Many ethical questions about our future with intelligent machines rest upon assumptions concerning the origins, development and ideal future of humanity and of the universe, and hence overlap considerably with many religious questions. First, could computers themselves become moral in any sense, and could different components of morality – whatever they are – be instantiated in a computer? Second, could computers enhance the moral functioning of humans? Do computers potentially have a role in narrowing the gap between moral aspiration and how morality is actually lived out? Third, if we develop machines comparable in intelligence to humans, how should we treat them? This question is especially acute for embodied robots and human-like androids. Fourthly, numerous moral issues arise as society changes such that artificial intelligence plays an increasingly significant role in making decisions, with implications for how human beings function socially and as individuals, treat each other and access resources.

Technology has been an integral part of biological life since the inception of terrestrial life. Evolution is the process by which biological life seeks to transcend itself in pursuit of more robust life. This chapter examines transhumanism as the use of technological means to enhance human biological function. Transhumanists see human nature as a work in progress and suggest that by responsible use of science, technology and other rational means, we shall become beings with vastly greater capacities and unlimited potential. Transhumanism has religious implications.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

This chapter uses Don Delillo’s novel Zero K to consider the historical and structural relationship between bioethics and biocapitalism, particularly in the development of consent forms and contract labour. In this way, the essay examines the role human capital theory and transhumanism have played in influencing definitions of human nature and the bioethical frameworks predicated on these definitions. Using the techniques of literary narrative bioethics and feminist relational bioethics, the essay carefully interprets Zero K’s treatment of cryonics as a bioethical dilemma too often contained and constrained by historical and ideological conceptions of consent, which the novel seeks to critique. Ultimately, the chapter offers a form of posthuman literary narrative bioethics as an alternative methodology.

Gabriel Zamosc argues that a proper understanding of TSZ will help to advance the contemporary transhumanist movement that often claims to be inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch. According to Zamosc, Zarathustra warns us against falsely or sickly transcendent versions of his superhuman ideal that are actually a veiled hatred of our unchangeable human-all-too-human past. Indeed, this is why he teaches eternal recurrence, in order to show us how to love this past as an embodiment of our creative will to power. The transhumanist movement must therefore incorporate this doctrine so as to secure a joyful version of itself that embraces our transitional destiny of forever remaining mere bridges to the superhuman.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering/bio-enhancement reflect a deep-seated discontent with humanity’s embodied condition. This discontent is a contemporary variation on the long-standing dualisms that elevate mind/soul/intelligence over bodies and materiality. The (increasingly well-funded) desire to redesign human bodies and the habitats of our world grow out of the same logic that is reflected in an impatience with imperfection, vulnerability, and frustration. The end-result of transhumanism leads to a strange outcome, namely the eclipse, surpassing, and obliteration of the form of humanity itself. As such, transhumanism reflects a refusal to be in bodies and places, and thus is a particularly striking example of humanity’s rejection of its creaturely condition.

The conclusion brings the book full circle and reflects on the wider historical lessons that have been learned in hidden histories of the dead, and cases of disputed bodies after WWII to the present day. It sets out the book’s main research finding that the new case material substantiates the importance of better engaging with a cultural transition in medical research from an older ethics of conviction (patriarchal medical experts, authoritarian and inward looking, prioritising their exclusive research agendas) to a new ethics of responsibility (reflecting much more medicine’s impact on society as a whole, economically, culturally and politically) for a Genome era. Six policy implications are identified from the wealth of new research material, and the conclusion reflects on how we still need to embrace a world in which DNA coding will democratise how we see and interact with a newly visible self. The substantial data employed in this volume has allowed us not only to explore existing historiographical agendas, but also to set new ones. At this research frontier, the old death sentences of the past are being delayed and we stand on the threshold of new scientific eternities that challenge our historical imaginations and patient-practitioner working relationships.

The Conclusion provides a brief overview of the scientific, social, and economic trends described in the preceding chapters. It argues that attitudes to the altered body were widely varied, characterised by flexibility and heteroglossia. It draws parallels between early modern attitudes towards the altered body and modern endeavours in bodily restoration and augmentation, including transhumanism. Embedded or extended cognition may be an apt way in which to think about these development, and these philosophical trends have much in common with early modern models of selfhood.

