness

Unique individuals?
Yes, our egocentric world-simulations each have a different protagonist. Yet we are not "uniquely" unique. When I said that "science suggests I'm not special", I was alluding simply to how I perceive myself to be the hub of reality is (probably!) a fitness-enhancing hallucination:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#moralvalues

Olivier5
It's possible your recent comment has been deleted. But the reason I don't advocate the extinction (as distinct from genetic tweaking) of the cat family is precisely the visceral responses of outraged cat lovers. Ethically speaking, should we conserve, for example,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GATu6KKu2g
[Viewer discretion advised: please don't watch if you already agree that intelligent moral agents should end predation. But in the abstract, "predation" sounds no more troubling than halitosis.]
Civilisation will be vegan.

counterpunch
I hope you'll forgive me for ducking questions of art here. However, when it comes to science, I'm a realist and a monistic physicalist, but not a materialist:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#dualidealmat
Taking modern physics seriously yields a conception of reality very different from the world-simulation of one's everyday experience.

Michael
Thanks, your striking footprint / boot analogy hadn't occurred to me; but yes, in a sense. I'm still thinking about the coffee! Either way, the difference between dreaming and waking consciousness isn't that when awake one perceives the external world. Rather, during waking life, peripheral nervous inputs partially select the contents of one’s phenomenal world-simulation. When one is dreaming, one's world-simulation is effectively autonomous.

Now for the twist. A Kantian might say that all one can ever know is phenomena. The noumenal essence of the world is unknown and unknowable. But the recently-revived intrinsic nature argument "turns Kant on his head":
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#galileoserror

OglopTo
Thank you. You are very kind. The Transhumanist movement is diverse, indeed fragmented. For instance, Nick Bostrom and I both advocate a future of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness, but “existential risk” means something different to an ardent life lover and a negative utilitarian (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/transhumanism/). A commitment to the well-being of all sentience is item 7 of 8 in The Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009). This prioritisation probably reflects the relative urgency most transhumanists feel. Superintelligence and superlongevity loom larger in the minds of most transhumanists than defeating suffering.

That said, I'd urge any secular Buddhist to embrace the transhumanist agenda. Recall how the historical Gautama Buddha was a pragmatist. If it works, do it! Indeed, the abolitionist project might crudely be called Buddhism and biotech. The only way I know to abolish the biology of suffering short of sterilising Earth is to rewrite our legacy source code. Other makeshift remedies are just stopgaps. Most technological advances don’t get to the heart of the problem of suffering. We need a genetically-driven biohappiness revolution.

Pfhorrest
Very many thanks. Yes, I remarked that most critics don't find an architecture of mind based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of bliss to be a genetically credible prospect. If pressed, such critics will normally allow that a minority of chronic depressives are animated entirely by gradients of ill-being. The possibility of people with the opposite syndrome, i.e. life animated entirely by gradients of well-being, simply beggars their imagination. That’s why case studies of exceptional hyperthymics (e.g. Jo Cameron) who never get depressed, anxious or feel pain are so illuminating. The challenge is to create a hyperthymic civilisation.

Terminology? The opposite for our position is dolorism. It's historically rare. More common is the bioconservatism exemplified by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (1733), "One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT".
Voltaire satirised such an inane optimism in Candide (1759).

Tackling the entrenched status quo bias of bioconservatism can be hard. One way of overcoming status quo bias is to pose a thought-experiment. Imagine humanity encounters an advanced civilisation that has abolished the biology of suffering in favour of life based on gradients of intelligent bliss. What arguments would bioconservative critics use to persuade the extra-terrestrials to revert to their ancestral biology of pain and suffering?

Olivier5
The problem of suffering can't be solved by tigers killing their victims any more than it can be solved by psychopaths killing orphans. Well-fed tigers breed more offspring who go on to terrorise more herbivores. I wouldn't personally be sad if the cat family were peaceably allowed to go extinct; but most people are aghast at the prospect. So instead, genetic tweaking can allow the conservation of tigers and other members of the cat family minus their violent proclivities.

