Philosophies & Movements
Transhumanism
The view that people should use technology to move past the limits of the human body and mind — aging, illness, memory, mood, lifespan, intelligence — rather than accept them as fixed. It is the parent idea behind several other entries here: extropianism, paradise engineering, and the AI-flavored hope that minds might eventually run on something other than biology. Supporters call it the obvious next step. Critics point out that upgrades get sold, not shared, so “better humans” in practice means whoever can pay — and that deciding which human traits are defects has an ugly history.
Origin · no single documented coiner
The word is older than the movement: biologist Julian Huxley used it as the title of a 1957 essay arguing humanity should transcend itself, and forms of it appear earlier still (W.D. Lighthall in 1940, and Dante’s “trasumanar” centuries before). Its current meaning — a technology-driven philosophy with organizations behind it — was set out by Max More in his 1990 essay “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy,” the same work that produced extropianism. So there is no single coiner of the word, and a datable author for the modern doctrine.