Transhumanism is a philosophy which advocates for the radical enhancement of human capacities using science and technology, that is, self-directed human evolution. There are many varieties of transhumanism, with no consensus on what the evolution should or will consist of. For example, some transhumanists envision a fusion with the digital, either in the form of technologies such as brain-to-computer interfaces, or, more radically, the transfer of human consciousness to a silicon substrate (so-called ‘mind-uploading’). Others see our future remaining entirely as biological and view information technologies as a means of enabling us to rewire the ‘bug-ridden code’ of our genes. Superintelligence, superlongevity and superwellbeing are sometimes put forward as the three core pillars of the creed, but even this is rejected by factions of transhumanists.[1] The politics of transhumanism is a further area of schism between ‘technoprogressives’, who tend to emphasise an inclusive and socially responsible form of transhumanism, and more libertarian advocates, who envisage the dynamism of markets as key to the technoscientific progress that promises to supercharge transhumanist aspirations. Some even advocate environmental degradation and great social harms as an acceptable trade-off for the promises of their utopian vision.
Such considerations indicate an immediate conceptual problem: that humanity is conceived of as both subject or agent of the enhancement, and its object. This raises serious questions about power relations between humans. Whose version of ‘enhancement’ is being enacted and in whose interest? Transhumanists often attempt to avoid these thorny issues of power by tapping into the liberal and libertarian roots of the modern incarnation of the philosophy. They emphasise individual choice in the form of ‘morphological freedom’, that is, the use of oneself as a tool to achieve oneself.[2] This modern form of transhumanism begins in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a group called the Extropians, with Max More at its centre. However, the ideas that these thinkers were espousing have a much longer history. Indeed, dreams of eternal life, extra-human capacities such as flight, and access to godlike wisdom have been the prevail of human myths throughout history. The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back nearly four millennia, and Greek mythology is replete with such aspiration. However, often such fantasies forewarn of hubris, rather than functioning as a call for enhancing human capacities.
Transhumanists themselves usually identify Enlightenment humanism as the precursor to their philosophy, which they see as “a modern form of Enlightenment techno-utopianism”.[3] More suggested a new calendar with year zero marked by the publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum to signal Bacon’s import for transhumanist thought.[4] In New Atlantis, Bacon envisioned a thriving utopia dedicated to “the knowledge of causes and secret motion of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible”.[5] Later, Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s book Machine Man (1748) conceptualised the human as a biological machine, whose every facet would ultimately be explicable through comprehending the individual component parts, and the Marquis de Condorcet suggested that “perfection of the human species might be capable of indefinite progress”.[6] This belief in the ability of human reason to conquer nature, including its own, is evident in transhumanist discourse, though it is often abstracted into a hierarchical and restricted notion of intelligence, which machines may potentially develop to a greater degree than humans.
The Copernican revolution and Darwin’s theory of evolution struck a blow to such human narcissism. Christopher Coenen traces a history of transhumanism as ‘an expression of displaced eschatological needs.[7] Human reason plays a pivotal role in proto-transhumanist discourse as it is seen as the force which may enable humanity to rise up to a scale befitting the new awareness of the depth and scope of time and space that scientific insights were unveiling. In his book The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Winwood Reade claimed that “it is Science alone which can ameliorate the condition of the human race”.[8] Over one hundred years before the Extropian movement, Reade’s book introduced most of the concepts that modern transhumanism espouses. Space colonisation, the promise of a new human corporality, the idea of humanity functioning as a hive mind, immortality, and the conviction that humanity will come to rule the universe as a godlike posthuman entity, are all present. For Coenen, it “developed the blueprint for the ideological nucleus of modern transhumanism”.[9] Contemporaneous with Reade is the Russian thinker Nikolai Federov, considered by some to be the first transhumanist,[10] and the inspiration for Russian Cosmism. Coenen also cites H. G Wells, and the biologists J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal, as notable proto-transhumanist thinkers who prefigured modern transhumanism. Their imaginations were invigorated by a sense of the sublime that science was enabling.
