Are Friends Electric? Robots Dancing Mechanic

The advance of superhumans — leaving the planet to a small elite of the super-rich and their ‘electric friends’

Gary Numan’s 1979 hit Are ‘Friends’ Electric? and Kraftwerk’s “we are the robots” refrain on their 1978 album The Man-Machine had, some 50 years ago, given an artistic expression to a future that would see the merging of man and machine.

An idea known as transhumanism — an outgrowth of the old eugenics movement — has been gaining momentum since the 1980s and is the rationale behind ‘The Great Reset’ — an attempt not only to “transform the world,” but to shatter in the process “our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like.”

Its origins go back to the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane who, in 1923, first advanced the fundamental ideas of this newly emerging philosophy, foreseeing, in his view, great benefits from applying advanced sciences to human biology. It was, however, the biologist Julian Huxley who popularized the term transhumanism in an influential 1957 essay, and who is generally regarded as the founder of transhumanism.

“The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is,” writes Robin McKie.