Technology isn’t the Essence of Transhumans
The message of transhumanist science fiction that hides in plain sight
I expect that the average person who’s at least heard of “transhumanism” would likely associate that concept with science fiction’s speculations about the future of technology. Transhumanism, then, would be about scenarios in which technology makes our species sovereign over nature.
In terms of the Kardashev scale of life’s stages of dominion over its circumstances, we might say that we’ll become “transhuman” when we turn into a Type II or III civilization that can fully harness the resources of the Sun or of the entire Milky Way.
Proponents like Ray Kurzweil write, for instance, that artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will figure prominently in our techno ascent to godhood.
The problem with this is that science fiction, which is the primary source of these speculations, is written for us here and now, not for readers in the distant future. This means that science fiction from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is mainly about what’s already happened, or what we’ve already become.
Sure, those stories are often set in an imagined future, but that’s the magic of indirect reference. Here we might compare SF to…
