Playing God: An unapolgetic transhumanist manifesto

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If you’ve ever fantasised about uploading your mind to the internet, or gestating your genetically modified children in an artificial womb, or living forever in a community of immortal, hyper-orgasmic superbeings, you’ll find friends among the members of Humanity+ and other such transhumanist organisations.

In The Proactionary Imperative, sociologists Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska aim to “provide a comprehensive intellectual justification for the emerging progressive movement of transhumanism” – a cultural and philosophical movement with its own journal, and even, for a time, its own parliamentary representative, in Italy. Specifically, the authors are interested in what they call the “indefinite promotion” of “our seemingly endless capacity for self-transcendence, our ‘god-like character’, if you will”.

Proactionaries argue that, at the very least, willing volunteers should be allowed to participate in cutting-edge scientific research. And, say Fuller and Lipinska, “proactionaries might well seek long-term benefits for survivors of a revolutionary regime that would permit many harms along the way”. The programme will require “mass surveillance and experimentation”, not to mention the understanding that many people “may turn out to have been used or sacrificed for science”. Nonetheless, they write, “we must have the courage to adopt the role of Natural Selector”.

If the authors are aware how their plans might sound to vulnerable populations, to disabled people or ethnic minorities, they don’t give much evidence of it. Yet it was in response to abuses of these populations that we developed the current research regulation.

Read the full, original story: A manifesto for playing god with human evolution

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