Metaphysician Undercover
I believe in the existence of mind-independent reality (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#idsolipsism). Its status, from my perspective, is theoretical not empirical. The fact that one can't directly access the world outside one's transcendental skull doesn't make it any less real.

Grounding ethics?
Agony and despair are inherently disvaluable for me. Science suggests I’m not special. Therefore I infer that agony and despair are disvaluable for all sentient beings anywhere:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#metaethics

Michael
Thanks, a lot to unpack there. I worry that the expression "perceptually given" is doing a lot of work in your account. One's experience of a macroscopic world is an intrinsic property of neural patterns of matter and energy. This kind of experience may be shared by dreaming minds, brains-in-vats, Boltzmann brains – and awake humans who have evolved over millions of years of natural selection. In other words, the experience of a macroworld isn't intrinsically “perceptual” – the extracranial environment is neither sufficient nor necessary for the experience, Rather, one’s phenomenal macroworld has been harnessed by natural selection to play a particular functional role in awake animal nervous systems, namely the real-time simulation of fitness-relevant patterns in the extracranial environment. "Perception" is a misnomer.

If inferential realism / a world-simulation account is correct, then thorny semantic issues arise:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#hardparadox

Counterpunch
The fact that we each run a phenomenal world-simulation rather than perceive extracranial reality doesn't entail that our world-simulations are unreal – any more than the mind-dependence of our world-simulations entails that extracranial reality is unreal. It's often socially convenient to ignore the distinction and pretend we share common access to a public macroscopic world. But shared access is still a fiction.

Olivier5
True, a tiger does not apologise. Nor does a psychopathic child killer. Their victims are of comparable sentience. Unless rather naively we believe in free will, neither tigers nor psychopaths are to blame in any metaphysical sense for the suffering they cause. But their blamelessness is not an argument for conserving tigers or psychopaths in their existing guise.

Counterpunch
Modern physics reveals that mind-independent reality is radically different from our egocentric virtual worlds of experience. I say a bit more, e.g.
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#johnsearle

Olivier5
Complications aide, sentient beings exhibit a clearly expressed wish not to be harmed. So compassionate biology doesn't entail "engineer[ing] every single life form on earth to do exactly what you think is good". Rather, intelligent moral agents should ensure that all sentient beings can flourish without being physically molested. Genome-editing is a game-changer. Yes, there are some (human and nonhuman) predators who want to prey on the young, the innocent and the vulnerable. But there is no "right to harm". A civilised biosphere will be vegan.

counterpunch
The inferential realist account is more epistemically demanding. The perceptual naïve realist believes that (s)he directly communes with the external world – an approach that offers all the advantages of theft over honest toil. By contrast, the inferential realist tries to explain how our phenomenally-bound world-simulations are neurologically possible. It's a daunting challenge:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#categorize  

Climate change? A prosperous sustainable future? There is no tension here. I promise transhumanists are as keen on a healthful environment and economic prosperity as you are!

Counterpunch
Recall I argue against the view that reality is subjectively constructed. But each of us runs a phenomenal world-simulation that masquerades as the external world. Mind-independent reality may be theoretically inferred; it's not perceptually given.

Jkg20, counterpunch
As far as I can tell, physical reality long predates the evolution of phenomenally-bound minds in the late Precambrian. As I said, I’m a metaphysical realist. But each of us runs an egocentric world-simulation. Phenomenal world-simulations differ primarily in the identity of their protagonist. My belief that I’m not a Boltzmann brain or a mini-brain in a neuroscientist’s vat (etc) is metaphysical. The belief rests on a chain of inferences – and speculation I find credible. The external environment partly selects the content of one’s waking world-simulation; it doesn’t create it:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#immanuel

fdrake
Thank you. Suffering and the extended mind thesis?
(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis)
One of the authors of the extended mind thesis, Andy Clark, is explicitly a perceptual direct realist. Clark’s co-author, David Chalmers, sometimes writes in a similar vein. If some version of the extended mind thesis were true, then the abolitionist project would need to be re-evaluated, as you suggest.

