#Transhumanism
18 entries tagged Transhumanism.
People (6)
- Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer Yudkowsky is an American writer and self-taught artificial-intelligence theorist who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, wrote the foundational texts of the LessWrong rationalist movement, was funded for a decade by Peter Thiel, and in 2025 was named by Thiel as an example of the technology-stopping 'Antichrist.'
- Julian Huxley Julian Huxley was the evolutionary biologist who coined the modern usage of transhumanism in 1957, served as the first Director-General of UNESCO and wrote a founding document tying the agency to eugenics, and presided over the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962.
- Julian Savulescu Julian Savulescu is an Oxford bioethicist who founded the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, edited the Journal of Medical Ethics, and advanced 'procreative beneficence' and the case for human genetic and moral enhancement.
- Max More Max More is a British-born philosopher who coined the term extropy, founded the Extropy Institute and the libertarian-transhumanist movement of the 1990s, and later ran the Alcor cryonics foundation.
- Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.
- Timothy Leary Timothy Leary was the Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic evangelist who ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project, coined 'turn on, tune in, drop out,' operated under documented CIA surveillance while drawing on research networks whose funding traced to MKULTRA, and in his final decades became a champion of personal computers, space migration, and life extension.
Organizations (3)
- Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute was a research center at the University of Oxford founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom that became the academic headquarters of longtermism and AI-existential-risk research, drew funding from Elon Musk and the FTX Future Fund, and was closed by the university in April 2024.
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a Berkeley artificial-intelligence-risk nonprofit founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, funded from 2005 by Peter Thiel, that incubated the LessWrong rationalist community and the social network from which the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations later emerged.
- The Zizians The Zizians are a small group led by the computer programmer Jack LaSota that splintered from the Bay Area rationalist movement around an idiosyncratic theory of brain hemispheres, militant veganism, and AI-apocalypse decision theory, and that has been tied to six deaths across California, Pennsylvania, and Vermont between 2022 and 2025, including the killing of a Border Patrol agent that produced a federal death-penalty prosecution.
Events (1)
- Singularity Summit The Singularity Summit was an annual conference on artificial intelligence and human enhancement cofounded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Ray Kurzweil, that ran through 2012 as the public-facing platform of the Singularity Institute before the brand was sold to Singularity University in 2013.
Concepts (8)
- Effective Accelerationism Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) is a Silicon Valley techno-optimist movement that emerged in 2022 advocating the unrestricted acceleration of artificial intelligence and technology, defined against effective altruism's AI-safety 'doomerism,' and drawing on the accelerationism of Nick Land.
- Eugenics Eugenics is the project of improving the human species through controlled reproduction, named by Francis Galton in 1883, which drove sterilization and immigration laws and the Holocaust, was repackaged after the war as race-and-intelligence research, and is identified by critics as a root of the transhumanist and longtermist worldview.
- Extropianism Extropianism is the libertarian transhumanist movement founded by Max More in the late 1980s around the Extropy Institute and its 1990s mailing list, the seedbed from which Nick Bostrom's longtermism, the rationalist community, and parts of the cypherpunk and cryptocurrency worlds emerged.
- Rationalist Community The Rationalist Community is the Bay Area subculture that formed around Eliezer Yudkowsky's LessWrong writings and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in the late 2000s, organized around probability-based reasoning and artificial-intelligence existential risk, and from whose social network the Effective Altruism movement and the Leverage Research, Vassarite, and Zizian cult formations all emerged.
- Russian Cosmism Russian Cosmism is the late-19th-century movement originating with the Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorov that called for the technological resurrection of all the dead, radical life extension, and the colonization of space, and it supplies the 'C' in the TESCREAL acronym.
- Singularitarianism Singularitarianism is the belief, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993 and popularized by Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book and his Singularity University, that accelerating technology will soon produce a machine superintelligence and an irreversible transformation of human life.
- TESCREAL TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence.
- Transhumanism 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.