Transhumanism and Its Very Silly Critics

Techno-realism, media cool kids, and why the future doesn't have to suck

Image generated by DALL-E.

Jamie Paul here. In a few weeks, I’m planning on putting out a piece responding to reader questions. Please feel free to email me at AmericanDreaming08@gmail.com with any questions, requests, etc.

This article is a guest post by Rowe Kruger.

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Transhumanism — the idea we should upgrade human abilities through technology and science — has been gaining recognition over the years. As time moves forward and technology advances, the advent of transhumanism, once synonymous with science fiction, now seems increasingly inevitable. With recognition, however, also comes detractors. The criticism ranges from skepticism based on technological trends to vacuous mockery based on political tribalism and shallow associations. Transhumanism, many educated progressives contend, won’t just fail to improve the human condition, it must be avoided at all costs… because reasons. I’ve been keenly following the transhumanist movement since before it was, if not “cool”, at least well known. I’ve even written a book about it: Dialogues on Transhumanism (2019). I’m also on the political left. And I find much of the cynical and smarmy scorn directed at transhumanism misguided. The future doesn’t have to suck, and there is real reason for cautious optimism about a better tomorrow.

What is Transhumanism?

For those familiar with transhumanism, imagery of robotic limbs, advanced genetic engineering, and brains being hooked up to the Internet will immediately come to mind. While those examples certainly fall within the purview of transhumanism, the concept itself is both much broader and remarkably simple. Wikipedia aptly describes transhumanism as “a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well being.” Similarly, Cambridge defines transhumanism as “the theory that science and technology can help human beings develop beyond what is physically and mentally possible at the present time.” In Philosophy Now, John Kennedy Phillip sums it up as “A movement which advocates [transformation] of the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing technologies, and making them widely available.”

These definitions provide a good sense of the three core concepts that encompass transhumanism:

1. Human beings have various physical, mental, and longevity limitations by virtue of their biology.

2. These limitations can be overcome through the application of science and technology.

3. The ability to overcome these limitations is good and ought to be widely available.

The question to ask concerning transhumanism isn’t just “Is it really that simple?”, but also “Haven’t we been doing this already since, like, forever?” Indeed, human beings have used new knowledge and tools — in other words, science and technology — to overcome our previous limitations for as long as we have been human. Homo sapiens can be seen as a fundamentally transhumanist species in its own right. From cavemen using spears half a million years ago, to Sumerians creating a non-brain-based repository of information with clay tablets, to the development of vaccines against deadly and debilitating viruses, human history has been nothing if not a long exercise in technological self-improvement. Mankind is an augmenting ape.

If there is a distinction between “transhumanism” and humanity’s long track record of innovative life-hacking, it’s one of degree, not kind. For transhumanists, it’s not enough to use tools that can be put away, taken off, or shut down. Transhumanists want those tools to become a part of ourselves as much as our bones and organs. It’s not enough that life expectancy has incrementally increased over the years, it ought to be radically extended. People should be able to live youthfully and in health for centuries. It’s not enough that global literacy rates are on the rise or that scientific knowledge is more accessible, we ought to be able to physically upgrade our cognitive processing speed and bandwidth. We should have the means to allow anyone to gain high-level expertise in virtually any subject they choose.

The future envisioned by transhumanists is grandiose and wild, yes. But so is the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter compared to the Wright Flyer, or the Large Hadron Collider compared to John Dalton’s attempts at explaining the law of multiple proportions, or CRISPR gene editing compared to Mendel’s experiments with pea plants. The transhumanist stands on the long road of advancement in fields of engineering, medicine, genetics, and software development and says “It doesn’t stop here.”

Pictured left: the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter (2021). Pictured right: the first Wright Flyer (1903).

Utopianism?

Like any movement, transhumanism (which often gets lumped in with futurism) is not without its shortcomings or critics. The most obvious critique is the charge of utopianism, calling to mind previous instances of starry-eyed idealists wreaking havoc in their ill-conceived pursuit of some imagined moonshot panacea. To be clear, the idea that any one idea could ever solve all of our problems and usher in some grand utopia is foolish. The ends don’t necessarily justify the means and one-size-fits-all remedies don’t exist.

