Uploaded March 2023 | Updated September 2026, 8 hours ago
What are the benefits and risks of transhumanist technologies, and why are they so taboo? How do we legislate to avoid existential risks, without holding back too much the enormous possible benefits? How do we secure the mental health, rights and equal access of the public as it inevitiably rolls out?
So today we have the tricky and somewhat taboo topic of how to ethically guide the ever-increasing application of transhumanist technologies. With the recent advances in bio-technology, and some technologies already making their way into our bodies, it seems that the move towards a transhumanist vision of how to improve our standard of living is already well under way. So the question now is how do we educate ourselves the public and legislate tech corporations and governments, to be sure that people’s mental and physical health, access to opportunities, and personal freedoms are not being compromised in the gold-rush.
Fortunately our guest today is a sociologist and bioethicist with over 25 years of debating exactly these kind of questions. He is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies or IEET, and he is the Associate Provost for Institutional research, Assessment and Planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston, James Hughes!
He is a Buddhist and techno-optimist, and was executive director of the World Transhumanist Organisation from 2004-2006. He argues for a democratic transhumanism in which human enhancement technologies should only be allowed if available to everyone, with respect for the rights of the individuals to control their own bodies.
He’s the writer of many articles and papers and the author of the book,“Citizen Cyborg: Why democratic societies must respond to the redesigned human of the future”. He is currently working on another book about moral enhancement, tentatively titled “Cyborg Buddha: Using neurotechnology to become better people”.
Being a techno-optimist and futurist myself, yet extremely cautious of mankind’s reckless and often blind curiosity when developing technology, I felt it was an important time to take a balanced multi-perspectival look into the ethics and policy development of transhumanist technologies. The interview offered me a process of re-evalutation of my own preconceptions and triggers, so I hope it helps you question your own opinions on this complex topic.
A brief apology to those of you watching for the lack of video feed on the host during the interview, you’ll only see James Hughes - which may turn out for the better!
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro
08:00 Difficulty accepting our inevitable transhumanist future
10:30 Protecting the future of work, equity and liberal outcomes in the near term
14:00 The taboo of transhumanism and debating toxic issues
19:45 It’s not the tech that’s the risk but the way we use it and legislate it: Max Tegmark
33:20 The History of Transhumanism
44:50 Is Eugenics connected to Transhumanism?
51:00 The roadmap towards markets rolling out transhumanist technologies
52:30 The Kurzweilian paradigm: Smaller, smarter and faster
55:45 Backing up memories - replacing and supplementing brain function
57:00 Instantiating brain backups in robot bodies, cloned bodies or computers
58:45 The Metaverse and brain-internet interfaces assessed
01:03:00 Augmented reality will be more popular than virtual reality
01:06:00 Technology interfering with the evolution of brains and culture
01:10:00 Selective scientific publication about the negative mental health outcomes
01:18:00 Wearable devices to motivate pro-mental health behaviour
01:19:30 Surveillance capitalism, the attention economy and legislating algorithms
01:21:00 Neurolink: brain computer internet interfaces assessed
01:29:00 The distinction between somatic and heritable/reproductive gene therapy
01:30:00 The distinction between therapeutic and enhancement gene therapy
01:32:00 If we change something, in future we can just change it back
01:32:40 No super powered technologies should be allowed only for the rich
01:35:00 Cyborgs: Part biological and part synthetic
01:43:50 The Singularity explained: Vernor Vinge’s ‘Singularity’ is a physics blackhole term referring to total unpredictablitly of future outcomes
Full timestamps on the website
References:
James J Hughes ‘Citizen Cyborg’
https://g.co/kgs/x5J4s8
Metaverse paper ‘The Democratic Metaverse’
philpapers.org/archive/STUTDM-2.pdf
JBS Haldane’s ideas in Contemporary biopolitics in 1920s' British futurism paper
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327541
Julian Huxley ‘Transhuamanism’ paper, 1957
scribd.com/document/233981907/Julian-Huxley-Transhumanism#
David Bostrum - ‘A History of Transhumanist thought’ paper
nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf
The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies IEET
ieet.org
Alvin Toffler ‘Future shock’
https://g.co/kgs/9onaNx
The Future of Life Institute
futureoflife.org
What are the benefits and risks of transhumanist technologies, and why are they so taboo? How do we legislate to avoid existential risks, without holding back too much the enormous possible benefits? How do we secure the mental health, rights and equal access of the public as it inevitiably rolls out?