However, as far as I can tell, the external world is inferred, not perceived. Strictly, it’s a metaphysical hypothesis (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#distort). Thanks to evolution, biological minds each run skull-bound phenomenal world-simulations that take the guise of their external surroundings. Within your world-simulation, your virtual iPhone is an extension of your bodily self. Within your world-simulation, you may perceive the distress of the virtual bodily avatars of other organisms. If you’re not dreaming, then their virtual behaviour causally co-varies with the behaviour of genuine sentient beings in the wider world.
But suffering is in the head.

Bitter Crank
Many thanks. Could environmental degradation derail transhuman civilisation?
I'm sceptical. But I suspect a climate catastrophe such as the inundation of a major Western metropolis will be needed to trigger serious action on mitigating global warming. One possible solution might be coordinated international legislation to enforce drastic reductions in CO that become effective only in, say, 10 years’ time.

A runaway “intelligence explosion” of recursively self-improving software-based AI?
Again, I’m sceptical:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#intelexplos
Classical Turing machines can’t solve the binding problem:
https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/binding-interview.html
Digital zombies have profound cognitive limitations that no increase in speed or complexity can overcome. In my view, zombie AI will augment sentience, not replace us.

Superhappiness?
The molecular signature of pure bliss is unknown, although its location has been narrowed to our ultimate “hedonic hotspot” in a cubic centimetre in the posterior ventral pallidum. Its discovery will be momentous. But the creation of superhappiness, let alone information-sensitive gradients of superhappiness, will depend on the solution to the binding problem. And the theoretical upper bounds to phenomenally-bound consciousness – whether blissful or otherwise – are unknown.

Down The Rabbit Hole
Many thanks. Should human intuitions of absurdity weigh more in ethics than in, say, quantum physics? That said, I defend what might be called "indirect negative utilitarianism", but is really just strict negative utilitarianism. Thus enshrining the sanctity of human and nonhuman animal life in law doesn’t lead to more net suffering. Naively, yes, the implications of negative utilitarianism are apocalyptic (cf. https://www.utilitarianism.com/rnsmart-negutil.html). Indeed, classical utilitarian philosopher Toby Ord calls negative utilitarianism a “devastatingly callous” doctrine. But whereas negative utilitarians can ardently support an advanced transhumanist “triple S” civilisation, classical utilitarians are obliged to obliterate it with a utilitronium shockwave:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/pre2014.html

Olivier5
The conjecture that predation among species is inevitable is no more tenable than the conjecture that predation among races is inevitable. This isn’t because selection pressure is going to slacken; on the contrary, selection pressure will intensify. But intelligent moral agents can decommission natural selection. A combination of genetic tweaking and cross-species fertility regulation (immunocontraception, remotely tunable synthetic gene drives, etc) together with ubiquitous AI surveillance is going to transform life on Earth.
https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html

Olivier5
Boredom? Its elimination will be trivial compared to defeating the biology of aging:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#eliminate

Predation?
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963
(I didn’t write the headline.) No sentient being need be harmed by some light genetic tweaking.

Plant sentience?
It’s a hoax:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#plantzombies

Outlander,
I share your dark view of humanity.
Yet should we discourage a scientific understanding of depression and its treatment for fear some people might use the knowledge to make their victims more depressed? Should we discourage a scientific understanding of pain, painkillers and pain-free surgery for fear some people might use the knowledge to inflict worse torments on their enemies? Most topically here, should we discourage research into the "volume knob for pain" for fear a few parents might choose malign rather than benign variants of SCN9A for their offspring? If taken to extremes, this worry would stymie all medical progress, not just transhumanism. Indeed, one reason for accelerating the major evolutionary transition in prospect is to put an end to demonic male "human nature".

Olivier5,
If I might quote Robert Lynd, “It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.” You say, “I tend to like life as it is, suffering included.” If you are alluding just to your own life here, cool! But please do bear in mind the obscene suffering that millions of human and nonhuman animals are undergoing right now. Recall that over 850,000 people take their own lives each year. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from depression and chronic pain. Billions of nonhuman animals suffer and die in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. I could go on, but I’m sure you get my point. Life doesn't have to be this way.

You say the transhumanist vision “scares” you? Why exactly? Quasi-immortal life based on gradients of intelligent bliss needn't be as scary as it sounds.