Of course, the same generic accusations can — and are — leveled at basically all movements oriented around progress, improvement, or the future. As dangerous as utopian thinking can be, the line between working toward achievable progress versus volatile pipe dreams is not so easily drawn. There will always be some people in any movement more principled than others, more prudent than others, and more measured than others. The charge of utopianism, then, becomes at once a truism and also a cheap cop-out — a substance-free way to dismiss anything one wants without seriously engaging with it. This is a common motif among the objections to transhumanism, which tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Often, they’re grounded in little more than icky vibes, political guilt-by-association, and a middle-school Mean Girls knee jerk against anything that seems just a little too tech bro-ey. You can often judge a thing by the quality of its enemies.

The Cult of Transhumanism?

In order to paint transhumanists in a negative light, some critics try to present them as a sort of cult of religious zealots. A 2023 Vox article outright describes futurist and transhumanist ideas as “religion repackaged.” The author starts off with a vague description of what one might assume to be Heaven and then introduces the twist that this describes the messianic vision not of a preacher, but an AI researcher. “The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI,” they write, “the more you hear echoes of religion.” 

Similarly, a 2023 piece in The Nation goes into detail on the views of Meghan O’Gieblyn, a former Christian fundamentalist who has gone from being pro-transhumanism to a critic. “Transhumanists may claim they are the first to consider how technology will redefine what it means to be human, what types of immortality may be desirable or possible, and the philosophy of the mind that comes with uploading or copying your mind […] Christians started to ask these questions long ago.” Transhumanism and other futurist endeavors are, as the article’s title makes obvious, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Build God and Control Humanity.”

It’s worth quoting the piece at length:

“[Venture capitalist Marc] Andreessen envisions AI as augmenting human intelligence. Children, he writes, will have tutors that are ‘infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful’ as they develop to ‘maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.’

This brings me back to my days in Bible school. God’s love, we were told, was not visible the way love from people around us was, but closer examination (and faith) would reveal its presence. By accepting the existence of God’s love, we could grow and develop such that our true potential, our destiny, our capacity to be a better child/sibling/friend/neighbor/lover/human would be realized. Andreessen’s hypothetical AI love is different from God’s love, of course, because with AI, you get the transformative effects of a god’s personal intervention as well as the affirmation of something that undeniably interacts with you.”

In attempting to draw these unflattering parallels, the article overlooks the most glaring distinction between transhumanism and religion. The difference between a hypothetical advanced artificial intelligence and a loving deity is the simple fact that we know AI exists. Whether it’s the generative AIs that are all the rage today like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, or the incredibly simplistic red koopas in Super Mario Bros that know to turn around when they come to a ledge, the fact is artificial intelligence is a thing that demonstrably exists. The same cannot be said for gods, as evidenced by the fact that comparing something to god-worship has become a common way to portray it as ridiculous (even among believers, curiously). The deeper point is that transhumanism is grounded in naturalism, not supernaturalism. There are no holy books, no houses of worship, no authoritarian dictates, and no beliefs to be held without evidence. Transhumanists envision using innovations that build off of known technologies and operate squarely within the laws of nature. Bionic limbs and brain-computer interfaces are things that demonstrably exist.

True, transhumanists do more than their fair share of dabbling in futuristic predictions and making claims about the world of tomorrow. And yet, however skeptical one might be of Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that we’ll develop AI super-intelligence by 2045, it’s in no way realistically comparable to the thousands of earnestly foretold raptures, apocalypses, and end-times that came and went without much fuss over the last two millennia. 

Something Something, Billionaires

It’s also become fashionable in some progressive circles to attack transhumanism by way of name-dropping select billionaires in order to associate the entire concept with right-leaning libertarian ideals. In a 2023 Scientific American piece, writer Charles Stross builds his attempt at a case against transhumanism by rattling off a who’s who list of capitalist “tech bro” billionaires:

“Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and ‘seasteading.’ Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a ‘techno-optimist manifesto’ promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.”

