Transhumanism

Transhumanism is the upgrade thesis at the heart of Homo Deus: that “increasing human power” will shift from upgrading our external tools to “upgrading the human body and mind, or merging directly with our tools,” and that the “upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.” Yuval Noah Harari splits the techno-religions into “techno-humanism” (which still sees humans as the apex of creation and wants to build a “much superior human model,” Homo deus) and “data religion.” His warning is that these projects, aiming to surpass rather than safeguard the human norm, “may well result in the creation of a new superhuman caste” — and that techno-humanism may paradoxically downgrade humans into “human cogs… who can barely pay attention, dream or doubt.”

The thread recurs as a quasi-religious one. In Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation, Kyle tags the “Mormon Transhumanist Association” beside passages on Turing’s “transmigration of souls,” Ray Kurzweil’s “spiritual machines,” and the claim that “in transhumanism, postmodern rationalism collapses into ancient apocalypticism.” And in The Cogsec Chronicles, Kyle reads Peter Thiel’s account of transhumanism as “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed to an immortal body” — Thiel’s complaint being not that it’s unnatural but that mere bodily change is “so pathetically little”: you also “need to transform your soul… your whole self.” Kyle frames this as a transformation “tantamount to extinction, but not in the form of destruction” — “holistic evolution.”

Context: Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement holding that humans can and should use science and technology (genetic engineering, brain–computer interfaces, AI, life-extension biotech) to radically enhance human physical and cognitive capacities and transcend current biological limits, including aging and death. Ray Kurzweil and the idea of the technological “singularity” are central reference points.

Where this appears

• Homo Deus — the three upgrade paths (biological, cyborg, non-organic) and the techno-humanism / data-religion split
• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — transhumanism as religion (Kurzweil, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, the singularity as eschatology)
• The Cogsec Chronicles — Peter Thiel reframing transhumanism as soul-and-self transformation, read by Kyle as “holistic evolution”