An overview of conspiracy theories about transhumanism

Part 2 in the series "why nobody wants to call themselves a transhumanist anymore"

My first exposure to transhumanism was in 2010 in my senior year of college, when I joined the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Transhumanism Club. Since then, I’ve noticed that fewer and fewer people have been identifying as transhumanist, despite increasing excitement around and support for the development of transhumanist technologies (life extension, human spaceflight, brain-computer interfaces, gene editing, personal robots, AI, nanotech).

From my own perspective, excitement around and identification with transhumanism went into high gear after the publication of Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in 2005, and then peaked sometime around 2015. I can think of a few reasons for why this might be. In my last post, I discussed transhumanism’s aesthetics problem, which makes people feel that transhumanism is “icky”. In this post I’ll briefly review the conspiracy theories around transhumanism that have arisen since 2010. Like bad aesthetics, these conspiracy theories create a “stench” around transhumanism and the global transhumanist movement.

Transhumanism conspiracy theories on the right

Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is an engineer by training and a long-time futurist with transhumanist leanings. In his 2017 book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” he proselytizes about technologies like nanomaterials, organ printing, driverless cars, virtual reality, wearable computing, internet of things, blockchain, 3D printing, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces.

At the 2017 WEF, Schwab sat down with Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Speaking with a thick German accent, Schwab said “Can you imagine that in ten years when we are sitting here, we have an implant in our brains? and I can immediately feel—because we all will have implants, and we measure your brain waves—and I can immediately tell how the people react to your answers.” After a long pause, Sergey admitted it was imaginable, but then went on to say that it’s very, very hard to predict how and when such technologies will be developed. Sergey seemed uncomfortable with Schwab’s idea. One can almost detect an undercurrent of excitement in his voice when Schwab raised the prospect of being able to read the thoughts and feelings of his audience. It’s not that far of mental leap to conclude that we are barreling towards a future where elites will want to monitor the thoughts and feelings of the masses.

In 2018 an even more ignominious spectacle played out at the WEF, when Yuval Noah Harari gave a talk entitled “The Future of Life: Will the Future Be Human?”. The talk discussed two major themes from his 2015 book Homo Deus. Firstly, Harari contends that evolutionary forces will lead to humans being supplanted by post-human entities. Secondly Harari sees human behavior as increasingly molded by AI algorithms, creating a growing risk of mass control by large corporations or governments. To be clear, Harari was not arguing that either of these things are good or bad, he was just dispassionately laying his argument for what he sees as likely to happen.

The optics of this event were perfect fodder for right-wing conspiracy theorists. There was the very Jewish and openly gay Harari standing in front of a rapt audience of globalist “Davos men”, calmly explaining how the masses will be controlled by AI algorithms and how humanity will be supplanted by a new race of “posthumans”. It was also fodder for religious conservatives who think transhumanism and transgenderism are intertwined movements.

If things were not already bad enough, the death of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 resulted in a flurry of articles about how he was a transhumanist. While Epstein was, as far as I can tell, not actually involved in the transhumanist movement, the articles are largely correct that Epstein had an interest in cryonics and funded researchers working on gene editing technology. In 2018 Epstein donated $100,000 to the transhumanist organization Humanity+ through his nonprofit, Gratitude America, Ltd (Humanity+ did not realize the money was from him at the time).

Then in 2020, the pandemic hit. In June 2020 the World Economic Forum announced a plan called “The Great Reset” and conspiracy theories about globalist plans for world domination kicked into high gear. COVID lockdowns stoked fears of government overreach, and the rise of the lab leak theory got many people thinking about the hubris of technological development.

Some articles with the tag “transhumanism” on InfoWars.

Reporting on the “growing transhumanist threat” became a mainstay at Infowars. Sometime around 2022 right-wing agitator Steve Bannon started to pay Joe Allen to come on his show The War Room to give regular reports on transhumanism. Joe Allen’s reporting work culminated in the 2023 publication of his book Dark Aeon, for which Bannon wrote the foreword.

According to Allen, transhumanism has tie-ins with gnosticism, a heretical offshoot of early Christianity. Gnostics, like transhumanists, view the body as flawed. Just as Gnosticism was a heresy, Allen believes transhumanism is a heresy undergirded by devil spirits and agents of Satan. As evidence for a connection to Gnosticism, Allen points to Sophia the Robot, noting that “Sophia takes her name from the Gnostic goddess—or aeon—who in her confusion, abandoned the fullness of eternal light.”

