All you need to know about transhumanism - and how it might transform our existence

RTÉ News​

07-07-2025

Analysis: Transhumanism might appear to be the stuff of science fiction but advances in medicine, engineering and bioscience are bringing it closer to reality
"Forever young, I want to be forever young": many would agree with those lyrics from Alphaville's 1980s hit song. Indeed, who never wished to retain their youthful traits and vigour through time, defying old age and ultimately death itself?
This has been the relentless mission of tech entrepreneur and billionaire Bryan Johnson for the last few years, as portrayed in the Netflix documentary Don't Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever. Johnson has been following a strict daily routine and spent millions of dollars in anti-ageing medicine, food supplements and medical procedures over the last few years with the aim of realising that goal. This in turn has sparked the 'Don't Die' movement, promoting Johnson's lifestyle and ideals, who made a business of sharing his protocol and selling his supplements on the Internet.
Trailer for Don't Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever
But Johnson is only one of those who have been continually advocating to push the boundaries of human existence using science and technology. Another one is Elon Musk , whose Neuralink company aims to create a brain-computer interface in order to enhance mental and physical abilities in individuals.
There is in fact a name for that kind of endeavour and the ideas underpinning it: Transhumanism. It came into being in the 20th century among engineers, scientists and intellectuals like evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (who first coined the term) and professor of 'futuristic studies' FM-2030 (whose real name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, but who renamed himself to suit his belief that the year 2030 would constitute a pivotal moment in human history).
Transhumanism see the human being as an 'unfinished' product of evolution. It presents the overcoming of the traditional boundaries of human life—such as death, diseases, as well as other mental and physical limitations linked to our biological existence—as something not only desirable and achievable, but as an imperative per se. It aims to achieve this goal by relying on the progress of human knowledge and accompanying technological and scientific advancements.
From RTÉ 2fm's Dave Fanning Show in 2017, interview with author Mark O'Connell about his book To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
These ideas are not just the preserve of a few select eccentrics and idealists and have infused popular culture, as seen by a number of recent fictional productions such as Years and Years, Altered Carbon and Black Mirror, or the creation of a Transhumanist political party in the United States. At first glance, Transhumanism's aims might appear to be mostly the stuff of science fiction, such as the integration of technology within human biology or the alteration of the human genome using sophisticated scientific methods. However, advances in the fields of medicine, engineering and bioscience like CRISPR (for which two researchers have recently won a Nobel Prize in chemistry) or nanotechnology have in reality made Transhumanist aspirations closer to reality than ever.
Such advances are currently seen as having mainly medical applications. Neuralink's devices are primarily destined for quadriplegics to help them recover a sense of autonomy and CRISPR has been developed as a 'gene therapy' to treat specific diseases. However, there is absolutely no doubt that possible applications go far beyond that, effectively challenging human physical and mental limits in a way never seen before. Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has predicted that humans and machines will eventually merge to create a 'superintelligence' that will bring humanity to the next phase of its evolution, leaving behind its outdated, 'carbon-based' biological existence, what is commonly referred to as the ' technological singularity '.
It appears that some people are not been waiting for this event to take place in order to start transforming their own selves. An important part of the Transhumanist movement today consists of so-called ' biohackers ' and ' body hackers ' who are closely monitoring their health and bodily functions (following the example set by Johnson, the ' most measured man in human history '). These people are even implanting technological apparatuses directly into their bodies in an attempt order to extend their lifespan and increase their cognitive and physical abilities.
The ethical implications of the technological and scientific transformations advanced by partisans of Transhumanism are also concerning
This should come as no surprise therefore that the concept of the cyborg, until now limited to the domain of science-fiction, has come to be widely used by partisans of Transhumanism to promote their mode of life and conception of the human. As one of them, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner tells us 'we have always been cyborgs'. You may think that what Sorgner says is quite outlandish, but remember this the next time you are going on a run using your 'smart watch' to keep track of your progress, or using the AI assistant on your connected device for everyday tasks. Aren't these technologies already an integral part of ourselves, to the point that we cannot conceive our existence without them?
At the same time, the increasing pervasiveness of those technologies in our everyday life as it is being promoted by Transhumanists is not without its issues. Serious concerns been raised—and rightly so—around the questions of privacy and the impact of screens and other connected interfaces on our mental health and well-being.
The ethical implications of the technological and scientific transformations advanced by partisans of Transhumanism are also an issue, given that those advances could reinforce already existing social inequalities between those who can actually afford them, and those who cannot. Once those issues are taken into consideration, the question becomes not so much 'do you want to live forever?', but rather 'who can actually do so, and at what price exactly?'