Slightly later, Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous) arguably coined the term ‘transhumanism’ in something like its modern sense, though its coinage is contested and even Huxley’s first usage is uncertain.[11] However, in his 1951 article “Knowledge, Morality and Destiny”, he states, “Transhumanism … is the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition”.[12] He later wrote, “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself … in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve”.[13] Such optimism enabled by the pace of technological change provided a counterweight to the pessimism resulting from the ethical failings of the twentieth century, including the two world wars. Science fiction also bolstered the appetite for the spectacular belief in progress. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem were some of the writers whose futurist worlds fuelled the imaginations of techno-optimists.[14] The space race and moon landings also contributed to the techno-fervour.[15]
Perhaps even more important than these cultural currents was the concrete progress of technoscience itself. It is the convergence of so-called NBIC technologies which really animates the modern transhumanist imaginary, that is, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. Richard Feynman’s There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom[16] inspired K. Eric Drexler, who later popularised nanotechnological potentialities in Engines of Creation.[17] In terms of biotech, the Human Genome Project began sequencing the human genome in 1990 and achieved its aims in 2003. Most significant was the progress in info-tech. Computers and the internet radically transformed social, political and economic life. The capacities which computers display have led to comparisons with human intelligence. Cybernetics aided these flattening, reductive comparisons by conceptualising everything in terms of information flows, abstracting the importance of materiality into the ineffable primacy of information. Such was the pace of change in computing technologies that exponential growth is often cited to justify wild speculation about the trajectory of technoscience. The possibility of machine intelligence eventually outstripping human intelligence became thinkable and was articulated by I. J. Good in 1965.[18] This notion is most commonly referred to in transhumanist parlance as the ‘Singularity’. Vernor Vinge’s Technological Singularity (1993) popularised the term.[19]
It is in this context that modern transhumanism can really be seen to take root. F. M. Esfandiary is an important cultural influence. He changed his name to FM-2030 in the hope of celebrating his 100th birthday that year. He thought 2030 would be the magical time in which humans would be ageless. Alas, he died in 2000 and was cryonically frozen. FM-2030 befriended and influenced Natasha Vita-More and Max More, who later became a prominent transhumanist couple and central protagonists in the Extropy movement. More states, “Although Dante and Huxley used the term earlier, I first (and independently) coined the modern sense of the term [transhumanism] … in my [1990] essay ‘Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy'”.[20] Along with T. O. Morrow, he founded the Extropy journal (1989) and the Extropy Institute (1992–2007). The Extropy mailing list (from 1991) played a key role in bringing together numerous figures who would later become prominent transhumanists or influencers of the discourse, such as Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Hal Finney, Robin Hanson, Ben Goertzel and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Nick Bostrom and David Pearce then founded The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) (later Humanity+) in 1998 “to develop a more mature academically respectable form of transhumanism, freed from the cultishness [of Extropians]”.[21] In 2004, Bostrom and James Hughes founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), another transhumanist-related organisation, to “promote the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities”. Hughes has been central to developing the technoprogressive version of transhumanism. He noted that progressive thinkers had been largely purged from Humanity+ by 2009 and replaced with a libertarian minded leadership: “high-tech anarcho-capitalists freed from the constraints of democratic statism, like the CEOs who form the utopian colony at the conclusion of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged”.[22] That organisations backed by tech mogul Peter Thiel were instrumental in the coup speaks to another extremely important current development of transhumanist culture. Transhumanism has become the philosophy of choice amongst Silicon Valley elites and its billionaires.
Emile Torres and Timnit Gebru coined the acronym TESCREAL to identify a line of related philosophies that currently inform the discourse around the dream of building artificial general intelligence (AGI).[23] It stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism. Transhumanism is considered the ‘galaxy brain’ which underpins all the other philosophies. Nick Bostrom, arguably the most influential transhumanist of the 21st century, who ran the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University until its collapse in 2024, is a central figure in the development of longtermism. It contends that the human ‘cosmic endowment’ has the potential to build astronomical value in the future in the form of trillions of posthuman digital consciousnesses that can colonise space. Using a utilitarian moral framework, this endowment demands that ‘we’ realise this grandiose and epic potential value by avoiding existential catastrophe and ensuring technoscientific progress continues. Current social injustices and disasters including wars, genocides, the mass extinction of species, are mere ripples as long as the technoscientific knowledge of the billionaire elites survives. Perhaps it is unsurprising that longtermism in particular has a grip on Silicon Valley culture and especially on Elon Musk.
