Technicism
Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies to enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being. Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion. Some critics argue that transhumanism amounts to little more than a "rebranding" of eugenics.
Transhumanist thinkers discuss the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. Some transhumanists speculate that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings of such vastly greater abilities as to merit being called "posthuman". Another topic of transhumanist discourse is how to protect humanity against existential risks, including artificial general intelligence, asteroid impact, gray goo, pandemic, societal collapse, and nuclear warfare.
The biologist Julian Huxley popularised the term "transhumanism" in a 1957 essay. The contemporary meaning of the term was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, a man who changed his name to FM-2030. In the 1960s, he taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School when he began to call people who adopt technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity "transhuman". This assertion laid the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, organizing a school of thought that has since grown into the transhumanist movement.
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