Transhumanism

Transhumanism is a social and philosophical movement devoted to promoting the research and development of robust human enhancement technologies. Human enhancement technologies are any material or social technologies which produce an increase in human sensory, emotive, or cognitive capacity as well as technologies geared toward producing a marked increase in human health and longevity. It is important, then, that in the definition of transhumanism it is robust human enhancement technologies which are at issue. Robust is intended to designate those technologies which are strictly material, more or less permanent, and—with the exception of artificial intelligence which represents something of a special case—integrated into the human body. Though directly related to the topic of human enhancement, transhumanism is not the particular hardware or technology, but the concept, the philosophy, and the movement. The concise definition of transhumanism offered above, will be expanded the through a theoretical and historical examination.

The term transhumanism was originally coined by Julian Huxley in his 1957 essay by the same name. Huxley refers principally to the use of social and cultural technologies to improve the condition of humanity but the essay and the name have been adopted as seminal to the movement that is principally focused on material technology.

Huxley held that while man was a naturally evolved species it was now possible through the complex social institutions he had developed for man to assume many of the responsibilities of the evolutionary mechanism in refining and improving the species. The ethos of Huxley's essay—if not its letter—can be located in transhumanism's commitment to assuming the work of evolution through technology, rather than society.

The movement's adherents are overwhelmingly male, libertarian, and employed in the high technology sector of the economy or the academy. Its principle proponents over the decades have been prominent technologists like Ray Kurzweil, scientists like roboticist Hans Moravec and nanotechnology researcher Eric Drexler, with the addition of a small but influential contingent of philosophers like James Hughes and Nick Bostrom. The movement has evolved over time having begun was a loose association of groups dedicated to “extropianism” or the desire to leave the Earth and colonize space. [Page 770]Transhumanism today is principally divided between adherents of two principle visions of post-humanity: first, the radically enhanced human who's technological and genetic improvements have rendered him essentially a distinct species; and second, the advent of a species of greater-than-human machine intelligence. There is substantial overlap between these groups in the realm of how they envision the development of discrete technologies but their understandings of the trajectory of technological development overall lead them to distinct predictions of the substance of post-humanity.

The membership of the transhumanist movement tends to split in one additional way. One prominent strain of Transhumanism argues that social and cultural institutions—including national and international governmental organizations—will be largely irrelevant with regard to the trajectory of technological development. Market forces and certain laws of technological progress—the most prominent of which is Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns—will drive technological progress to approximately the same end point without regard for social activity. Often this end point is referred to as the Singularity, a metaphor drawn from astrophysics and referring to the point of hyperdense material at the center of a black hole which generates its intense gravitational pull. The significance of the metaphor for transhumanists is that a Singularity is understood as the point at which the laws of normal physics cease to operate and we can only speculate as to the results because it is a realm with which we are entirely unfamiliar, they see the advent of post-humanity in similar terms.

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