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Category: transhumanism

The Ethics of Transhumanism — Dreaming of More, Without Losing What We Are

Transhumanism promises a better humanity—or perhaps something no longer human at all. Join us as we explore the moral dilemmas and future paths of human augmentation.

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Credits:
The Ethics of Transhumanism.
July 17, 2025; Episode 740
Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Editor: Donagh Broderick.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Stellardrone, \

Transhumanism: Should We Become More Than Human?

In the future, humanity may embrace genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation of mind and body, but what does this Transhuman future look like? And should we embrace or resist these paths?

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Credits:
Transhumanism \& Humanity’s Future.
Science \& Futurism with Isaac Arthur.
Episode 375, December 29, 2022
Written, Produced \& Narrated by Isaac Arthur.

Editors:
Briana Brownell.
Donagh Broderick.
Keith Blockus.
Lukas Konecny.

Graphics:
Jeremy Jozwik.
Ken York of YD Visual.

Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

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Marco Santini on The Alpha Centauri Project: There Is A Lot Of Space For Rational Optimism

Fourteen years ago, I sat down with an Italian engineer who gave his novels away for free.

Marco Santini was not chasing royalties. He was chasing readers.

His book The Alpha Centauri Project imagines the 24th century split three ways: humans, artificial intelligences, and souls, the digitized minds of people who refused to stay dead. Their interests do not align. Their futures collide. An interstellar voyage becomes the only way to avoid a war.

It reads like a thriller. It lands like a warning.

What stayed with me was not the plot. It was his stance on the future.

Pessimistic scenarios can always exist. With rationality, optimistic ones can be created.

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James Hughes on Citizen Cyborg: Interrogate and Engage the World

In 2012, I sat down with Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Fourteen years later, the questions we wrestled with have only sharpened.

Why are transhumanist atheists so often drawn to Buddhism? Is optimism rational, or just a posture we adopt to keep moving? What does it mean to redesign the human being, and which democratic institutions are ready to respond when we do?

James does not flinch from any of it. He talks about his first book Citizen Cyborg, the then forthcoming Cyborg Buddha, moral enhancement, animal uplift, and what our actual chances are of surviving the technological singularity.

What struck me most was his refusal to retreat into easy camps.

Not a cheerleader, not a doomsayer. Someone who interrogates the world and engages it on its own terms.

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Lincoln Cannon: Are Science and Religion Mutually Exclusive or Complimentary?

Are science and religion enemies or allies?

I recorded this debate 14 years ago, and the question has only gotten sharper.

Lincoln Cannon is a software engineer with degrees in philosophy and business. He is also president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. So when he argues that science and religion are complementary, he is not speaking from ignorance of either side.

I disagree with him. I think they are mutually exclusive. He thinks they complete each other.

So we sat down and argued it out. Friendly, but real.

This was a special edition of Singularity. FM, and it remains one of the more honest conversations I have had about belief, reason, and what transhumanism owes to both. The questions we wrestled with sit right at the heart of #transhumanism and the #futureofreligion in an age of accelerating #technology.

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Ken Hayworth: Brain Preservation is the Logical Lifeboat

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with Ken Hayworth and asked him a question most people spend their whole lives avoiding.

What happens to the self when the body fails?

Ken is president of the Brain Preservation Foundation. He is also a neuroscientist who refuses to flinch. His answer was not comfort. It was logic.

Brain preservation, he argued, is the logical lifeboat that people have access to today.

Here is the part that has stayed with me ever since. Ken imagines our grandchildren looking back at us. They will see that we had the science. They will see that we understood the brain holds our memories, our skills, our personality. And they will ask why we did nothing.

His verdict is brutal. We were not killed by bad technology. We were killed by bad philosophy. We simply could not accept that we are physical machines.

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Robin Hanson (part 2): Social Science or Extremist Politics in Disguise?!

What happens when an economist starts designing a future society?

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with Robin Hanson for a second time. It became the most vigorous debate ever recorded.

I rarely disagree with a guest. With Robin, I disagreed more than I ever had.

Here is what unsettled me. His work on the Em Economy reads like social science. It uses the language of markets, incentives, and equilibrium. But underneath the economic reasoning sit choices that are not economic at all. Policies of social discrimination. The full privatization of law and punishment. Minds run a thousand times faster, and handed a thousand times more voting power. Emulations deleted when they cannot pay their storage fees.

These are not technical footnotes. They are ethical and political decisions wearing the costume of impartial analysis.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, was first a moral philosopher. He understood where the tools of his discipline stop being useful and start being dangerous.

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Munk Debate on Gene Editing

On April 21, the Munk Debates convened a special debate about gene editing in Deerfield, Massachusetts for 650 students at Deerfield Academy.

Motion: Be it Resolved, let’s engineer better human beings.

About the Debate:
New powerful engineering technology is already being used to edit human embryos, curing diseases and repairing defective genes before a child is even born. Some welcome this new science as a powerful tool to enhance human intelligence, memory, appearance and physical health. Why wouldn’t we embrace a science that allows people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives? Others warn that this new technology will be used to create designer babies and a new class of genetically “enhanced” elites. It will undermine human dignity and autonomy, and risk unleashing new diseases into the human gene pool. Playing G-d with human nature, critics argue, will result in a dystopian nightmare of our own making.

About the Debaters:
Arguing in favour of the motion was the biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine, Gregory Stock. His debate partner was the internationally acclaimed strategic philosopher and pioneering transhumanist Max More. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO and a former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH. His debate partner was the award-winning educator, author, and Professor of Reproductive Science at University College London, Joyce Harper.

Fermi Paradox: The Partial Galactic Colonization Hypothesis

An exploration of the idea of an indefinite partial colonization of a galaxy as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.

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Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We’ll All Have To Make

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.

It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.

The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?

I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.

Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.

One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:

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