It doesn’t help that Max More has a 1989 article entitled “In Praise of the Devil” and the US Transhumanist Party’s 2024 presidential candidate, Tom Ross, has a 2023 article entitled “The Synergy of Gnosticism and Transhumanism.” (Side note - Gennady Stolyarov pointed out that a leading gnostic thinker, Miguel Conner, is a critic of transhumanism. Also, Stoylarov says that Ross’s article was mostly outreach to the Gnostic community, although he has publically said he is a Gnostic.)

Fan of transhumanist technologies Klaus Schwab speaking in 2022 and 2023 at the ominous-sounding “World Government Summit”. Cue the “new world order” conspiracy theorists.

Similar to Bannon and Allen in the US, in Europe far right firebrand Stefan Magnet has been taking to German and Austrian airwaves to discuss how transhumanism is a “satanic plan” being implemented by globalists who are in cahoots with big tech corporations and the LGBTQ movement. Magnet is essentially Germany’s Alex Jones — he owns a far right TV channel called AUF1. In 2022 he published a book entitled Transhumanismus: Krieg gegen die Menschheit (Transhumanism: the War Against Humanity). Drawing from the conspiracy theorist’s playbook, Magnet sees several global trends as intimately connected - vaccination efforts, transhumanism, and the LGBTQ movement. Magnet proclaims that the COVID-19 vaccination program was a globalist plan to warm up the masses for the next phase of biotechnological control. Soon, he says, vaccines mandated by globalists will contain nanobots capable of controlling thoughts. Not long after that, Magnet believes globalists will make humans infertile and babies will be bred in government-run laboratories, similar to Brave New World.

Meanwhile in Russia, right-wing philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who has been called “Putin’s brain”, has also been railing against transhumanism, which he sees as symptomatic of the selfish decadence of western liberalism. Dugin frequently refers to western liberalism as a “cancer” and warns that “liberalism will mean precisely the human is optional: so you can choose your individual identity to be human [or] not be human. That has a name: transhumanism, post-humanism, singularity, artificial intelligence”. Of course, he is not far off the mark here, transhumanists do value freedom of bodily autonomy and some are interested in becoming “posthuman” (whatever that means) if technology allows it.

Transhumanism conspiracy theories on the left

While the right-wing conspiracy theorists fret about leftist WEF globalists pushing transhumanism, the left-wing conspiracy theorists worry right-wing billionaires pushing transhumanism. The usual suspects are Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreesen. Occasionally Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman are also thrown into the mix.

The main conspiracy theory on the left comes from Emile Torres and Timit Gebru. They propose that several future-oriented ideologies should be considered as a bundle - transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism (TESCREAL). These ideologies do share a few things in common — they are popular in the Bay Area, and they involve thinking about the effects of technology and advocating for certain forms of technological development.

A big problem here is imagining that all these movements are all acting in some concerted fashion. In fact, as many have pointed out, there are major conflicts between these movements. Most notably, many rationalists, effective altruists, and longtermists want to slow or pause AI development, while many transhumanists and extropians want to accelerate it. There are also many disparate actors within each movement. Within transhumanism, for instance, there are quite distinct strands of libertarian transhumanism, left/progressive transhumanism, and apolitical/anti-political transhumanism.

Anyway, here’s the two core claims they make:

(On TESCREAL ideologies) “all trace their lineage back to the first-wave Anglo-American eugenics tradition.” - Torres, March 2023, in a viral thread on X.

“The same discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenics are pervasive within the TESCREAL literature and community” - Gebru and Torres, 2024.

The main piece of evidence for the first claim is the fact that Julian Huxley, who is considered to have coined the term “transhumanism”,¹ was a liberal eugenicist (“liberal” in the sense that he was against government coercion — he also staunchly rejected race-based eugenics throughout his life).

There is a persistent misconception that Julian Huxley is the “founder” of the transhumanist movement. While Huxley had many proto-transhumanist views, he was not at all influential in the formation of the modern transhumanist movement. Natasha Vita-More goes to pains to explain this in her 2019 article “History of Transhumanism”.

Huxley is mistakenly called the “founder” because in his 1957 book, New Bottles for New Wine, he coined the term in a chapter entitled “transhumanism” Here’s what he said:

“The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but trans­cending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” - Julian Huxley in New Bottles for New Wine.

