| Feb. 8th, 2012

Does Transhumanism Threaten Equality and Human Rights?

By Exception Staff | July 23, 2010

According to transhumanists, we are close to entering a post-human age when technology allows humans to evolve. Here is why, from a 2009 article on the Exception titled "What is Transhumanism:"

If we analyze the rate of progress from an exponential, rather than linear, standpoint, it becomes stunningly clear that radical enhancement technologies will be available within a few decades.

We approach a turning point in human history. Never before has the rate of progress reached its current pitch. Technological interventions will create changes so dramatic, that it will make intuitive sense to call the deeply-altered people of the future posthumans.

What will happen when these posthumans compete with the rest of us? Even transhumanists concede that the political and social effects are a concern since "the benefits of emerging technologies may favor the rich over the poor, increasing barriers between social classes." Francis Fukuyama, a former member of President Bush's Bioethics Council from 2001 to 2005, has written that transhumanism is one of the most dangerous ideas because it threatens equality.

Beverly Nuckols of the Texas GOP Vote suggests that the first step towards accepting posthuman inequality will be driven by political philosophy, not technology.

It’s probably not the technology or the use of it that threatens to infringe on Jefferson’s self-evident rights. The danger – or at least the beginnings of it - is the philosophical and legal contemplation that rights are ideas and word games, not endowed by our Creator, not “unalienable,” and certainly not "self-evident." Rights become dependent on might, artifacts that the most powerful or numerous decide to recognize.

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