So today we have the tricky and somewhat taboo topic of how to ethically guide the ever-increasing application of transhumanist technologies. With the recent advances in bio-technology, and some technologies already making their way into our bodies, it seems that the move towards a transhumanist vision of how to improve our standard of living is already well under way. So the question now is how do we educate ourselves the public and legislate tech corporations and governments, to be sure that people’s mental and physical health, access to opportunities, and personal freedoms are not being compromised in the gold-rush.
Fortunately our guest today is a sociologist and bioethicist with over 25 years of debating exactly these kind of questions. He is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies or IEET, and he is the Associate Provost for Institutional research, Assessment and Planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston, James Hughes!
He is a Buddhist and techno-optimist, and was executive director of the World Transhumanist Organisation from 2004-2006. He argues for a democratic transhumanism in which human enhancement technologies should only be allowed if available to everyone, with respect for the rights of the individuals to control their own bodies.
He’s the writer of many articles and papers and the author of the book,“Citizen Cyborg: Why democratic societies must respond to the redesigned human of the future”. He is currently working on another book about moral enhancement, tentatively titled “Cyborg Buddha: Using neurotechnology to become better people”.
Being a techno-optimist and futurist myself, yet extremely cautious of mankind’s reckless and often blind curiosity when developing technology, I felt it was an important time to take a balanced multi-perspectival look into the ethics and policy development of transhumanist technologies. The interview offered me a process of re-evalutation of my own preconceptions and triggers, so I hope it helps you question your own opinions on this complex topic.
A brief apology to those of you watching for the lack of video feed on the host during the interview, you’ll only see James Hughes - which may turn out for the better!
What we discuss:
00:00 Intro
08:00 Difficulty accepting our inevitable transhumanist future
10:30 Protecting the future of work, equity and liberal outcomes in the near term
14:00 The taboo of transhumanism and debating toxic issues
19:45 It’s not the tech that’s the risk but the way we use it and legislate it: Max Tegmark
33:20 The History of Transhumanism
44:50 Is Eugenics connected to Transhumanism?
51:00 The roadmap towards markets rolling out transhumanist technologies
52:30 The Kurzweilian paradigm: Smaller, smarter and faster
55:45 Backing up memories - replacing and supplementing brain function
57:00 Instantiating brain backups in robot bodies, cloned bodies or computers
58:45 The Metaverse and brain-internet interfaces assessed
01:03:00 Augmented reality will be more popular than virtual reality
01:06:00 Technology interfering with the evolution of brains and culture
01:10:00 Selective scientific publication about the negative mental health outcomes
01:18:00 Wearable devices to motivate pro-mental health behaviour
01:19:30 Surveillance capitalism, the attention economy and legislating algorithms
01:21:00 Neurolink: brain computer internet interfaces assessed
01:29:00 The distinction between somatic and heritable/reproductive gene therapy
01:30:00 The distinction between therapeutic and enhancement gene therapy
01:32:00 If we change something, in future we can just change it back
01:32:40 No super powered technologies should be allowed only for the rich
01:35:00 Cyborgs: Part biological and part synthetic
01:43:50 The Singularity explained: Vernor Vinge’s ‘Singularity’ is a physics blackhole term referring to total unpredictablitly of future outcomes
Full timestamps on the website
References:
James J Hughes ‘Citizen Cyborg’
https://g.co/kgs/x5J4s8
Metaverse paper ‘The Democratic Metaverse’
philpapers.org/archive/STUTDM-2.pdf
JBS Haldane’s ideas in Contemporary biopolitics in 1920s' British futurism paper
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327541
Julian Huxley ‘Transhuamanism’ paper, 1957
scribd.com/document/233981907/Julian-Huxley-Transhumanism#
David Bostrum - ‘A History of Transhumanist thought’ paper
nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf
The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies IEET
ieet.org
Alvin Toffler ‘Future shock’
https://g.co/kgs/9onaNx
The Future of Life Institute
futureoflife.org