The conclusion sums up the work, indicating the core elements shared by (Hellenic) theories of daimonification along with (Jewish and Christian) theories of angelification. One common element is the link of virtue (ethical transformation) with physical and cognitive transformation. It is this persistent link that allows ancient theories of posthuman transformation to serve as correctives for current Transhumanist visions of posthuman enhancement. Transhumanists often speak of cognitive and physical improvements with no robust reflection on ethical or moral improvement. Posthuman enhancement must never be defined apart from morality, but in terms of it. Morality cannot simply be programmed from without, nor can it be governed by the overall value of personal autonomy.

What remains in life’s wake? Postapocalyptic literature long has imagined the end as a kind of beginning; someone or something always survives Armageddon, if only for a time. This is the postapocalyptic condition of possibility, enabling the genre’s cathected tropes of loss and redemption, regression and advance. Even when the survivors are not recognizably human—are androids, aliens, or nonhuman animals—“life” goes on. Engaging with a range of American fiction and nonfiction (from Ray Bradbury to Octavia Butler to Ray Kurzweil), this essay argues that what unites the posthuman and the postapocalyptic is, first, a shared, vitalistic investment in what might be called “life after death” and, second, a refusal or inability to narrate a final, lasting extinction. In H. P. Lovecraft’s radical take on Darwinian evolution, however, we can see the prospect of a posthuman sublime that never reconstitutes the autonomous subject. The chapter concludes with a brief meditation on the implications—metaphysical, biopolitical, and critical—of this self-alienation.

The introductory chapter provides a brief overview of transhumanism and argues that transhumanism can be better understood by approaching it from a comparative perspective and putting it in conversation with longstanding concerns within the discipline of cultural anthropology. It discusses how the book speaks to existing anthropological research on technology, the future, the technological imagination and transhumanism. It also provides a brief overview of the chapters and discusses the research methods I used.

This chapter outlines some of the intellectual currents that have led to the development of contemporary critical posthumanism(s). Critical posthumanist thought aims to abandon the essentialisms of humanism and to theorize a human subject constituted not by self-sameness but by difference, not fixed but in process, and entangled in human, non-human, and technological relations. I trace some of the challenges to humanism posed by the antihumanisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then offer an overview of some recent and positive philosophical and cultural responses to these challenges, including new ways to think about embodiment and materiality, about our embeddedness in and dependence on the non-human world, and about our simultaneous and globalized entanglement in the cultures of technology. If nothing else, the imminent threat of the climate crisis demonstrates the pressing need to rethink ourselves in/and the world.

Machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems arise as images of the posthuman within the discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. From the side of technoscience, advances in cybernetics and systems theory have been the prime movers of the posthuman imaginary. AI and its elaboration in the cultural imaginary is particularly instructive with regard to transhumanist visions of transcendence. Where cybernetics spread across organic bodies, computational devices, and the social dynamics of communication, AI bypassed multiple cybernetic couplings to concentrate on the design, construction, and study of computational agencies. AI discourse ran alongside the development of SETI—the scientific program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Both AI and SETI foreground how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. The 2015 novel Aurora overcomes the AI imaginary as previously constituted by bringing ecological realism to the relations to machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems.

In a verse reflecting the (colonial) attitudes of his time, Kipling once wrote, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West; and never the twain shall meet’.Although written in 1889, the underlying sentiment might equally describe the bipolar geopolitics prevalent at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, by the time of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to suppress intended liberal reforms, to many, the ideological chasm between the Eastern and Western blocs appeared insurmountable. Notwithstanding these divisions, key political leaders (particularly in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union) sought strategies to promote greater stability and predictability in international affairs. To this end, they pursued more cooperative East–West relations, recognising that collaboration on environmental issues might help to defuse Cold War tensions. The apparently non-political nature, and seeming objectivity, of environmental issues contributed to their becoming, by 1975, a central pillar of détente between the East and the West.