Whither Transhumanism?

Mission accomplished, in one sense

The future feels increasingly vertiginous. Society feels in jeopardy, and many of us carry a sneaking suspicion that the West is running on fumes. Our great scientific monuments, such as Arecibo, are crumbling. Hard-won norms — free speech, free association, the presumption that rights are not conditional — are treated in some quarters as passé. There are days I wonder whether it might be better to go ‘Millennial Amish’, and eschew everything after about 2007: the smartphone, the feed, the always-on cloud, the AI thralls.

Transhumanism has become a frightening word to a lot of people, precisely because it is finally becoming real — and because the application of these technologies is increasingly steered by large, unaccountable institutions rather than by the hobbyists and idealists who dreamed them up. I want to be clear that I am not indicting the transhumanist community, which is broadly a well-meaning force for the common good and a threat to no one. My worry is structural: it does not matter how innocent a body of research is, because research can be appropriated to serve the ends of whoever holds power, and very little can be done to prevent that.

For years, human enhancement was an abstraction argued over at conferences. Then, almost overnight, an enhancement technology was deployed into most of the population of many nations. Whatever one thinks of that technology on its merits, the manner of its arrival is the thing I want to dwell on — because it changed the terms of the entire enhancement debate, and few people noticed.

The consent problem

In many places, the intervention was made a condition of ordinary life — of holding a job, of moving freely, in some cases of access to services and institutions. Some of those measures were later rolled back or struck down; the point is that they happened at all. To make medical care, work or social participation contingent on accepting a medical intervention is to breach the principle of informed consent, which is not a bureaucratic nicety but one of the load-bearing beams of the post-war ethical settlement. You can believe the intervention was wise and still hold that coercing it was a grave error. Those are separate questions, and collapsing them is how societies talk themselves into things they later regret.

This is why I think the episode is so consequential for transhumanism specifically. Eugenics did not lose its standing because every idea within it was scientifically empty; it lost its standing because it was used to justify coercion, and eventually atrocity, and the association became indelible. Human enhancement now risks the same fate for the same reason. If the public’s first mass encounter with an enhancement technology is one where consent was treated as optional, the association will stick — and no amount of subsequent good behaviour will fully undo it.

Bioethics, as a field, existed in large part to hold this line, and in the moment it was most needed its voice was faint. Whatever one’s view of the underlying science, the near-silence of the profession on the consent question was a failure of nerve, and it is the part of this whole period I find hardest to forgive. A field that will not defend informed consent when informed consent is under pressure is not doing the one job it was created to do.

There is also the matter of who we are being asked to trust. The origin of the virus itself remains genuinely unresolved — a research-related accident has not been ruled out, and honest people still disagree — and that uncertainty sits awkwardly beneath a demand for sweeping trust in the institutions closest to the science. We are, in effect, being asked to swallow a transhuman spider to catch a transgenic fly, on the word of the same cadre whose judgement is part of what is in question. Trust asked for under those conditions is trust worth examining.

Where the ratchet points next

The precedent is the danger. If an enhancement can be effectively mandated on pain of losing a livelihood, then in principle so can the next one, and the next one may not even be disclosed plainly. In a world of increasingly algorithmically managed work, ‘white collar’ is coming to mean a position relatively free of such petty tyrannies. Now consider neural laces and brain–computer links. It is not paranoid to ask whether, a couple of decades on, we might face IQ, attention, mood or ‘law-and-order’ therapeutics that are strongly encouraged, then expected, then effectively obligatory — against our own conscience. The question a mandate answers is not ‘is this good for you?’ but ‘who decides?’, and once that answer is ‘not you’, it is hard to put back.

Part of what makes this moment combustible is how much power has concentrated around the technology. A handful of interlocking centres of gravity — Big Tech firms richer than many nations, transnational think tanks, intelligence services entangled with the platforms, a media landscape held by a few hands, and the financial and payment-processing chokepoints — have been fusing into something more capable than the sum of its parts. Powers of this kind, wielded through technologies that are effectively magic to the public, can be turned to plausibly deniable forms of control once economics and biology begin to interlock and access to ordinary life is gated by opaque criteria. Left on its current trajectory, the default outcome looks less like liberation than a kind of technofeudal, oligarchic transhumanism. Power corrupts, and there is no reason to expect these particular powers to be the exception.

No free lunches

Even setting coercion aside, enhancement technologies carry second-order costs that their champions tend to wave away. Reliable contraception — itself plainly a transhuman technology — was, and is, profoundly liberating; it also reshaped families, relationships and birth rates across whole societies in ways nobody chose and few anticipated, with consequences we are still metabolising. That is not an argument against it. It is an argument that even our most benign enhancements ripple outward in ways we do not model in advance, and that the honest response to a powerful new capability is humility about what we cannot yet see.

Kaczynski observed that technology tends to liberate before it enslaves in turn — a dark bargain, with no free lunch on offer. Despite his horrendous crimes of terrorism, the observation deserves a hearing. I would like to see the concepts of shifted costs, of Moloch, and of Chesterton’s Fence placed at the centre of these conversations rather than the periphery. The interesting questions were never ‘could we?’ They are ‘should we?’, ‘who benefits, and when?’, and ‘how do we keep it from going wrong?’

What the movement owes

A pioneering natural experiment in human enhancement was conducted with a heavy thumb on the scale of consent, and a great many people will not trust human enhancement again for a long time — understandably. Transhumanism as a tidy, optimistic brand may not survive it. We were naïve to assume that our dream of liberation from the human condition could not be turned instead into a means of managing us.

If the movement is to mean anything now, it needs reframing more than rebranding. It should be inviting, accessible, frankly precautionary, and never dismissive of ethical concern or of the people who want no part of enhancement at all. It should foreground radically improved mental and physical health for individuals, families and communities, and drop the adolescent register of ‘superpowers’ and anything that reads as a wish to become less human. The tell of a trustworthy enhancement project is that it is trying to make us more humane, not less. And it has to be able to say, and mean, that these technologies will be offered to all who want them and forced on no one — because the whole argument of this essay is that the coercion, not the capability, is the wound.

Above all it needs institutions: trustworthy, capture-resistant bodies that set tangible, implementable ethical standards for enhancement technologies present and near-future — open, participatory, and practicable. Not feel-good abstractions, but criteria concrete enough to actually bind. Those institutions are the prerequisite for any transhuman future worth having, and building them is slow, unglamorous work. If the people who know this domain best will not do it, it is hard to see who will, and the odds of a dystopian outcome climb accordingly.

The sun will always rise tomorrow. But a better future only arrives if we do the work to shepherd it into being — work for aspiring angels rather than Iron Man wannabes. Hope has to return to our picture of the future: a hope grounded in humane and truthful values, in long-term sustainability and social cohesion, rather than in constructed narratives or in technological progress prized as an end in itself. Technology without carefully reasoned values, set in criteria we can actually act on, is simply an amplifier — and an amplifier serves whatever is fed into it.