Transhumanist thought can be broken down into three main premises, each with an eminently political intent:

1. Human beings in their “natural” state are obsolete and ought to be enhanced by technology, which then becomes a means of artificially extending the hominization process. Thus, transhumanism sweeps human taxonomy into the political arena. An observation by Michel Foucault, written in 1976, comes to mind: “What might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. [. . .] Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”16 In other words, transhumanists believe we have a duty to replace the category of human with a new creature, a post-sapiens sapiens. We would potentially find ourselves, in zoological terms, at a moment of speciation: an extreme situation when a new species peels off and steps forward to join the animal kingdom.

2. The goal is full hybridization between the posthuman being and the machine, something that goes far beyond the human–machine interface we know today (from interacting with cell phones and computers, for example). The mind-boggling image of a human–machine hybrid suggests a permanent integration, frequently talked up by one of transhumanism’s most prominent ideologists, Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil believes that human beings should become an intrinsic part of the machine, that we should be (re)programmable like software.17 This is the logical outcome of the postwar cybernetic movement’s machinist fetishism, epitomized by Norbert Wiener and a circle of other mathematicians and philosophers.18 It proposes nothing less than full submission to technical rationality, our human subjectivity suppressed. From this point on, technology, viewed as the new agent of hominization, paradoxically becomes the main instrument of dehumanization. Transhumanist machinism turns out to be fundamentally antihumanist—not least because the machine is by definition inhuman.

3. This would have us transcend not only our humanity but also what we might call the basic ideological matrix that underlies many other ideologies (liberalism, socialism, conservatism, etc.), namely, humanism, which brings together all our ways of understanding ourselves as human beings at the center of the world and at the top of the species pyramid. While humanists believe that individuals can achieve moral growth through education and culture (the “humanization of man”), transhumanist ideology proffers an altogether new set of values, insisting on the necessity of transitioning to a posthuman species capable of continuous self-enhancement by integrating new technological components. In a sense, technology obviates the need for moral, educational, or cultural effort.