Transhumanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Transhumanism is a philosophical movement built on a single, startling conviction: that the human condition is not fixed. In 1923, the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane predicted that every advance in applying science to human biology would first appear to someone as blasphemy or perversion, "indecent and unnatural". He was describing a tension that has never gone away. What does it mean to improve a human being? And who gets to decide when improvement becomes something else entirely? These are the questions that have driven transhumanist thinkers for over a century, from a futurist who renamed himself FM-2030 to a philosopher named Nick Bostrom who worries about asteroids and gray goo threatening civilization itself.

• 2. Ancient Roots, Modern Name

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  Nick Bostrom has traced the impulse toward self-transcendence as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the quest for immortality. Dante, writing his Divine Comedy, coined the word trasumanar, meaning "to transcend human nature" or "to pass beyond human nature", in the first canto of Paradiso. René Descartes, in his 1637 Discourse on Method, imagined a new kind of medicine capable of granting both physical immortality and stronger minds. William Godwin, in his 1793 Political Justice, laid out arguments favoring what he called "earthly immortality". His gothic novel St. Leon, published in 1799, explored life extension and may have inspired his daughter Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

  The word "transhumanism" itself has a complicated origin. The biologist Julian Huxley is generally credited as its popularizer, using it as the title of an influential 1957 article. But the term actually derives from a 1940 paper by the Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall. Huxley's framing was direct: he wrote that the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself, not sporadically but in its entirety, as humanity. That vision set the terms for everything that followed.

  In 1966, FM-2030, born F. M. Esfandiary, began teaching "new concepts of the human" at The New School in New York City. He called people who adopted technologies and worldviews transitional to posthumanity "transhuman". That usage laid the intellectual groundwork for British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990.

• 3. Building a Movement

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  The first self-described transhumanists met formally in the early 1980s at the University of California, Los Angeles. FM-2030 lectured there on his "Third Way" futurist ideology. At the EZTV Media venue, Natasha Vita-More presented a 1980 experimental film called Breaking Away, which explored humans escaping biological limitations and Earth's gravity. By 1982, Vita-More had authored the Transhumanist Arts Statement, and by 1988 she produced the cable TV show TransCentury Update on transhumanity, which reached over 100,000 viewers.

  In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology and founded the Foresight Institute. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the first nonprofit organization to research and perform cryonics, became a center for futurists through its Southern California offices. Max More and Tom Morrow published the first issue of Extropy Magazine in 1988. More then created the Principles of Extropy in 1990, defining transhumanism as a class of philosophies seeking to guide humanity toward a posthuman condition while sharing humanism's respect for reason, science, and progress.

  In 1992, More and Morrow founded the Extropy Institute, which provided a mailing list that exposed many people to transhumanist ideas for the first time during the rise of cyberculture. Six years later, in 1998, philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association as an international non-governmental organization. In 2008, it rebranded as Humanity+. By 2012, the Longevity Party had been initiated as an international union with more than 30 national organisations. That same year, Giuseppe Vatinno became the first transhumanist elected to a parliament, in Italy.

• 4. The Technological Horizon

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  I. J. Good, the British cryptologist, first proposed the concept of the technological singularity in 1965. He defined an ultraintelligent machine as one that could far surpass all human intellectual activities, and argued that such a machine could then design even better machines, producing an "intelligence explosion" that would leave human intelligence far behind. Good concluded: "Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

  Computer scientist Marvin Minsky wrote on the relationships between human and artificial intelligence beginning in the 1960s. Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil followed, oscillating between technical work and futuristic speculation. Robert Ettinger, whose 1964 book Prospect of Immortality founded the cryonics movement, contributed to the conceptualization of transhumanity with his 1972 book Man into Superman. Kurzweil's own book, The Singularity is Near, and Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future both outline specific human enhancement technologies and their potential impact.

  Transhumanists support the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science, a grouping sometimes called NBIC. They also look ahead to simulated reality, artificial intelligence, 3D bioprinting, mind uploading, and cryonics. Some speculate that radical human enhancement may be achievable no later than the midpoint of the 21st century. The U.S. Department of Defense has already accelerated research on brain and body alteration technologies, with military scientists exploring the possibility of extending human capacity for combat to a maximum of 168 hours without sleep.

