„Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwunden werden soll. Was habt ihr getan, ihn zu überwinden?“

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883)

Transhumanism is one of the most influential techno-ideologies of the twenty-first century. It is presented as a natural continuation of human evolution with emancipatory elements such as liberation from the biological limitations of human life such as pain, suffering, and even death, through technological enhancement. Although futuristic and tantalizing, beneath its promise of nearly absolute emancipation lie deeper questions about power, control and the pursuit of superintelligence as a means of radically shaping human societies.

The Transhumanist Vision

The central idea of transhumanism is the eventual merger of humans and machines. Despite its emphasis on the role of technology in shaping humans, the language surrounding transhumanism often carries a distinctly theological structure. Visions of digital immortality, superintelligent entities and a transcendence from biological limitations echo religious narratives of salvation. In this sense, transhumanism functions as a secularized version of such notions as “final days”, “second coming” etc… while replacing the traditional theological notion of transcendence with a technological one. For instance, some transhumanists (R. Kurzweil, Y. N. Harari) have predicted the emergence of something akin to a “digital god”. At the same time, other transhumanists (Z. Istvan, S. Schneier, A Gomez Morin etc) working in adjacent fields have explored different dimensions of the transhumanist vision that human evolution may soon become technological rather than biological.

In the larger scheme of things, transhumanism and AI safety have both emerged from the AI field and the prediction of superintelligent machines. Regardless of whether the prediction of such machines is possible, while the AI safety community is mainly concerned with human control and the AI alignment with human values, one of the justifications for transhumanism is based on the necessity of an evolutionary adaptation to counter superintelligent machines, whose appearance they take for granted. This necessity is backed up by the idea of Morphological Freedom i.e. the right of individuals to modify their bodies, and now minds through technology. This perspective is laid out in The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan who is one of the most visible advocates of transhumanism in the political sphere. In many ways this sounds plausible and may be even desirable: Human life is constrained by aging, disease, and biological fragility. Therefore, the possibility of overcoming these limitations through biotechnology and artificial intelligence is deeply appealing. This resonates with the ideas of the British philosopher David Pearce, who envisions a post-Darwinian world in which technology eliminates suffering in humans and animals alike. In such a world, the evolutionary logic of pain and struggle would be replaced by engineered states of well-being that Pearce describes as “gradients of bliss.”

The idea is undeniably provocative. Physical and psychological suffering, however meaningful they may be in certain narratives of human development, are rarely regarded as desirable in themselves. Instead they are considered as some kind of necessary evil that will help humans gain a better understanding of life and human condition. But not all suffering is meaningful or helpful. And biotechnological engineering is already used to mitigate some meaningless human pain, though under strict ethical and regulatory oversight. However, transhumanism sets its sight far beyond this by suggesting that enhancement of human beings themselves will enable them to not just end suffering but also death, thereby transcending the limitations imposed by biology.

Transhumanists are not concerned with building superintelligent machines. In their view, this is inevitable. They celebrate technological acceleration to reach the conditions where their predictions will come true. Their proposals also involve the redesign of human beings in order to keep pace with superintelligent machines that they assume will become reality. Advocates of this view argue that when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, the only viable response will be deeper integration between humans and technology through neural implants, brain-computer interfaces, and AI-assisted cognition. From this perspective, the biological human body is merely a temporary evolutionary platform. Humanity, in order to survive and remain relevant, must become post-biological.

Ironically, even if AI safety and Transhumanism may be viewed as the two sides of the same coin, the two fields diverge fundamentally in that the very problems identified by AI safety research may ultimately render the transhumanist project obsolete: If superintelligent systems were ever to emerge, they might surpass human intelligence so dramatically that even radically enhanced humans would remain insignificant in comparison.

Power, Control and the Political Economy of Enhancment

So the question is why these ideas are being pursued. Is the drive towards transhumanism motivated by simple extrapolations, necessity, curiosity, or fascination with fictional technological futures? Is it pursued because it is necessary for human survival, or simply because it will be technologically possible? Or are transhumanist ideas merely philosophical justifications for what is known as the technological logic that has already shaped contemporary digital economies? Currently, the infrastructures required to develop advanced artificial intelligence, biotechnology and possible human enhancement technologies are controlled by a relatively small number of corporations and research institutions that oftentimes are connected to those corporations. Transhumanism, despite its claims of ending suffering and death, does not seem concerned with the consequence of this concentration of power. Its narrative of inevitable technological evolution towards superintelligence and human-machine merger in fact obscures the pitfalls of this presumably final human evolutionary step in the hands of profit driven corporations and industry leaders who openly speak about dismantling the achievements of human societies.

We think that transhumanism must be understood as an extension of the technological logic that has already shaped contemporary digital economies. If surveillance capitalism transformed human behavior into a source of data extraction, transhumanism hints at a deeper transformation in which the human organism and mind themselves become subject to technological optimization.

This optimization trap seems to be shared by both transhumanists and many strands of AI safety research. Why do we think that the trajectory of civilization is defined by increasingly powerful systems of intelligence and optimization? Is the relentless pursuit of optimization itself desirable? After all, many of the crises facing contemporary societies are not caused by a shortage of intelligence, but by failures of governance, coordination, and collective responsibility. The deeper challenge may therefore not be how to maximize intelligence, but how to ensure that technological development remains embedded within social, ethical, and ecological frameworks that preserve human flourishing.

The question is why corporations and cultures are so deeply concerned with intelligence (human or artificial) and how it is embedded within economic, political, and institutional systems. Why has the pursuit of ever greater intelligence become the central technological goal of our time? Can humans live as humans in a world dominated by superintelligent machines? Transhumanists certainly do not think this is a possibility. And so to counter the machines built by humans, they must merge with the machines in order to create Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

But while Nietzsche imagined the possibility of a human-being transcending existing moral and existential constraints, transhumanism appears to revive this aspiration through technological means. At the same time, the transhumanist approach to Übermensch reveals a tension: Nietzsche imagined the creation of a super human-being through the acquisition of new values. Transhumanists assume that technological enhancement alone will produce a higher form of humanity guided by some form of rational superintelligence. What is the danger? And if any, is the danger new?

Unfortunately, already today, increased technological capability seems to substitute for the deeper ethical and cultural transformations that genuine human flourishing requires. Rules, agreements, laws are being replaced with might and brute force by those who consider colonialization, slavery and looting as a sign of intelligence and superiority. It is quite clear that it is the very same surveillance capitalism that is in pursuit of superintelligence that in one way or another, with or without human enhancement, will result in control capitalism.

This is in fact a rarely addressed issue in the current debate. The human-machine integration in the transhumanist discourse must be done within systems of cybernetic control. The development of modern information systems has transformed individuals into nodes within vast networks of data collection and optimization. And as Michel Foucault observed, modern forms of power often operate through subtle mechanisms embedded within social systems. A fully integrated human-machine ecosystem could extend the mechanisms of power and control even further, embedding technological governance directly within human cognition.

Conclusion

Transhumanism presents itself as the natural continuation of human evolution. Yet this narrative conceals deeper questions about power, control, and the role of intelligence in shaping the future of civilization. The challenge facing humanity may therefore not be how to transcend its biological limits, but how to ensure that the technological systems it creates remain aligned with the values that make human life meaningful in the first place.

In short, it is not whether humanity can transcend itself through technology, but whether it can do so without losing sight of the very values that made transcendence worth pursuing in the first place.