Transhumanism (sometimes abbreviated as >H or H+ or H-plus) is a movement that aims to promote the use of technological innovations to increase physical and cognitive capabilities and improve aspects considered undesirable in the human condition, such as disease and aging, with a view also to a possible post-human transformation.
In particular, transhumanists believe that artificial intelligence will one day surpass human intelligence and thus lead to the technological singularity.
One of the earliest theorists of Transhumanism was the Jesuit and paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, although the best-known definition is by Julian Huxley: ” man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”
Max More interprets Transhumanism as “a class of philosophies that seek to guide us to a posthuman condition.” Per Robin Hanson’s definition also alludes to a time spectrum of its implementation: “Transhumanism is the idea that new technologies are likely to change the world in the next century or two to such an extent that our descendants will not be ‘human’ in many respects.”
The Vatican Note “Antiqua et Nova” states in this regard, “Some argue that such an AI could one day reach the stage of “superintelligence,” surpassing human intellectual capacity, or contribute to “superlongevity” thanks to advances in biotechnology. Others fear that these possibilities, however hypothetical, will one day come to overshadow the human person, while still others welcome this possible transformation.”
Various forms of amortality also result from the hypothetical application of futuristic biotechnology. Luca Grion uses the expression “living without expiration.”
Most transhumanists do not believe in a transcendent human soul, but they trust in the compatibility of human minds with computer hardware, thinking that individual consciousness may one day be transferred or emulated on a digital medium; such a technique is called “mind uploading.”
These visions lead to the idea of the Cyborg, a hybrid human-machine being, an idea behind the technology developed by Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that is developing implantable neural interfaces to connect the human brain with external devices, such as computers. The goal is to create a brain-computer interface that can restore autonomy to people with problems that cannot yet be resolved by medical science. In fact, Neuralink aims to create generalized neural interfaces that can be used by a wide range of people to unlock human potential.
Current experiments in using these technologies to overcome disabilities, such as blindness, are interesting, but this area invests important ethical and legal issues that are far from settled. The ethical element is particularly relevant here.
The transhumanist view does not correspond to the idea of Homo Extensus, which we seek to develop here and which instead alludes to an evolutionary leap in natural human intelligence, along the lines of other cultural revolutions that have occurred in the past in the interaction between human intelligence itself and historical cognitive technologies, such as the alphabet or scientific observation tools. This topic has already been dealt with extensively in a number of chapters in this book, which, as the authors intended, envisions this evolutionary leap as a positive outcome to the advent of AI, seeking to arouse interest and gain ideational forces to the cause of building a human intelligence that remains such, albeit extended by the faculties of machine intelligence.
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