I had a very long writeup on this but I had a similar journey from identifying as a transhumanist to deeply despising AI, so I appreciate seeing this. I'll quote part of mine and perhaps identify:
"I worked actively in frontier since at least 2012 including several stints in "disruptive technology" companies where I became very familiar with the technology cult perspective and to a significant extent, identified. One should note that there is a definitely healthy aspect to it, though even the most healthiest aspect is, as one could argue, colonialist - the idea of destructive change in order to "make a better world."
Until 2023..
And yet I also had a deep and abiding love of art, heavily influenced by "Art as Prayer" by Andrei Tarkovsky, and this actually fit into a deep and abiding spiritual, even religion viewpoint that integrated my love of technology and love of art.
In my spare time and nontrivially, I spent a lot of time writing, drawing here and there, as well as writing poetry - all which had a deep and significant meaning to me.
In the Hermetic system, Man is the creation of clay and spirit imbued with the divine spark to create; this is why science and technology can be seen as a form of worship, because to learn of Nature and to advance the "occult" into the known is part of the Divine Science to ultimately know God and summon the spirits via the Machine; the computer is the modern occultist's version of the pentagram and circle. But simultaneous with this, is the understanding that the human is the one who ultimately is the creator, who "draws imagination from the Empyrean realms, transforms them into the material substance, and sublimates it into art" as glimpses of the magical. Another version of this is in the Platonic concept of the Forms, which are then conveyed into actual items via the labor of the artist or the craftsman.
As such, the deep love of technology and the deep love for art was not in contrast in the least, because one helped the other and in both, the ultimately human spirit was very much glorified. Perhaps there is a lot of the cyborg in it, but the human is never extinguished.
The change came in last year with the widespread release of Chatgpt. I actually was an early user of Midjourney and played around with it as an ideation device, which I would have never faulted a user of AI for. But it was when the realization that the augmentation of that which is human was exchanged for the replacement of human that I knew that something had gone deeply, terribly wrong with the philosophy of the place.
Perhaps that was not the only reason: another transformative experience was reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness which changed a lot of my awareness of life from something of "information"(which is still the default thinking of techbros, which is why mind-uploading is such a popular meme) into the understanding of the holobiont that life, even in an "organism" is in fact a kind of enormous ecosystem of many autonomous or semi-autonomous actors as small as the cellular level(or even below!). A human is in fact almost as much "not human" as human - now while the research as been revised slightly, it still comes out that an average human is perhaps at most 66% human, and many of our human cells show incredible independent initiative. Life is a "whorl of meaning" and miraculous on so many fundamental levels.
And now, with the encroachment of technology, was the idea of not only replacing humanity with the creation of art, one of the most fundamentally soulful things that we do, but the idea of extinguishing life for some sort of "more perfection." Others have already talked about this particular death cult of the tech-bros, but this article covers the omnicidal attitude well, which goes beyond just the murder of all of humanity but also the death of all organic life. Such attitudes are estimated to be among AI researchers between 5 to 10%, the people who are in fact, actively leading us down this path who literally want you and everything you love to die.
I responded to the widespread AI the same way with a lot of other researchers in the area - initially with a mental breakdown(which I am still recovering from) and then with the realization that with the monster that had been created, we had to make the world as aware as possible and to try to stop it.
Art as Transcendence
Art is beauty, art is fundamental to human communication and I believe that while humans exist, we will never stop creating art. But beyond that, is the realization of art as transcendent - it speaks of the urgency of love, the precariousness of life, the marvel that is heroism, the gentleness of caring, and all of the central meaning of our existence, things which should be eternal and things I truly realize now are part and parcel of our biology. One doesn't have to relate to a supernatural soul to know that these things should be infused into our very being and that they are, by nature, not part of any mechanical substrate. A jellyfish alien that breathes through its limbs would be more true to us than a computer with a human mind upload in that sense; for anything that is organic is almost certainly that same kind of ecosystem, of life built upon life, of a whorl of meaning and ultimately of beauty, while the machine is a kind of inert death, and undeath in its simulacrum and counterfeit of the human being.
