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Yet transhumanism seems almost misanthropic in its zeal. Proponents appear to argue that if human beings as we know them are eliminated, so much the better. We're a pretty rubbish species anyway, so if our successor species is better, why worry about preserving the one we have? Take Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading. Having implanted several electronic devices into his body, he has begun to claim (perhaps hyperbolically) that he is the world's first cyborg—part human, part machine. “I was born human,” he says, “but this was an accident of fate, a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.”
I'm not sure what to make of all this. But perhaps we are too ready to dismiss innovations such as superintelligence as distant possibilities. We may also be too quick to underestimate the pharmaceutical and genetic technologies that could impact who and what we are in the nearer future. For that reason, it is worrying that Bostrom admits that transhumanists haven't given much thought to the question of what sorts of modifications would simply enhance us and which would be so transformative as to, in effect, destroy humanity as we know it and create a new transhumanity in its place.
It's time that changed. There are questions about what it means to be human—and what we might want to protect from innovation—that need answering. To paraphrase Marx, until now, the philosophers have only interpreted the self; the point now is how, if at all, to change the self.