The logic is as simple as it is silly. These axiomatically evil billionaires are all Bad People™ and they’re funding various transhumanist/futurist endeavors so transhumanist/futurist endeavors are bad. The problem is, this kind of lazy guilt by association doesn’t land because not all billionaires are transhumanists and not all transhumanists are billionaires. I can, as someone who wants brain-computer interfaces to continue to develop and improve, say with a straight face that Elon Musk is a grade-A clown without having to turn in my transhumanist card.¹

It’s also worth asking why rich people spending money on rotational habitats and longevity is inherently bad. Isn’t it better to spend one’s wealth funding the development of new technologies as opposed to just hoarding it all in offshore accounts? There is something egregiously dishonest about reducing transhumanism to a hobby of eccentric billionaires with questionable business practices. While you’re busy dunking on Jeff Bezos’s penis-shaped rockets or Mark Zuckerberg’s quest to create a digital world where he can make friends, legions of actual scientists and engineers are quietly doing the unglamorous work of creating cutting-edge biotech.

So what do transhumanists believe when it comes to politics? Believe it or not, the transhumanist community has actually been polled about this. In 2005, 39 percent of transhumanists surveyed — a plurality — identified with a left-associated political label, compared to 22 percent who identified with a libertarian label. In 2012, nearly 55 percent of transhumanists identified with a left-associated label, compared to 26 percent libertarian. The majority of respondents also classified the following goals as “very important”: Ending social inequality, ending poverty, ending sexism, ending oppressive governments, and ending sexual repression.

These results shouldn’t be remotely surprising. Transhumanism is the application of science and technology to overcome human limitations. It’s a forward-thinking, science-based movement/philosophy that is fundamentally unconservative. Spend any actual time in transhumanist circles instead of the caricatures found in left-media and you’ll see that support for ideas like universal healthcare, universal basic income, and major economic reforms are commonplace. After all, it takes a special kind of jerk to want to see human limitations technologically surpassed, but only for a chosen few. And if we're going to upgrade ourselves with cybernetic limbs and augment our minds with neural implants, we’re going to need strict regulations on the companies that produce such technologies. If we’re going to radically extend our lifespans, we’re going to need a social security that scales. That’s what is most bizarre about these flaccid critiques: there’s never been any conflict between progressive and transhumanist ideals.

Transhumanism cannot simply be dismissed as utopian, any more than any other movement can be. It can’t be credibly smeared as a religion, or tarred as a billionaire hobby. There is, however, one strong argument against transhumanism.

The Cyberpunk Possibility

Beyond the flying cars and neon urbanscapes, the cyberpunk genre is built around a central speculative question: What happens if technology continues to improve but culture, ethics, politics, and economics don’t keep pace? What happens if the machinery around us soars into the future while social norms, governmental systems, and quality of life remain stalled in the late-20th or early-21st centuries?

The most substantive criticism of transhumanism is the concern that society will further devolve into a cyberpunk dystopia — a concern that transhumanist technology will indeed come to fruition, but absent the necessary socio-political infrastructure to ensure that it leads to people living better, longer, more actualized lives as intended. Lambasting transhumanism as billionaire vanity projects almost touches on a serious point by discussing a symptom of the disease at hand, but ultimately misses the real cause. If Musk, Zuck, Andreeson, and company were all found dead inside a Cybertruck at the bottom of a Scrooge McDuck money vault, it’s not as though transhumanism would suddenly become a welcomed prospect among left-media cool kids.

Emerging tech has always been a valid cause for concern. When new technologies are introduced into a world where the economic incentive is infinite growth, they can be employed in ways that don’t necessarily improve life for everyone. Consider again the recent artificial intelligence revolution of the past few years. We didn’t get robot butlers cooking our meals and doing our laundry. We got power-guzzling software that might actually put radiologists, copy editors, and low-level artists out of work. Oh joy.

The strongest argument against transhumanism is the eminently fair question: what if it goes wrong? What if we get transhumanist upgrades in the absence of other forms of progress and it just accelerates us into a dull cyberpunk dystopia? What if the transhumanist future is one where we live in high-tech squalor, packed into neon-lit tenements, anesthetizing ourselves in digital fantasy worlds while we breathe poisonous 120-degree smog through bionic lungs?

