Transhumanists Coming Out of the Closet

Transhumanists Coming Out of the Closet: "It wasn’t that long ago that listing transhumanism, human enhancement, the Singularity, technology-driven evolution, existential risks, and so on, as academic interests on one’s CV might result in a bit of embarrassment.

Over just the past decade and a half, though, there seems to have been a sea change in how these issues are perceived by philosophers and other scholars: many now see them as legitimate subjects of research; they have, indeed, acquired a kind of academic respectability that they didn’t previously possess.

There are no doubt many factors behind this shift. For one, it seems to be increasingly apparent, in 2011, that technology and biology are coming together to form a new kind of cybernetic unity, and furthermore that such technologies can be used to positively enhance (rather than merely alter) features of our minds and bodies.

In other words, the claim that humans can “transcend” (a word I don’t much like, by the way) our biological limitations through the use of enhancement technologies seems to be increasingly plausible – that is, empirically speaking."