Like a lot of social questions, attitudes toward disability remediation only start getting really nasty when they intersect with people's identities -- which is probably what writers are getting at much of the time when they talk about "disability culture", although I think that's a less than ideal choice of words since cultures intersect only imperfectly with self-image. Now, at this point I could link to "Keep Your Identity Small" and wash my hands of the problem. Certainly that's the advice I'd give to anyone in the unlikely position of making conscious choices about their future relationship with disability. But that's a dodge, and there's enough situations where it's inadequate that I think the question deserves a real answer.

I don't think breaking our response to the identity construction of disability down in medical terms ("they're sick; it's our job to cure them") is going to get us anywhere: the social architecture of medicine makes it poorly suited to navigating scenarios which the patient wouldn't consider dysfunctional. Let's consider our response in sociological terms instead: it has medical consequences when alternatives are or may become available, but people take on all sorts of identities with quality-of-life implications.

Looked at through that lens, choosing to accept a disability when remedial measures are available becomes largely equivalent to e.g. taking a vow of silence. Public choice issues make this trickier (enough so that I could probably devote a fairly long post to them), but if we leave those out it looks to be well within the scope of social variation: a little weird, sure, but not obviously destructive and perhaps handy on a society-wide level if problems come up where isomorphic coping skills would be useful.

But then there's the issue of taking steps to spread disability identification: patients opting out of gene therapies which could resolve the disability for their children, campaigning against curative technologies, and so forth. To a certain extent this can be considered self-defensive, and it's probably best to keep the distinction in mind. But insofar as it involves nonconsensual withholding of potential cures, it seems equivalent to (to borrow an Iain M. Banks phrase) aggressive hegemonization, and strikes me as rude. Identities do not have a right to exist independent of their carriers' preferences, and attempts to render those preferences irrelevant should probably be discouraged.

The analogies to augmentive transhumanism are all fairly straightforward.

Increasingly, the attitude of disabled people was that it wasn't inherently bad to be disabled

Same way that many battered spouses have learned to talk about the good points of their abusers, and many mortal people have learned to talk about the good points of mortality, I'm sure that many disabled people have learned to talk about the good points of their disability.

But as for the rest of us, we don't need to treat abuse, or death, or disability as remotely good.

I remember hearing about people complaining that cochlear implants were damaging deaf culture, or something. A quick google turned this up as the first hit, which seems to be evidence that what I heard was somewhat real.

I'm pretty sure I have heard about people saying that technology for having unimpaired children is in some way 'against' the disabled.

An awful lot of people do not think straight.

I'm not sure the question means anything, nor am I sure exactly what it would mean if it did.

An easier thought experiment for me to imagine, which seems to relate to this question, is how I would expect cultural attitudes towards unattractive people to evolve when technology allows individuals to choose their appearances. A still easier one is how I would expect such attitudes to be projected into an online environment where people choose the appearances of their avatars. My intuition is that the "ugly"/"attractive" scale starts to mean very different things in such cultures, and ultimately ceases to mean much of anything at all, and questions like "should I be allowed to choose an ugly avatar?" and "should my avatar be forcibly upgraded to be less ugly?" start to feel like silly questions to which the correct answer is "who cares?". Sure, I may understand intellectually that newcomers to this culture come from a world where attractiveness matters a great deal, and may have a hard time acclimatizing themselves to the idea that my world is different; I may even sympathize with their need to ask such silly questions, but that won't make me respect the questions any more.

Relatedly, one thing I might expect in a transhumanist culture is that the whole idea of a linear scale of ability might wither in the face of a myriad incommensurable but mutually exclusive abilities and a general presumption of as much competence as an individual desires. That is, "disabled" would come to mean something very different, and ultimately would cease to mean much of anything.

Put another way: if I'm a nonverbal autistic in such a culture who has the choice of installing the ability to express affection verbally, but chooses not to, and you're a something-else who has the choice of installing the ability to understand how I communicate affection but chooses not to, and both of us have the choice of installing the ability to communicate telepathically but have chosen not to, it's not clear to me that either of us is in a position even remotely like the autistic and his mother you describe.