• 5. Bodies and Borders

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  Kevin Warwick did not merely propose modifying the human nervous system. In 2002, he had a 100-electrode array surgically implanted into the median nerves of his left arm, linking his nervous system directly with a computer and thus also with the internet. He was then able to control a robot hand using his neural signals and feel the force applied through feedback from the fingertips. He experienced a form of ultrasonic sensory input and conducted what he described as the first purely electronic communication between his own nervous system and that of his wife, who also had electrodes implanted.

  Cyborg artist Neil Harbisson represents a different approach. His antenna, permanently implanted in his skull, allows him to sense colours beyond normal human perception, including infrareds and ultraviolets. Neuroscientist Anders Sandberg has been practicing the method of scanning ultra-thin sections of the brain, currently being used on mice, as a first step toward hypothetically uploading the contents of the human brain onto a computer.

  At the everyday level, many people are already participating in what transhumanists consider basic enhancement. Doctors prescribe medicines such as Ritalin and Adderall for cognitive focus. Lifestyle drugs such as Viagra, Propecia, and Botox are used to restore aspects of youthfulness. Cosmetic surgery alters physical form for non-medical reasons. Human growth hormones attempt to alter the natural development of shorter children. In a 2011-2012 survey by Hank Pellissier of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 818 transhumanists responded, and 23.8% of them said they did not actually want immortality. Some cited boredom, overpopulation, or the desire to reach an afterlife.

• 6. The Critics and the Fault Lines

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  Francis Fukuyama, in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future and in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article, designated transhumanism as the world's most dangerous idea, arguing it may undermine the egalitarian ideals of democracy by altering human nature. Social philosopher Jürgen Habermas made a similar case in his 2003 book The Future of Human Nature, contending that moral autonomy depends on not being subject to another's unilaterally imposed specifications, which embryo-stage genetic alteration would violate.

  Bill McKibben, in his 2003 book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, argued that overcoming universal human limitations would remove the context that makes meaningful choice possible. He pointed to Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, and the contemporary Amish as examples of societies that benefited from renouncing particular technologies. Science journalist Ronald Bailey challenged McKibben's historical examples, noting that some Amish communities are actually welcoming gene therapy because inbreeding has afflicted them with rare genetic diseases.

  The socioeconomic divide is one of the sharpest fault lines. Biologist Lee M. Silver, who coined the term "reprogenetics", expressed concern about a two-tiered society of genetically engineered "haves" and "have nots". Bioethicist James Hughes argued in his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg that a universal health care voucher system covering enhancement technologies would be a more effective response than prohibition. Philosopher Mary Midgley, in her 1992 book Science as Salvation, characterized the transhumanist lineage of thinkers as engaged in "quasi-scientific dreams and prophesies" driven by "self-indulgent, uncontrolled power-fantasies" and a fear of death. Some critics also argue that transhumanism amounts to little more than a rebranding of eugenics, a charge that leading transhumanist organizations have directly addressed by condemning the coercion and racist assumptions of historical eugenics movements.

• 7. Faith and the Posthuman

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  The first formal dialogue between transhumanism and religious faith was a one-day conference at the University of Toronto in 2004. Religious critics faulted transhumanism for offering no eternal truths or relationship with the divine and said a philosophy without these leaves humanity adrift in a foggy sea of postmodern cynicism and anomie. Transhumanists responded that such criticisms reflect a failure to look at the actual content of transhumanist philosophy, which is rooted in optimistic, idealistic attitudes tracing back to the Enlightenment.

  Sociologist William Sims Bainbridge conducted a pilot study after that dialogue, published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, suggesting that religious attitudes negatively correlated with acceptance of transhumanist ideas. He found that people with highly religious worldviews tended to see transhumanism as a direct and ultimately futile challenge to their beliefs. The 2002 Vatican statement Communion and Stewardship stated that changing the genetic identity of man as a human person through the production of an infrahuman being is "radically immoral" and that true improvement can come only through religious experience and realizing more fully the image of God.

  Not all religious thinkers oppose transhumanism. The Mormon Transhumanist Association was founded in 2006 and had hundreds of members by 2012. The Christian Transhumanist Association was established in 2014. Theologians Ronald Cole-Turner and Ted Peters have argued that the doctrine of "co-creation" provides an obligation to use genetic engineering to improve human biology. The physicist Giulio Prisco writes that cosmist religions based on science might be the best protection against reckless pursuit of superintelligence and other risky technologies. The American Academy of Religion has held a "Transhumanism and Religion" consultation at its annual meeting every year since 2009.