If only there were something here and now — some transhumanist success story that would let us know if a better world is possible…

Transhumanism in a Pill

We already have bionic arms and brain-computer interfaces, and yet we don’t see high demand for elective amputation and brain surgery. One of the difficult aspects of defending transhumanism is how much of it amounts to advocating for tomorrow with little to show today. The big question is, do we have an example of actual futurist transhumanism? Do we have an example of something that is more than just a technicality, but a straightforward example of using science and medicine to make a direct upgrade to our bodies that natural biological processes are incapable of doing? One comes to mind, an innovation whose effects have become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer recognized as a medical and social revolution and is instead regarded as just another part of life: the birth control pill.

To control one’s body is to control one’s destiny. Though cruder forms of birth control existed for millennia, in the 1950s the feminist endeavors of Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick and the scientific rigor of Gregory Pincus and John Rock converged in the development of the birth control pill. Visionaries working toward a better, more advanced future utilizing science and technology, and informed by equally forward social thinking came up with a means to allow people to overcome the limits of their biology with an effective, widely available product. The pill is as capital-T transhumanist as any invention can get. And its effects are almost too obvious to require stating. Women can choose when they want to get pregnant, plan families and careers on their terms, and be sexual creatures rather than mere vessels for procreation. 

As with any big technological change in society, it led to its own growing pains. Things had to be restructured, old dynamics didn’t work. New problems arose. Hell, maybe if we didn’t have all these women in the workforce expanding the economy and skyrocketing productivity, we wouldn’t have all these dreaded billionaires to complain about when they want to fund space habitats. And yet, I somehow doubt that transhumanism’s left-leaning critics are eager to join hands with integralists, post-liberals, and religio-fascists in rolling back the clocks to undo the pill and the sexual revolution, because they recognize that the pros outweigh the cons a hundred times over. Even if it didn’t completely solve sexism, social disparities, and the inequality of opportunity, it was a liberating technology that made life better for billions of people. Imagine opposing our generation’s version of the birth control pill, and having to explain why the lives of millions should not be freer and more liberated because… Elon Musk sucks.

The Future is Worth Striving For

Most of the criticisms of transhumanism carry little weight because they seem to present the transhumanist movement as a zero-sum game advocating a hyper-focus on futurist projects to the wholesale exclusion of all other problems in the world. Not only isn’t this true, but one of the beautiful things about science is how it cross-culturally affects the future. The computer I’m using to type these words and the device you’re using to read them has software that exists because the Apollo space program spearheaded software development. In fact, the Apollo Program’s downstream effects included improvements to food safety, earthquake-proof engineering tech, and rechargeable hearing aids, among many others. 

A critic in the 1960s of the same mindset as the people attacking transhumanism and futurism today might have wondered about the benefit of spending so much money trying to put men on the moon. Why bother? Because Kennedy said we should? What about nuclear weapons? What about segregation? What about Vietnam?

Human beings have been enhancing themselves with tools and ideas for as long as we’ve existed. We now have the prospect of improving ourselves further through radical advancements in biomedical technology. However horrifying this may seem to people operating under the cloud of a century of solid science-fiction scaremongering, the truth is that technological change is among the most difficult things to stop. A transhumanist future is coming, whether you like it or not. The question is, will we steward these advancements in directions that help humanity, or in directions that help only a privileged few? It’s easier to fight for universal basic income than it is to fight against AI. It’s easier to fight for better consumer protections and more robust social safety nets than it is to fight against brain-computer interfaces.

The advancing world has led to its fair share of dire problems, but problems by their nature are solvable. And the way to solve problems is to continue moving forward without abandoning liberal ideals of progress, equality, and human rights. We won’t fix the challenges we face by stagnating and letting the world’s bad actors eat our lunch. If journalists are concerned about us possibly ending up in a cyberpunk dystopia, they ought to wake up and realize we’re already on our way. It’s time to drag ourselves out. We can’t stop the future. We can either try to help shape it to serve the common interest, or we can, to paraphrase Orwell, let the cybernetic boot of the future stamp on the face of humanity forever. Choices don’t come much easier.

See also: “When 65 is Young: The Politics of Life Extension”

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1. You can tell which of Musk’s companies employ experienced moron wranglers and which ones don't.