Twenty years ago, transhumanism was a Silicon Valley fringe belief. Today, it shapes the people who build and govern AI. Alex Thomas, author of “The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,” helps us recognize this anti-human vision and counter it with a pro-human one.
Behind the AI race, there's a philosophy with an intellectual lineage and a body of work that holds that human beings are a defective early draft, that the things that make us humans are bugs to be fixed, that this planet is expendable and we can move on to the next. And that the suffering of real people today is a rounding error against the value of a cosmic future.
Broadly speaking, these ideas fit under the umbrella of transhumanism. You might hear it referred to as techno-optimism or accelerationism. Twenty years ago, these were the beliefs of an ideological fringe in Silicon Valley. Today, they are held by many of the people who build and govern the most powerful technology in human history.
In this episode, we name and explore these underlying beliefs and the people who hold them — so that you can recognize this anti-human vision of the future when it appears in a press statement, or buried in a manifesto, or in a carefully worded thread on X. And we discuss how to counter those ideas with a pro-human vision that embraces the full complexity of our world.
Our guest this week has devoted his career to thinking about these critical issues. Alex Thomas is a senior lecturer at the University of East London and the author of "The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism." He first started studying transhumanism years ago when it was an abstract academic curiosity, and he's watched as it's become, in his own words, "arguably the most powerful ideological force on the planet."
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
“The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism” by Alexander Thomas
Peter Thiel’s interview with Ross Douthat on Interesting Times
Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”
Further reading about The Broligarchy
Further reading about The Intelligence Curse
The website for the human-computer interface company Merge Labs
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CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS