--- alias: - Transhumanism - Transhumanist - H+ category: Ideology created: 2026-06-20 location: United Kingdom; California summary: Transhumanism is the movement to use technology to transcend the biological limits of the human condition, named in its modern sense by Julian Huxley in 1957 and organized academically by the World Transhumanist Association that Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded in 1998. tags: - Concept - Transhumanism - LifeExtension - Cryonics - ArtificialIntelligence - HumanEnhancement - Posthumanism updated: 2026-06-20 --- Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that holds that human beings can and should use science and technology to overcome the fundamental limits of their biology, including disease, aging, death, and the bounds of human cognition. Its program spans radical life extension, cognitive and physical enhancement, genetic engineering, mind uploading, cryonics, and the eventual emergence of a posthuman condition. The term in its modern sense comes from the biologist [Julian Huxley](/people/julian-huxley/) in 1957, and the movement acquired an organizational form with the World Transhumanist Association founded by [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/) and David Pearce in 1998. It is the umbrella under which the libertarian [extropian](/concepts/extropianism/) current and the academic and technoprogressive wings both fall.[^1][^2] ### The Term and Its Precursors Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and the first director-general of UNESCO, used the word in his 1957 essay collection *New Bottles for New Wine*, writing that "the human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself, not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity," and proposing, "We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve." Bostrom's own account of the movement's history traces an older lineage of scientific speculation about remaking the human, in particular the biologist J. B. S. Haldane's lecture *Daedalus; or, Science and the Future* (1923), which imagined ectogenesis and genetic improvement, and the physicist J. D. Bernal's *The World, the Flesh and the Devil* (1929), which envisaged bionic implants and the colonization of space.[^3][^4] The deeper roots reach to Enlightenment confidence in progress and perfectibility, and beyond that to the ancient and perennial human wish to escape mortality, but transhumanists distinguish their position by its insistence that the relevant transformation is to be achieved through applied technology rather than through politics, ethics, or the supernatural. The contemporary movement adopted the abbreviation "H+" or "h+," standing for "humanity plus," as shorthand for the enhanced future condition it seeks.[^3] ### Core Technologies and Projects The cluster of technologies central to transhumanist hope took shape across the second half of the twentieth century. Robert Ettinger's *The Prospect of Immortality* (1962) launched the practice of cryonics, the freezing of the legally dead in the expectation of future revival, and his *Man into Superman* (1972) generalized the idea to technological enhancement of the living. The futurist FM-2030, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, taught "new concepts of the human" at the New School for Social Research in the 1960s, organized the optimistic "UpWingers," and in *Are You a Transhuman?* (1989) gave the term "transhuman" wide currency, describing a transitional being on the way to a posthuman future. The engineer Eric Drexler's *Engines of Creation* (1986) brought molecular nanotechnology into the program, and the prospect of whole-brain emulation, or mind uploading, supplied a technological route to the old dream of surviving the death of the body.[^4][^5] These threads converged with the rise of computing and artificial intelligence into a coherent agenda by the 1980s and 1990s: defeat aging through biotechnology and nanomedicine, raise intelligence through drugs, implants, and genetic selection, preserve the dying through cryonic suspension at facilities such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and ultimately transfer or back up the patterns of the mind onto more durable substrates. The movement overlaps heavily with the milieu of the technological singularity and with the artificial-intelligence community, and counts the futurist Ray Kurzweil among its best-known proponents.[^2][^4] ### The Libertarian and Academic Wings The first sustained organization of modern transhumanism came from its libertarian wing. The philosopher [Max More](/people/max-more/) coined the term "extropy" in 1988 and built the Extropy Institute around an anarcho-capitalist and individualist creed of self-overcoming, whose 1990s mailing list gathered many of the figures later prominent in the AI-risk, [rationalist](/concepts/rationalist-community/), and cypherpunk worlds. A distinct, more academic and politically heterogeneous tendency emerged at the end of the decade: in early 1998 Bostrom, then a young philosopher, and Pearce, author of the online manifesto *The Hedonistic Imperative*, founded the World Transhumanist Association, later renamed Humanity+, to provide an organizational basis open to transhumanists across the political spectrum. Its two founding documents were the Transhumanist Declaration and the Transhumanist FAQ.