Aside from the openning, it seemed okay.  It had a slight quality of praise of the concepts sitting beneath his personal objections.

Rather a mixed treatment, I'd say.  There was definitely a lot of "this is weeeeird!" in the article, and an unwarranted and distracting emphasis on the physical appearance of some of the presenters, but I think this paragraph:

"Maybe the cockeyed thinking of transhumanists is what allows them to see the illogic of the way we dope kids with caffeine while banning other stimulants. Maybe that's why they find it odd that we denounce steroids as cheating but ignore athletes who get Lasik or muscle-enhancing surgery. Maybe that's why they look back at the doubling of human life expectancy in the last century and wonder why we shouldn't try to double it again. To our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they figure, we already look posthuman."

is EXACTLY on the mark.  It's promising that he can at least give some credit to this logic, despite calling it "cockeyed".

Dale Carrico has posted an excellent response:

"Thanks for Back-Handed Compliments"
06/06/2006
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/IEETblog/carrico20060606/

Saletan strikes me as being as close to an ally as we'll find in the mainstream media; I've always liked his tech-positive bioethics coverage on Slate.  While his portrayal was skeptical, it was also relatively friendly, and did give complements where they are due.

Hmm, I just read Carrico's response, and it left me thinking a few things:

1) Why did Saletan put such emphasis on body-modifiers?  I hang out with a lot of them, but few of them strike me as really transhumanist- most are just the opposite, neo-primitivists.  As for me, I'm happy with my unmodified body for now; I'll wait for the real enhancements to come along.

2) Saletan has never struck me as a Kassian bioconservative- on the contrary, he seems cautiously optimistic- not a transhumanist, but certainly not opposed to our goals (maybe in a personal sense, but certainly not in a legal sense).  I get a Ron Bailey-esq, moderate libertarian vibe off of him, and these libertarians are allies we need.

3) While I'm more or less a political centrist, and have been all but labeled a commie by some Extropians, a lot of these transhumanists are a bit too socialist for my liking, and haven't seriously thought out the economic ramifications of their programs, or looked at the history of social-democratic economic plans (which, while not entirely negative, and quite useful on a local scale, have proven unworkable or harmful on a mass scale).  A global GMI?  Along with universal single-payer healthcare?  In a world where the PCGDP barely tops $7200, and 3 billion people still live on only $2 a day?  You have to be joking.  I'd like to give everyone in the world free ice cream too, but it ain't exactly feasable.

4) 'With “enemies” like Saletan, who needs friends?'  

Which begs the question, is Saletan really an "enemy"?  Or is he simply an amused observer, happy to let us continue on our merry way, enjoying the spectacle of it all, while chuckling under his breath at the hysteric fears of blowhards like Fukuyama and Kass?  I'm leaning towards the latter.

I agree with PMS; I think William is spicing it up just to increase page views for Slate. It's not that he's attempting to totally discredit the ideas behind the conference.

Who's really weird? This attendees of the conference, who are at least trying to think about the implications of all this emergent technology or, President Bush, for invoking scare images of cockroach-men during his State of the Union?

...or Jeb Bush, and his imaginary Mystical Warrior Friend named "Chang".

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/20/jeb-bush-reveals/

Frivolity aside, I am actually really excited to see all these different conference reviews popping up and the different impressions people came away with.  Even if some of them might be "spicing things up for the media".

This past
Friday, James
Hughes
of the World Transhumanist Association
(WTA) and Institute for Ethics...