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Posthumanism

Not a prediction. A working hypothesis : that Homo sapiens is a transitional species, that the things which replace us may not be flesh, may not be...

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Not a prediction. A working hypothesis : that Homo sapiens is a transitional species, that the things which replace us may not be flesh, may not be singular, and may, by the conventions of personhood we now hold, not be people. Key sections include: Post human. What comes next.; Trans > Post.; How long is now ?; What might come next; Is the upload you ?; Who built this field; The five obligations; Recommended source; The long view; Indicators · 2026–2050.

Key sections

  • 01Post human. What comes next.
  • 02Trans > Post.
  • 03How long is now ?
  • 04What might come next
  • 05Is the upload you ?
  • 06Who built this field
  • 07The five obligations
  • 08Recommended source
  • 09The long view
  • 10Indicators · 2026–2050

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Slide outline
  1. 01Post human. What comes next.
  2. 02Trans > Post.
  3. 03How long is now ?
  4. 04What might come next
  5. 05Is the upload you ?
  6. 06Who built this field
  7. 07The five obligations
  8. 08Recommended source
  9. 09The long view
  10. 10Indicators · 2026–2050
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Category
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Updated
2026-05-17
LLM text
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

Post human. What comes next.

  • A pamphlet · Vol. 6 · No. 10
  • After Sapiens
  • Not a prediction. A working hypothesis: that Homo sapiens is a transitional species, that the things which replace us may not be flesh, may not be singular, and may, by the conventions of personhood we now hold, not be people.
Slide 02

Trans > Post.

  • §1 · Distinction
  • Transhumanism says: extend the human. Better senses, longer lives, more memory. The human remains the reference frame. Posthumanism says: the reference frame itself is provisional. The category "human" was useful for a few hundred thousand years. It need not be the last category.
  • Two readings
  • Critical posthumanism · Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles. The human as ideologically constructed; species lines as political; subjectivity as networked.
  • Speculative posthumanism · David Roden, Nick Bostrom, Eric Steinhart. Empirical: there will be descendants. They may not be human. What can we say about them?
  • The two camps don't always recognize each other. The first is mostly humanities; the second mostly philosophy of mind and futures studies. This file pulls from both.
Slide 03

How long is now?

  • §2 · The deep-time view
  • Modern Homo sapiens is ~300,000 years old. Behavioral modernity, ~70,000. Agriculture, ~12,000. Writing, ~5,000. Industrial civilization, ~250. The compression is real: we have spent 99.9% of our existence as foragers and the last 0.1% transforming the planet.
  • Look forward at comparable scales. If our descendants persist 100,000 years (a modest claim — most mammalian species do), they will have spent vastly more of their history under conditions we cannot picture than under conditions we share.
  • forecast By the standard of geology, the question is not whether something replaces Homo sapiens. It is what.
Slide 04

What might come next

  • §3 · Successor scenarios
  • A · Hybrids
  • Cyborg lineages
  • Gradual integration of biology & silicon. Continuous personal identity; discontinuous species identity.
  • B · Uploads
  • Digital descendants
  • Mind emulation; substrate-independent persons. Hanson's Age of Em as the rough sketch.
  • C · AGI lineage
  • Mind children
  • Moravec 1988. AI systems as cultural & possibly literal descendants — they inherit our concepts even if not our genome.
  • D · Engineered biology
  • Designer species
  • Heavy CRISPR / synbio over centuries; one of many descendant species that share an evolutionary trunk with us.
  • E · Multi-substrate civ
  • All of the above
  • Scenarios A–D running simultaneously, in different niches, perhaps in conflict, perhaps not.
  • F · Ending
  • No descendants
  • Existential catastrophe (Bostrom 2002, Ord 2020) is non-zero. Posthumanism only matters if we get past it.
Slide 05

Is the upload you?

