Pretty late but still wanted to say it but the whole tranahumanist stuff is weird, if transhumanism ever booms within our lifetime it won't be aviable to the average citizen so you won't have cyberpunk-eske cyborg people running around or troons actually transitioning, it would most likely be aviable only to the military so chances are you'd have a something like the Combine from Half-Life 2, soulless abominations that have no independent thoughts or morals and who's entire existence is dictaded by their overlords, now that I think about it, troons might fit right in with that world, hell, a lot of them do look like stalkers from the game.
Disagree actually.
To actually do any of that cyberpunk-eske shit, you have to be able to have technology that can directly communicate with the brain at the speed of the brain. So the first "implants" that you'd see for any kind of actual augmentation, as opposed to a prostheses, would be neurological in nature, which has a very broad set of applications. First applications will probably be something """simple""". For instance, If you're, I don't know, a physicist, an accountant, actuary, or something like that, imagine a number and set of operation, implant interprets it, sends its interpretation to a computer, gets it back and gives you a result as like a little number or something that either pops into your vision or your head.
Scientific applications will probably come first, then the military refines it and makes it into something useful.
Transhumanism under our current society would be dedicated to wringing out every bit of productivity they can to make line go up. You'd see people embracing 'hustle' culture and maybe even going to black market/underground implant rings to try and make money to scrape by. If nothing is done then current income inequality would only worsen (it's already really bad) and people would sell their soul (and flesh) to do anything to put more food on the table. What would once be a dream of embracing yourself and escaping the prison that is the flesh you'd only be mutilating yourself just to grind a bit more.
Do you know how much pain fast food workers are in? They're all abusing either painkillers or advil. Whichever they can get their hands on. Standing in one place on a hard surface is hell on your body. When I worked there we were all in great pain, our legs and feed were killing us. I remember for the first two months I'd get home and be unable to walk and I was only doing three hours a day, the full-timers were completely fucked up. Can you imagine people taking out loans to combat that? Getting implants just to make their minimum wage job less grueling? The debt people would land themselves in?
Transhumanism is only good in a fairy tale.
Everything on the production end of society is about wringing every bit of productivity out of people (as well as everything else), and always has been. Income inequality is going to continue to get worse, in fact, it's been getting worse ever since humans went above Neolithic savagery. That's because if there exists wealth, there exists the potential for someone to have more of it than others, the more, the more. So what you'll get, is that the people who are the top have ever more produced wealth attributed to them, and they'll take whatever proportion of it.
People would also go into debt for a car so they don't have to walk to work. People go into debt to operate/start a businesspeople do a lot of shit. Now you have the opportunity to stick machines in your body for some benefit to counter some hardship. The only difference I see between then and now is the instinctual repulsion you'd have to doing it. Before, we had kids who'd work in factories with little to no safety measures for 12 hour shifts for shit pay, coped with it, changed it. Shits bad then, people fixed it or dealt with it in some way creating new problems, shits bad now, people are trying to fix it or are dealing with it in some way and will create new problems.
