What is transhumanism?
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.
“Human beings achieved ‘civilization’ thousands of years ago. Yet we have not shaken off the ancient tyrannies that haunt the human condition. We suffer physical and emotional sicknesses ending in decrepitude and death. The primitive parts of our brain spur us to envy, to hate, to despair, and to kill. Our philosophies and our religions attempt to express our highest values, yet we use them to oppress and control. We use them to crush the world’s complexity into a simplicity that we can clutch like a security blanket for the human condition.
Human ingenuity has created astonishing institutions and technologies to remedy these problems. Yet our intellectual and emotional limitations often spawn new problems from our attempted solutions, while our primitive drives find ways to abuse them. The ever-accelerating pace of change breeds anxiety even as it glimmers with hope. Powerful technologies ever more rapidly shake up entire cultures and economies as well as each individual life. As we continue to experiment with technology using legacy brains and antiquated strategies, uncertainty and anxiety continue to plague us.
The Vision
Advances in technology (including “social technologies” of knowledge management, learning, and decision-making) are starting to enable us to change human nature itself in its physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects. The radical possibilities now emerging could cause huge problems or could enormously improve the human/transhuman condition. With better knowledge and decision making, humans could live far longer in better-than-“perfect” health; improve their self-knowledge and awareness of interpersonal dynamics; overcome cultural, psychological, and memetic biases in thinking; enhance intelligence in all its various forms; and learn to thrive on change and growth.”
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