Whether the transition kills us first.
The movement contains both the people most eager to build a superintelligence and the people most alarmed about it, and frequently they are the same people. Bostrom wrote the declaration and then wrote Superintelligence.
The most striking thing about transhumanism as a belief system is that its eschatology and its apocalypse are the same event. The people who most want a superintelligence built and the people most convinced it will end humanity overlap heavily, and the movement contains no mechanism for adjudicating between them. Bostrom is the clearest case: he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association, co-drafted the 1998 Declaration, and then in 2014 published Superintelligence, which did more than any other book to establish existential risk from artificial intelligence as a serious field. Marked contested because the split is real, runs through the movement's leading figures, and has consequences — it is the reason a philosophy of enhancement now spends much of its energy arguing for caution.
The same ground, other faiths
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