>[!abstract] >Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being. ("Transhumanism", 2025). ## My thoughts One of my most formative reads was Ray Kurzweil's *The Age of Spiritual Machines* in 1999, just as I was a few months away from graduating from university with the world as my oyster. Kurzweil's compelling vision for a future defined by the [[Technological singularity|technological singularity]] resonated with me in ways that few books ever did, before or since. The fundamental premise made obvious sense to me: biological evolution is linear whereas [[Moore's law|technological evolution]] is exponential. Eventually, the latter will catch up with the former, then overtake it, and then forever diverge asymptotically from it. It took 400,000 years for Homo heidelbergensis to evolve into Homo sapiens — a glacial pace relative to the last 400 years that contain most of humanity's scientific progress, or the last 40 that have seen the advent of modern computing. Whatever the future holds for our species, it will no longer be defined by biology, but by technology. An inflection point is coming at which artificial general intelligence (AGI) will match that of a human, and then of all humans, and then will start improving *itself* at a runaway pace. Past that point, all predictive models break down. That, in a nutshell, is the singularity. Kurzweil predicted human-level AGI for 2029, which seems astonishingly accurate given the current progress. Kurzweil also predicted that by 2045, human and machine intelligence will effectively merge. Some people are distressed that Homo sapiens will no longer be the apex species and is bound for obsolescence. I consider that to be reductively speciesist. In [[Hopepunk|hopepunk]] fashion, I found this vision energizing and refreshing. It meant that Homo sapiens is not an evolutionary end game. We can be deliberate and intentional about creating better, kinder, smarter versions of ourselves; that, in a nutshell, is [[Transhumanism]]. As I closed Kurzweil's seminal book in 1999, I embarked on my second transformative read along my transhumanist journey: Ed Regis' *The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition*. ## References - Transhumanism. (2025, February 15). In *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transhumanism&oldid=1270633876 ## Related - [[Singularitarianism]]