My take on this is something like:

a) this post is certainly pointing at a useful and relevant quality

b) this post may be useful for Conor specifically referring people to for how his brain works

c) this post (or something like it) could also be useful as a general "here are qualities that we should aspire to and think about" thing, which'd be handy to build off of. But using the word human means that, at the very least, every time some new people talk about the concept there's going to be a chunk of time spent rehashing the argument of "you're saying people aren't human!?" (Or, people understanding the post... but still being uncomfortable with it and doing a song-and-dance around distancing themselves from the variations on this idea that feed directly into things like moral worth).

Even if, after every one of the iterations, people talk things through and end up on the same page, I just anticipate a lot of wasted time. Human is just such a loaded term.

I acknowledge, and mainly agree. I have no strong or principled defense of this thing that my brain does, and wouldn't object to people pumping against it even if they did so much more strongly than you do above.

However, it is what my brain does.

I could dance around it by saying something like "a less vibrant and interesting person," which might be better? That, too, is a true statement—while it feels a little like PR semantics, it also underscores that personhood is a binary that can't be taken away? (My brain absolutely does think of personhood as a binary that all people except maybe those in permanent vegetative comas have.)

I do want to point out, though, that something in your brain caused you to round me off to saying not human, which I absolutely did not say at any point in the post. There's an enormous qualitative difference between less and not. Although maybe that, in and of itself, is an object example of why you are advocating caution (because people hear what they hear, regardless of what you say, and there's a benefit to keeping a wide moat around something like that).

Yeah, I like most of your substitutes. May edit to adaptibility (which also does assonance!).

Ah, but that was the point of the post? That I, in my personal opinion, think that unneccessary imperceptiveness and ineffectiveness and stubbornness makes someone less interesting and less valuable and less my peer, particularly when they're reflectively endorsed and enthusiastically embraced.

Descriptively, I agree with you completely—those traits are exceedingly human. But prescriptively, I fight them with everything I've got. I think they are strong candidates for "what we will outgrow," as a culture and as a species.

The astronaut is a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. The statue is titled "Self-Made Man" and is just a popular statue to the best of my knowledge (there was a cast of it on the UNC Charlotte campus, which is where I first saw it).

See above, where other people have made the same points you're trying to make, except they made them less antagonistically and also included additional thoughts and ideas that enriched the conversation.