Oliver5
Could the future be worse than the past?
It’s a horrific thought. I promise I take s-risks seriously – although not all s-risks:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#dpsrisk

However, it’s worth drawing a distinction between two kinds of technology. Traditional technological advances do not target the negative-feedback mechanisms of hedonic treadmill. In consequence, there is little evidence that the subjective well-being – or ill-being – of the average twenty-first century human differs significantly from the average subjective well-being / ill-being of the average stone-age hunter-gatherer on the African savannah. Indeed, some objective measures of well-being / ill-being such as suicide rates and the incidence of serious self-harm suggest modern humans are worse off. By contrast, biological-genetic interventions to elevate hedonic range and hedonic set-points promise to revolutionise mental health. I’m as hooked on iPhones, air travel, social media and all the trappings of technological civilisation as anyone. I’m also passionate about social justice and political reform. But if we are morally serious about the problem of suffering, then we’ll have to tackle the root of the problem, namely our sinister genetic source code. Only transhumanism can civilise the world.

Marchesk
Utopia, dystopia or muddling through?
It’s a question of timescales. I’m sceptical experience below hedonic zero will exist a thousand years from now – and maybe much sooner. I suspect quasi-immortal intelligent life will be animated by gradients of superhuman bliss. So I could be mistaken for an optimist. I don’t believe nascent machine superintelligence will turn us into the equivalent of paperclips (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#dpautistic); I discount grey goo scenarios; I reckon e.g. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#engineering is more challenging than it sounds; and I think the poor will have access to biological-genetic reward pathway enhancements no less than the rich. Not least, I think we are living in the final century of animal agriculture, a monstrous crime against sentience on a par with the Holocaust.

However, I’m not at all optimistic that humanity will avoid nuclear war this century. “Local”, theatre or strategic nuclear war? I don’t know.
How can nuclear catastrophe be avoided?
I could offer some thoughts. But alas "Dave’s Plan For World Peace" will make limited impact.
So I fear unimaginable suffering still lies ahead.

Michael
The prospect of a “triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness still strikes most people as science fiction. By way of a reply, I’m going to focus just on the strand of the transhumanist project that strikes me as most morally urgent, namely overcoming the biology of involuntary suffering. Technically but not sociologically, everything I discuss could be achieved this century with recognisable extensions of existing technologies. Nothing I explore involves invoking e.g. a Kurzweilian Technological Singularity or machine superintelligence as a deus ex machina to solve all our problems. Even helping obscure marine invertebrates and fast-breeding rodents is technically feasible now – although pilot studies in self-contained artificial biospheres would be wise. Technically (but not sociologically), a “low pain” (as distinct from a “no pain”) biosphere could be created within decades. And imagine if all prospective parents were offered preimplantation genetic screening and counselling / gene-editing services so their future children could enjoy benign versions of the SCN9A (cf. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-cure-for-pain/), FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes. Imagine if cultured meat and animal products lead to the closure of factory-farms and slaughterhouses worldwide. Imagine if we spread benign versions of pain- and hedonic-tone-modulating genes across the biosphere with synthetic gene drives: https://www.gene-drives.com . Imagine if all humans and nonhuman animals were offered pharmacotherapy (cf. https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-in-luxembourg/a/1542875.html) to boost their endogenous opioid function. Imagine if we took the World Health Organization definition of good health seriously and literally: “complete physical, mental and social well-being”. Biological-genetic interventions would be indispensable. The WHO commitment to health is impossible to fulfil with our legacy genome. To stress, I’m not urging a Five Year Plan (as distinct from a Hundred-Year Plan) and certainly not delegating stewardship of the global ecosystem to philosophers! Rather, we need exhaustive research into risk-reward ratios and bioethical debate. How much pain and suffering in the living world is ethically optimal? Intelligent moral agents will shortly be able to choose:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#eatanimal

Outlander
Each of your points deserves a treatise. Forgive me for hotlinking.
Two classes of humans, enhanced and unenhanced?
Yes, it’s a possible risk. But the cost of genome sequencing and editing is collapsing. Likewise computer processing power. The biggest challenge won’t be cost, but ethics and ideology. Intelligence-amplification involves enriching our capacity for perspective-taking and empathy – and extending our circle of compassion to even the humblest minds. Transhumanists (cf. https://www.transhumanist.com) advocate full-spectrum (super)intelligence: https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com . The Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009) expresses our commitment to the well-being of all sentience – not a world of Nietzschean Übermenschen.

