General recommendations

When presenting about transhumanism to a fresh audience, especially if there is a possibility of a discussion/debate, concentrate on obviously strong points of transhumanism, avoid its weak and controversial points. During the first talk there is no need to paint a comprehensive picture with all the subtleties. First impression is important, so present an optimistic picture to make people accept it.

Take into account future shock levels. Pick the level you and your audience will be comfortable with and don't stray too high from it.

Explain why transhumanism is a topic that can't be ignored, why some stand must be taken on the upcoming technological developments and then explain why transhumanist position makes most sense.

And of course, use general presentation best-practices.

Proposed introduction strategy

The above strategy (download Freemind mindmap) was developed by analyzing common problems we encounter when explaining transhumanism to people and trying to find ways around that. The main problems are:

1. people don't understand
1. either because they don't see the connection to their real life
2. or because they can't appreciate the scale of change),
2. people reject (
1. either because the ideas violate one of the many myths they believe about the reality and contradicts their worldview
2. or because they understand it and are scared).

The resulting strategy requries introducing people to the history of technological development, its acceleration, its important role in modern society and only after that trying to entice them with some transhumanist possibilities (e.g. intelligence augmentation) and specific non-threatening visions of the future (all the time keeping future shock levels in mind).

General approach

• deal with pessimism
  • show past progress of technologies
• persuade that technologies are reality
  • examples of technologies that radically changed everything
  • examples of "experts" who said technology X won't work or nobody would use it
  • accelerated development
  • everything in the modern life is thanks to technologies
• interest them in the future
  • nice images of the future
  • transhumanism - self improvement
• tell some things about the future showing how it is relevant to them
  • FSL-strategy
  • build a detailed reasoning chain from evidence to real lives of people