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What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism (or sometimes known as posthumanism) claims that technology can allow humans to transcend biology. While machine enhancements do not turn us into machines (because our own human/biological intelligence is still in charge of the whole organism) due to the exponential growth in processing power we are already moving beyond the "dumb" enhancements and into the age when our non-biological improvements will be a million, billion or trillion times faster and smarter, and indeed will take over our biological intelligence. It is in this way that humanity will hack its biology and change its destiny. That is the view of our future called transhumanism.

More specifically, transhumanists such as Max More, Natasha Vita-More and Ray Kurzweil believe that by merging man and machine via biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence, one day science will yield humans that have increased cognitive abilities, are physically stronger, emotionally more stable and live forever. This path, they say, will eventually lead to "posthuman" intelligent (augmented) beings far superior to man - a near embodiment of god.

It is this path of evolution starting with biologically dependent organisms, going through mixed-system cyborgenic entities and ultimately ending with non-corporeal augmented intelligent beings which according to transhumanism is "the destiny of intelligence." In Kurzweil's own words:

"It was the fate of bacteria to evolve into a technology-creating species. And it's our destiny now to evolve into the vast intelligence of the Singularity."

Building Gods (rough cut of full movie)

Some of the main issues here are:

Can humanity continue to survive and prosper by embracing technology or will technology eventually bring forth the end of the human race altogether?

Will humanity get polarized into neo-luddite technophobes (such as Samuel Butler and Ted Kaczynski) or transhumanist technophiles (such as Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Nick Bostrom)?

Does that mean that wide spread global conflict may be impossible to avoid?

Is transhumanism turning into a new "religion" for certain scientists? (with "prophets" such as Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge) Or, is it a viable scientific hypothesis?

Who will be the dominant species?

What is the essence of being human?

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