Coercion?
One human invention worth preserving is liberal democracy.

An end to evolution?
On the contrary, the entire biosphere is now programmable:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#killed

The beauties of Nature?
Nature will be more beautiful when sentient beings aren’t disembowelled, asphyxiated and eaten alive:
https://www.reprogramming-predators.com/

Persuading religious traditionalists?
Well, a world where all sentient beings can flourish isn’t the brainchild of starry-eyed transhumanists. It’s the “peaceable kingdom” of Isaiah. Transhumanists fill in some of the implementation details missing from the prophetic Biblical texts. For instance, the talk below was delivered to the Mormon Transhumanist Association:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/paradise.pdf

Hacking?
Yes, it’s a potential threat. But Darwinian life is a monstrous engine for the creation of suffering. Animal life on Earth has been “programmed” to suffer. It’s a design feature, not a bug or a hack. Darwinian malware should be patched or retired.

A “mere robot/non-human abomination?”
I’d need to know what you have in mind. But if we phase out the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero, then the meaning of “things going wrong” will be revolutionised too.

Schopenhauer1
I share your bleak diagnosis of Darwinian life:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#antinatal
But David Benatar and other “hard” antinatalists simply don’t get to grips with the argument from selection pressure. Antinatalists can’t hope to win:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/gods-little-rabbits-religious-people-out-reproduce-secular-ones-by-a-landslide/
See too my response to Down The Rabbit Hole above.

By contrast, for first time a few mainstream publications are starting to realise that genome editing makes a world without suffering possible:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
Like you, I find knowing that billions of sentient beings will suffer and die before the transhumanist vision can come to pass is dispiriting. I just can’t think of any sociologically credible alternative.

3017amen
Thank you.
Yes, transhumanists aspire to end involuntary suffering. It’s tempting to be lazy and normally say just “end suffering” but the “involuntary” is worth stressing. No one is credibly going to force you to be happy. Many of the objections one hears to the abolitionist project focus on the strange suspicion that someone, somewhere, intends to engineer coercive bliss and force the critic to be cheerful. As it happens, I cautiously predict that eventually all experience below hedonic zero will disappear in to evolutionary history (cf.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1239855/Transhumanist-writer-David-Pearce-technology-transhumanism-humanity-plus). But prediction is different from proscription. Perhaps the thorniest consent issue will be hedonic default settings. When the biology of suffering becomes technically entirely optional – and it will – should tradition-minded parents be legally allowed to have pain-ridden children “naturally” via the cruel genetic crapshoot of sexual reproduction? And must their children wait until they are eighteen (or whatever the legal age of majority) to be cured? Eventually, creating malaise-ridden babies like today’s Darwinian malware may seem to be outright child abuse. This prediction needs to be expressed with delicacy lest it’s misunderstood.

Pro-social?
Some conceptions of a superintelligence resemble a SuperAsperger. Ill-named “IQ” tests measure only the “autistic” component of general intelligence. “Superintelligence” shouldn’t be conceived as some kind of asocial singleton. Recall how human evolution was driven in part by our prowess at mind-reading, cooperative-problem solving and social cognition. True, contemporary accounts of posthuman superintelligence always reveal more about the cognitive limitations and preoccupations of the authors than they do about posthuman superintelligence. But full-spectrum superintelligences won’t resemble autistic savants – or “paperclippers”:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#dpautistic

