What are posthumans? Beyond human, explained

A posthuman is a hypothetical successor to the human being: a person so changed by biotechnology, computing or both that the word human no longer quite fits. No posthuman exists, and no two people agree on what one would be. The idea is worth understanding because the technologies it rests on are real, and every one of them is already raising the questions the concept describes.

What the word means

Posthuman and transhuman are often used as if they were the same word. They are not. A transhuman is an enhanced human, still recognisably one of us, upgraded along the way. A posthuman is the imagined end of that process: a being whose abilities, and possibly whose mind, are different enough that calling it human is a stretch. One describes a journey, the other a destination.

The distinction matters because the first is already partly here. A person with a cochlear implant, a prosthetic limb wired to nerve signals, or a corrected disease gene is arguably a transhuman in the original sense. Nobody is a posthuman.

Where the idea comes from

The word transhumanism was popularised by the biologist Julian Huxley in a 1957 essay. His brother Aldous had already written Brave New World, a book about the opposite of this optimism, and the two attitudes have travelled together ever since: the belief that we can improve ourselves, and the fear that we will do it badly.

The movement took organised shape much later. In the 1970s and 1980s the futurist FM-2030 described the present age as transhuman, a transition rather than a destination. In 1998 Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association, now Humanity+, to argue for the ethical use of enhancement technology. In philosophy, meanwhile, posthumanism took a different route entirely, through thinkers such as Donna Haraway, whose 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto used the image of the cyborg to attack the idea of a fixed human nature.

So there are two traditions under one word. One is a programme: use technology to improve human beings. The other is a critique: question the human being as a category at all. Most arguments about posthumans are really arguments between those two positions.

Two roads to the posthuman

Almost every serious version of the idea runs along one of two roads. The first is to change existing humans: genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, artificial organs, drugs that sharpen memory or attention. The second is to build a new mind rather than modify an old one, by creating an artificial intelligence at least as capable as a person.

The first road is slower than it sounds. Gene editing became practical with the arrival of CRISPR in 2012, and it is now used in medicine for specific conditions, but editing for enhancement is a different problem and is restricted or illegal in humans almost everywhere it is discussed. Brain-computer interfaces have moved from the laboratory to early clinical use, mostly to restore movement or communication to people who have lost it. That is medicine, not enhancement.

The second road is the one that worries people, and it is the one nobody can predict. A machine intelligence that could improve itself would not be bound by the pace of human generations. This is the idea behind the technological singularity, a term the mathematician Vernor Vinge used in a 1993 essay and Ray Kurzweil later popularised. It is a hypothesis, not a schedule, and the people who study it disagree about almost everything except that it would matter.

The technology underneath

It is worth being precise about what exists. Gene editing exists and is being used in medicine. Prosthetics that read nerve signals exist. Brain-computer interfaces exist in limited clinical form. Machine learning systems that outperform people at specific tasks exist, and they are everywhere. None of that adds up to a posthuman, and it is not close.

What it adds up to is a set of tools pointing in a consistent direction. Each one extends human capability a little, each one raises the same questions, and each one tends to arrive before the rules for it. That pattern, more than any single invention, is what the posthuman idea is really describing.

The ethical problem

The most consistent objection to posthumanism is not that it is impossible. It is that it would not be shared. Enhancement is expensive, and anything that improves a person’s mind or body is likely to reach the people who can pay for it first. The result could be a split along the lines of wealth, with the enhanced and the unenhanced living in the same world under different rules. That is a social problem before it is a scientific one.

There are other questions with no clean answer. Who consents, if the editing happens before birth? What happens to a person whose mind is partly software, if the software is owned by a company? If a machine becomes capable of suffering, what do we owe it? And the oldest question of all, which the concept keeps circling: if we can change what a human being is, who decides what a human being should be?

These are not abstract for much longer. They are the live questions in the regulation of gene editing, of artificial intelligence and of personal data, and many of them will be settled by policy before they are settled by philosophy.

Posthumans in science fiction

Science fiction got there first, which is why the vocabulary sounds familiar. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon puts human minds into interchangeable bodies. Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels are full of people who have simply stopped dying of old age. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and its sequels treat bodies and minds as things that can be bought, copied and replaced. Charles Stross’s Accelerando runs the whole idea at speed, and Greg Egan’s work takes it more seriously than almost anyone.

The genre’s best use of the idea is not the superpowers. It is the unease. A posthuman is a mirror held up to the reader: the thing that looks like us but is not, and the question of what we would have to give up to become it. That is why the stories that last are the ones where the technology works and the people are still a mess.

Common misunderstandings

First, posthuman does not mean inhuman or robotic. A posthuman could be entirely biological, just differently built. Second, it does not mean immortal. It means changed, and change can go in any direction, including bad ones.

Third, and most often confused, posthumanism is not one position. The transhumanist wants the change and believes it can be guided. The critical posthumanist is more interested in dismantling the idea of a special human subject altogether. And a great many people simply think the whole project is a bad idea, which is a position too.

Frequently asked questions

Are posthumans real?

No. Nothing that would qualify exists. The word describes a possibility, not a population, and there is no scientific consensus that it ever will.

What is the difference between transhuman and posthuman?

A transhuman is an enhanced human, still recognisably human. A posthuman is the hypothetical being beyond that stage, changed enough that the label no longer obviously applies. Transhuman is the journey, posthuman the destination.

Would posthumans still be human?

There is no agreed answer, and that uncertainty is the point of the concept. It depends entirely on how you define human, and every definition turns out to be doing a lot of hidden work.

What is the technological singularity?

The hypothesis that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence and be able to improve itself, after which change becomes too fast for us to predict. Vernor Vinge framed the idea in a 1993 essay and Ray Kurzweil popularised it. It is speculation, not a forecast with a date.

Is posthumanism the same as transhumanism?

No, though the words overlap and are often mixed up. Transhumanism is a movement that wants to use technology to enhance human beings. Posthumanism is also a philosophical position, one that questions the human as a privileged category. They share a vocabulary and disagree about a great deal.