  • §4 · The uploading question
  • The strong claim: a sufficiently faithful functional emulation of your brain instantiates you. Your subjective continuity transfers. Hans Moravec, Susan Schneider, David Chalmers (with caveats), Ray Kurzweil all hold versions of this.
  • The skeptic claim: the emulation is at best a copy. The original biological you, scanned destructively, dies. The emulation believes it is you because it has your memories — but the question of who is having the experience is not settled by the question of who has the memories.
  • Three positions, one diagram
Slide 06

Slide 6

  • §5 · Identity · diagram
  • After Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 1984); Schneider (Artificial You, 2019); Kolak (I Am You, 2004).
Slide 07

Who built this field

  • §6 · Voices
  • Donna HarawayUC Santa Cruz · "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985); Staying with the Trouble (2016)
  • N. Katherine HaylesHow We Became Posthuman (1999) · the canonical text on embodiment & information
  • Rosi BraidottiThe Posthuman (2013) · post-anthropocentric ethics
  • Cary WolfeAnimal studies · what posthumanism owes non-humans
  • David RodenPosthuman Life (2014) · "disconnection thesis" — descendants need not be intelligible to us
  • Hans MoravecMind Children (1988) · the substrate-independent foundation
  • Robin HansonAge of Em (2016) · economics of an emulation civilization
  • Toby OrdThe Precipice (2020) · existential risk & long-term human descent
  • Meghan O'GieblynGod, Human, Animal, Machine (2021) · the religious shape of these arguments
Slide 08

Slide 8

  • §7 · Stance
  • If the future has people, they will not be us.
  • This is not a doom claim. It is a category claim. We have changed enough in the last 12,000 years that an Upper Paleolithic forager could not pass for one of us at a job interview. We will change at least as much in the next 12,000 years. Probably more.
  • The question is not whether the descendants will exist. It is what we owe them, what we are willing to do to bring them into being, and what we want them to remember of us.
Slide 09

The five obligations

  • §8 · Ethics
  • Survival. If we extinguish ourselves, the question of posthuman descendants is moot. Toby Ord puts our existential risk this century at ~1 in 6.
  • Diversity. Lock-in to a single template — biological, digital, ideological — is its own catastrophe. Bostrom's "astronomical waste" cuts both ways.
  • Substrate parity. If we create digital persons, we owe them the moral status that supervenes on their being persons, not their being made of meat.
  • Reversibility. Choices that foreclose later options (lock-in, monoculture, irreversible enhancement) require unusual confidence.
  • Memory. We owe past lineages — including Homo sapiens as it once was — at least the dignity of being remembered.
Slide 10

Recommended source

  • §9 · Watch
  • Isaac Arthur · "Mind Uploading" / "Post-Scarcity Civilizations"
  • Sober, hour-long treatments. Pair with PBS Spacetime's identity-and-uploading episode.
  • youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA →
  • Kurzgesagt · "What Are You?"
  • 10-minute primer on theseus-ship identity, body cells, the Parfit puzzle. Useful for getting friends in the door.
  • youtube.com/@kurzgesagt →
Slide 11

The long view

  • §10 · Beyond 2100
  • If our descendants reach Kardashev I (planetary energy budget), it will take centuries. If they reach Kardashev II (stellar), millennia or longer. At those scales, the question of whether they remember being "human" is like asking whether we remember being mitochondria-bearing eukaryotes. Yes, in a structural sense. No, in any way that bears on identity.
  • 2050
  • Trans
  • Recognizable humans, augmented at the margins.
  • 2100
  • Hybrid
  • Mixed substrates, blurred edges, contested categories.
  • 2200
  • Diverse
  • Multiple successor lineages — some biological, some digital, some merged.
  • 3000+
  • Other
  • Categories we cannot sketch from here, by the same humility evolution always demands.
  • fiction-adjacent All of the above is speculation. The point is that not speculating is also a choice — and one that flatters the present at the expense of the future.
Slide 12

Indicators · 2026–2050

  • §11 · What to watch
  • Whole-brain emulation roadmap milestones (mouse-cortex connectome, ~2030)
  • Digital-personhood legal cases (AI, uploaded entities, hybrid corporate forms)
  • First serious philosophical & scientific consensus statements on AI moral patienthood (Birch et al., NYU 2023+)
  • Long-term-future foundations & institutions (Future of Life Institute, Forethought, GPI)
  • Cultural reception of post-anthropocentric ethics in mainstream education
  • Be a good ancestor.
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