Pinprick
Thank you.
What is the relationship between superintelligence and super-wellbeing?
It’s tricky. The best I can manage is an analogy. Consider AlphaGo. Compared to humble grandmasters, AlphaGo is a superintelligence. Nonetheless, even club players grasp something about the game of chess that AlphaGo doesn’t comprehend. The “chess superintelligence” is an ignorant zombie. I don’t know how posthuman superintelligences will view the Darwinian era that spawned them. Maybe posthumans will allude, rarely, to Darwinian life in the way that contemporary humans allude, rarely, to the Dark Ages. Most humans know virtually nothing about the Dark Ages beyond the name – and have no desire to investigate further. What's the point? Maybe superintelligences occupying a hedonic range of, say, +80 to +100 will conceive hedonically sub-zero Darwinian states of consciousness by analogy with notional states below hedonic +80 – their functional equivalent of the dark night of the soul, albeit unimaginably richer than human “peak experiences”. The nature of Sidgwick's "natural watershed" itself, i.e. hedonic zero, may be impenetrable to them, let alone the nature of suffering. Or maybe posthuman superintelligences will never contemplate the Darwinian era at all. Maybe they’ll offload stewardship of the accessible cosmos to zombie AIs. On this scenario, programmable zombie AIs will ensure that sub-zero experience can never re-occur within our cosmological horizon without any deep understanding of what they’re doing (cf. AlphaGo). In any event, I don’t think posthuman superintelligences will seek to understand suffering in any full-blooded empathetic sense. If any mind were to glimpse even a fraction of the suffering in the world, it would become psychotic.

Whatever the nature of mature superintelligence, I think it’s vital that humans and transhumans investigate the theoretical upper bounds to intelligent agency so we can learn our ultimate cosmological responsibilities. Premature defeatism might be ethically catastrophic.

Suffering and desire?
Buddhists equate the two. But the happiest people tend to have the most desires, whereas depressives are often unmotivated. Victims of chronic depression suffer from “learned helplessness” and behavioural despair. So the extinction of desire per se is not nirvana. Quite possibly transhumans and posthumans will be superhappy and hypermotivated. Intuitively, for sure, extreme motivation is the recipe for frustrated desire and hence suffering. Yet this needn’t be so if we phase out the biology of experience below hedonic zero. Dopaminergic “wanting” is doubly dissociable from mu-opioidergic “liking”; but motivated bliss is feasible too. If you’ll permit another chess analogy, I always desire to win against my computer chess program. I’m highly motivated. But I always lose. Such frustrated desire never causes me suffering unless my mood is dark already. The same is feasible on the wider canvas of Darwinian life as a whole if we reprogram the biosphere to eradicate suffering. Conserving information-sensitivity is the key, not absolute position on the pleasure-pain axis:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#hedonictreadmill

Down The Rabbit Hole
Thank you. Yes, I accept a version of the asymmetry theory. The badness of suffering is self-intimating, whereas there is nothing inherently wrong with inexistence. And yes, I’m a “soft” antinatalist. Bringing pain-ridden life into the world without prior consent is morally indefensible. Nor would I choose to have children on the theory that the good things in life typically outweigh the bad. Enduring metaphysical egos are fiction. That said, I don’t campaign for antinatalism. “Hard” antinatalism is not a viable solution to the problem of suffering. Staying childfree just imposes selection pressure against any predisposition be an antinatalist. As far as I can tell, the selection pressure argument against “hard” antinatalism is fatal (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#agreeantinatal).

Contrast the impending reproductive revolution of designer babies. As prospective parents choose the genetic makeup of their offspring in anticipation of the behavioural and psychological effects of their choices, the nature of selection pressure will change. Post-CRISPR and its successors, there will be intensifying selection pressure against our nastier alleles and allelic combinations at least as severe as selection pressure against alleles for, say, cystic fibrosis. Imagine you could choose the approximate hedonic set-point and hedonic range of your future children. What genetic dial-settings would you choose?

The Pinprick Argument? Recall that negative utilitarians want to abolish all experience below hedonic zero. So if any apparently NU policy-proposal causes you even the slightest hint of disappointment – for example sadness that we won’t get to enjoy a glorious future of superhuman bliss – then other things being equal, that policy-proposal is not NU. So NUs can and should support upholding the sanctity of life in law, forbidding chronic pain-specialists from euthanizing patients without prior consent, and many other political policy-prescriptions that are naively un-utilitarian. Not least, NUs are not plotting Armageddon (well, most of us anyway: https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-the-universe-the-dubious-philosophy-of-human-extinction-149331).