Another example: in such a culture, if I plug real-time information about others' preferences directly into my own motivational framework to become maximally social, while you artificially compensate for the natural cognitive biases that would ordinarily cause your motives to be influenced by others' expressed preferences in order to become maximally independent (or vice versa, if you prefer), it's not at all clear that it makes sense to talk about either of us as disabled, even though each of us lacks an ability the other possesses, and even though someone in my culture who approximated either of those states might be considered disabled in various ways.

So, I dunno. I agree that a rational clear dialogue about disability is desirable, but more because of their actual effect on the present than their hypothetical effect on a potential transhumanist future.

Interesting analogies and questions, but

It is not useful to ignore the role of disabled people and disability culture in the transhumanist movement. I believe that the future has a lot to offer many people with disabilities, including those who do not want a 'cure.' Transhumanism can encompass interest in diverse AAC methods, and I believe it should.

This reeks of politics - of "you should believe this because of the political gains to a movement associated to a label that might describe you" instead of "you should believe this because evidence shows it's true".

The label "transhumanist" might apply to me, but that doesn't mean I have any loyalty to a "transhumanist movement" or that I should support things that are "useful" to that movement. (Was it "useful" to the Russian communist movement to start killing off dissenters, ally with Hitler and starve Ukrainians? It allowed the "movement" to last many decades!)

I'd rather we just talked about whether X was right or wrong, or how to think clearly about X, or what the evidence about X is. A solid argument shouldn't require any reference to the listener's identity.

I think that the underlying issue is that different people often make radically different (and sometimes conflicting) qualities a central part of their personal identity. What's worse, some such identifications are regarded as improper while others are enshrined as utterly inviolate, all without any widely agreed upon decision-making metric.

In the case of individuals making their own choices things are usually manageable (one might expect as much or more variance in a transhuman society even without identity politics), but when it comes to propagating identity things get messy. As far as I'm aware, no one's managed to solve that problem to wide satisfaction even for things like religious affiliation that can be changed relatively easily later in life.

I tend to sympathize with Paul Graham here, but I can't even begin to see a society-level solution to the problem. Even the sort of changes discussed by TheOtherDave are regarded as extremely offensive in some cases.

For what it's worth, as a diagnosed autist and a (adult-)lifelong self-identified transhumanist, I can tell you that I never encounter disagreement with the notion of neurodiversity being the ultimate goal of transhumanism, as opposed to forced arbitrary definitions of what is 'superior'. After all; ultimately there is very little difference in the expected utility of providing hearing to the deaf as opposed to finding means of translating sound into other senses they already possess, or even granting senses they do not yet possess in order to process auditory input.

That we are currently limited from doing so does not mean that these things are impossible. Consider as a thought experiment the introduction of ampullae of Lorenzini (electroreceptors as found in sharks) to an adult deaf person with an external device that translated auditory input into local electrical fields those ampullae could then pick up.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread; as a diagnosed autist I find that my patterns of thought are significantly different from those around me. And while I would certainly cheer the development of a cure for the low-functioning part of low-functioning autism, I would find myself apalled at the notion of a cure for autism itself. While I from time to time toy with the notion of wondering what it would be like to be like "the rest of you" -- I treasure my difference and the distinctive insights it has clearly offered me.

So as I espouse transhumanism to others, I do so by couching it in terms of providing a wider array of available outcomes, rather than thinking I have the right -- let alone the qualifications -- to decide what forms of 'being' are superior to others, all relevant expected utilities being equal. (Case in point: I would not do away with the ability to 'suffer' unhappiness. I find that, at least for myself, there is no more powerful motivator towards dissatisfaction with my current condition. If a means could be found to prevent profound depression, however, I believe making it an option would be a highly positive moral outcome. I just wouldn't force it on anyone.)