Transhumanist Elise Bohan claims, “transhumanist-oriented research projects and think tanks are now attracting billions of dollars in funding, and many transhumanist thinkers are exerting a level of global influence disproportionate to the movement’s size”.[24] An antipathy to democratic oversight, a lineage of libertarian philosophy and a calculating utilitarian logic are evident in what Vita-More[25] identifies as three key concepts of “Transhumanism Now”: the proactionary principle, morphological freedom and existential risk. Transhumanism thus provides a convenient narrative of progress and a fantasy of escape at a time of environmental, economic, social and political instability.[26]
[1] “Transhumanism Part 2-4: The Three Supers”, A- Z of the Future Podcast, produced by Alexander Thomas, May–November 2023, available at: https://azofthefuture.podbean.com/ (accessed 14 October 2024).
[2] Anders Sandberg, “Morphological Freedom: Why We Not Just Want it, but Need It”, in Max More and Natasha Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology and Philosophy of the Human Future (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 63.
[3] James J. Hughes, “The Politics of Transhumanism and the Techno-Millennial Imagination, 1626–2030”, Journal of Religion and Science, 47.4 (2012), p. 757.
[4] Max More, “True Transhumanism: A Reply to Don Idhe”, in Gregory R. Hansell and William Grassi (eds), Transhumanism and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus, 2010), p. 138.
[5] Francis Bacon, “New Atlantis”, in Brian Vickers (ed,), Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1626]), p. 480.
[6] Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of The Human Mind (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979 [1975]), p. 109.
[7] Christopher Coenen, “Transhumanism and its Genesis: The Shaping of Human Enhancement Discourse by Visions of the Future”, Humana Mente Journal, 7.26 (2014), p. 38.
[8] William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004 [1972]), p.178
[9] Coenen, p. 41
[10] Anya Bernstein, The Future of Immortality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[11] Peter Harrison and Joseph Wolyniak, “The History of Transhumanism”, Notes and Queries, 62.3 (2015): 465–67.
[12] Julian Huxley, “Knowledge, Morality and Destiny”, Psychiatry, 14.2 (1951), p. 139.
[13] Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism”, in New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 17.
[14] See John Charles Griffiths, Three Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (Totowa: Macmillan, 1980) and Sherryl Vint, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
[15] Stefan Sorgner, We Have Always Been Cyborgs (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021).
[16] Richard Feynman, “There Is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Engineering and Science, 3.5 (1959): 22–36.
[17] K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Doubleday, 1998 [1986]).
[18] I. J. Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”, in F. Alt and M. Ruminoff (eds) Advances in Computer, Volume 6 (London: Academic Press, 1965), pp. 31–88.
[19] Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity”, Whole Earth Review, 81 (1993): 88–95.
[20] Max More, “True Transhumanism: A Reply to Don Idhe”, in G. R. Hansell and W. Grassie (eds), Transhumanism and Its Critics (Philadelphia: Metanexus, 2010), p.137.
[21] Cited in Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought”, Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14.1 (2005): p.16.
[22] James Hughes, “Politics”, in R. Ranisch and S. Sorgner (eds), Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 140.
[23] Timit Gebru and Emile P. Torres, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence”, First Monday, 29:4 (2024), https://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636 (accessed 14 October 2024).
[24] Elise Bohan, A History of Transhumanism, PhD thesis, Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, 2018, p. 271.
[25] Natasha Vita-More, “History of Transhumanism”, in Newton Lee (ed.), TheTranshumanism Handbook (Cham: Springer, 2019), pp. 49–61.
[26] Alexander Thomas, The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism: Techno-Human Evolution and Advanced Capitalism (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024).