And in that, I realized that there was a point where the human must be protected from the demons that we are trying to raise, because no longer are we trying to summon aid to us, but so many of the technologists have become besotted and have fallen in love with their own monsters, and not with the very life that has created us and given us all this wonderous existence to feel, to breathe and to be. "
Someone asked me how come I used to have a strong identity as a singularitarian / transhumanist but don’t have it anymore. Here’s what I answered them:
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So I think the short version is something like: transhumanism/singularitarianism used to give me hope about things I felt strongly about. Molecular nanotechnology would bring material abundance, radical life extension would cure aging, AI would solve the rest of our problems. Over time, it started feeling like 1) not much was actually happening with regard to those things, and 2) to the extent that it was, I couldn’t contribute much to them and 3) trying to work on those directly was bad for me, and also 4) I ended up caring less about some of those issues for other reasons and 5) I had other big problems in my life.
So an identity as a transhumanist/singularitarian stopped being a useful emotional strategy for me and then I lost interest in it.
With regard to 4), a big motivator for me used to be some kind of fear of death. But then I thought about philosophy of personal identity until I shifted to the view that there’s probably no persisting identity over time anyway and in some sense I probably die and get reborn all the time in any case.
Here’s something that I wrote back in 2009 that was talking about 1):
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The [first phase of the Excitement-Disillusionment-Reorientation cycle of online transhumanism] is when you first stumble across concepts such as transhumanism, radical life extension, and superintelligent AI. This is when you subscribe to transhumanist mailing lists, join your local WTA/H+ chapter, and start trying to spread the word to everybody you know. You’ll probably spend hundreds of hours reading different kinds of transhumanist materials. This phase typically lasts for several years.
In the disillusionment phase, you start to realize that while you still agree with the fundamental transhumanist philosophy, most of what you are doing is rather pointless. You can have all the discussions you want, but by themselves, those discussions aren’t going to bring all those amazing technologies here. You learn to ignore the “but an upload of you is just a copy” debate when it shows up the twentieth time, with the same names rehearsing the same arguments and thought experiments for the fifteenth time. Having gotten over your initial future shock, you may start to wonder why having a specific name like transhumanism is necessary in the first place – people have been taking advantage of new technologies for several thousands of years. After all, you don’t have a specific “cellphonist” label for people using cell phones, either. You’ll slowly start losing interest in activities that are specifically termed as transhumanist.
In the reorientation cycle you have two alternatives. Some people renounce transhumanism entirely, finding the label pointless and mostly a magnet for people with a tendency towards future hype and techno-optimism. Others (like me) simply realize that bringing forth the movement’s goals requires a very different kind of effort than debating other transhumanists on closed mailing lists. An effort like engaging with the large audience in a more effective manner, or getting an education in a technology-related field and becoming involved in the actual research yourself. In either case, you’re likely to unsubscribe the mailing lists or at least start paying them much less attention than before. If you still identify as a transhumanist, your interest in the online communities wanes because you’re too busy actually working for the cause. (Alternatively, you’ve realized how much work this would be and have stopped even trying.)
This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I’m saying the online h+ community is unnecessary, and that people ought to just skip to the last phase. The first step of the cycle is a very useful ingredient for giving one a strong motivation to keep working for the cause in one’s later life, even when they’re no longer following the lists.
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So that’s describing a shift from “I’m a transhumanist” to “just saying I’m a transhumanist is pointless, I need to actually contribute to the development of these technologies”. So then I tried to do that and eventually spent several years trying to do AI strategy research, but that had the problem that I didn’t enjoy it much and didn’t feel very good at it. It was generally a poor fit for me due to a combination of various factors, some including “thinking all day about how AI might very well destroy everything that I value and care about is depressing”. So then I made the explicit decision to stop working on this stuff until I’d feel better, and that by itself made me feel better.
There were also various things in my personal psychology and history that were making me feel anxious and depressed, that actually had nothing to do with transhumanism and singularitarianism. I think that I had earlier been able to stave off some of that anxiety and depression by focusing on the thought of how AI is going to solve all our problems, including my personal ones. But then it turned out that focusing on therapy-type things as well as focusing on my concrete current circumstances were more effective for changing my anxiety than depression than pinning my hopes on AI. And pinning my hopes on AI wouldn’t work very well anymore anyway, since AI now seems more likely to me to lead to dystopian outcomes than utopian ones.