[^1][^6] A further fork ran through the academic wing itself. The bioethicist James Hughes, in *Citizen Cyborg* (2004), articulated a "democratic transhumanism" or "technoprogressivism" that paired enhancement technologies with social democracy, equal access, and public regulation, in deliberate contrast to the extropians' free-market politics. Bostrom moved the intellectual center toward the academy by founding the [Future of Humanity Institute](/organizations/future-of-humanity-institute/) at the University of Oxford in 2005 and turning increasingly to existential risk and to longtermism, the view that the welfare of vast numbers of future people should weigh heavily in present decisions.[^6][^7] ### Reception and Criticism Transhumanism has drawn sustained criticism from across the political and intellectual map. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, writing in *Foreign Policy* in 2004, called it "the world's most dangerous idea," arguing that the project of re-engineering human nature threatens the basis of equal human dignity, and bioconservative critics such as Leon Kass and Michael Sandel have objected to the drive to abolish suffering, aging, and the given character of human life. From a different direction, the scholars Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru argued that transhumanism anchors a bundle of overlapping ideologies they labeled "TESCREAL," for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, which they contend has roots in twentieth-century eugenics and now exerts outsized influence over the priorities of the technology industry.[^8][^9] The movement has acquired a notable patronage among technology billionaires, whose funding of longevity research, cryonics, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence draws directly on transhumanist aims; the [Peter Thiel](/people/peter-thiel/) network's investments in anti-aging biotechnology and Thiel's own public embrace of life extension and cryonic preservation are frequently cited examples. The internal divide between those who seek to build superintelligence and those in the [Effective Altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/) and AI-risk camp who fear it surfaced in Thiel's 2025 [Antichrist](/concepts/antichrist/) lectures, in which he accused [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/people/eliezer-yudkowsky/) and Bostrom of turning from transhumanism toward a precautionary opposition to technology.[^7][^10] [^1]: "Transhumanism," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on the definition, Julian Huxley's coinage, Max More and the Extropy Institute, and the 1998 founding of the World Transhumanist Association by Bostrom and Pearce. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism [^2]: Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought," *Journal of Evolution and Technology,* 2005. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/ [^3]: Huxley, Julian. *New Bottles for New Wine.* Chatto and Windus, 1957, on the coinage of "transhumanism"; with Haldane's *Daedalus; or, Science and the Future* (1923) and Bernal's *The World, the Flesh and the Devil* (1929) as cited in Bostrom's history. [^4]: Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought," on Ettinger, FM-2030, Drexler, and the technologies of enhancement. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/a-history-of-transhumanist-thought/ [^5]: Esfandiary, F. M. (FM-2030). *Are You a Transhuman?* Warner Books, 1989; and Ettinger, Robert. *The Prospect of Immortality* (1962) and *Man into Superman* (1972). [^6]: Pearce, David. *The Hedonistic Imperative* (1995); World Transhumanist Association, Transhumanist Declaration and Transhumanist FAQ (1998 to 1999). [^7]: Hughes, James. *Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.* Westview Press, 2004; on the Future of Humanity Institute, Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (2014), and longtermism. [^8]: Fukuyama, Francis. "Transhumanism," *Foreign Policy,* September to October 2004, on "the world's most dangerous idea." https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/23/transhumanism/ [^9]: Torres, Émile P., and Timnit Gebru, on the "TESCREAL" bundle and its claimed eugenic roots; see the *First Monday* treatment, 2023 onward, and Torres's writing in *Truthdig.* [^10]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025, on Thiel's charge that Yudkowsky and Bostrom abandoned transhumanism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/