Germline genetic engineering has certainly been discussed by some transhumanists, but it is tiny fraction of what transhumanists advocate for. Germline genetic engineering is certainly eugenics, in so far as it is done to improve the health and wellbeing of children, but it’s hard to argue it’s bad when the child clearly benefits and it is undertaken voluntarily with full information regarding risks. As shocking as it may sound, a lot of “eugenics” is actually fine and non-controversial. We just don’t call it eugenics because of the terrible connotations that word has taken on. For instance, most people think incest is wrong and it’s OK to choose not to have a child because you are worried they may inherit your mental health issues. Most people are OK with preimplantation genetic testing for Tay-Sachs disease and other genetic diseases as well.

I am not aware of any transhumanist ever advocating for coercive eugenics. In fact, the transhumanist movement tends to skew libertarian, away from government intervention. If one defines eugenics in a broad way (“advocating for the creation of better humans”) then transhumanism is very much eugenicist. However, many mundane things also fall under the category of “efforts to improve children” — parenting, better childhood nutrition, improved schools, reducing lead exposure, cleaner air. Unfortunately, many people on the left view any talk of “making children smarter” or “increasing intelligence” as “problematic”, even though the concept of general intelligence and scales for measuring it have been well established by psychological science.² Fundamentally, people generally value intelligence, health, wisdom, and good behaviour in themselves, their friends, and their children. Transhumanists are just not afraid to use technology to help with the furtherance of such goals.

Anyway, I don’t have any desire to spend time here deconstructing all of Torres & Gebru’s arguments. It would take hours to write a full rebuttal to all their points. I do want to make a general point about Torres, though, who I have been following for several years (I even met him 2 or 3 times in ~2018). He was once a transhumanist, so he knows all the figures well. In recent years Torres has become very good at a particular style of rhetoric. He obsessively scours the web for any material he can use to tarnish his adversaries. He finds loose associations that fit his narrative (like “X was on podcast Y which also hosted controversial person Z”) and cherry picks quotes in a misleading way. Finally he weaves it altogether into a narrative. Unfortunately, a long string of anecdotes and cherry-picked misleading quotes can be made into quite a forceful sounding argument.

A common thread

A while ago Zoltan Istvan noted a common thread running through conspiracy theories about transhumanism:

“Despite the obvious successes of 21st Century science and technology—all which can be considered transhumanist in design—many conspiracy theorists do not easily see the benefits. Instead, they choose to focus on the negative side of things; they choose to hate transhumanism. If you tell them the Alzheimer’s sufferer can remember more via a brain implant, they'll tell you it's also a tracking device. If you tell them artificial hearts are coming and will help eliminate heart disease, they tell you only the elite will be able to afford it. If you tell them a vaccine may thwart Ebola, they tell you it will make children who get it autistic.” - Zoltan Istvan.

This is related to the phenomena of pessimism sounding smart, but where the pessimism isn’t grounded in reality at all.

So is the term “transhumanism” perma-f*cked?

A few years ago long-time transhumanist David Wood published a book entitled Vital Foresight: The Case For Active Transhumanism. It’s interesting to hear the pushback he got when his friends found out he intended to put “the T word” on the book’s cover:

“Don’t put that word on the cover of your book!” That’s the advice I received from a number of friends when they heard what I was writing about. They urged me to avoid “the ‘T’ word” – “transhumanism”. That word has bad vibes, they said. It’s toxic. T for toxic. I understand where they’re coming from. Later in this book, I’ll dig into reasons why various people are uncomfortable with the whole concept. I’ll explain why I nevertheless see “transhumanism” as an apt term for a set of transformational ideas that will be key to our collective wellbeing in the 2020s and beyond. T for transformational. And, yes, T for timely.” - David Wood

Indeed, whether or not the term “transhumanism” should be used has been an increasingly a point of debate within the transhumanist community. The World Transhumanist Association rebranded itself as Humanity+ in 2009. A few years ago the United States Transhumanist Party hosted discussions internally about renaming the organization, with some wanting to rename it the “longevity party”. Ultimately the membership voted by a large margin not to rename the organization, but the fact there was any debate about it at all is significant.

I’m personally conflicted on whether we should try to rehabilitate the term “transhumanism” or avoid it and find a new term (or set of terms) to rally around. Maybe when I have my thoughts more ironed out I’ll write something more definitive about the issue.

To close out this piece though I’d like to share what Balaji Srinivasan had to say on this issue. Anyone who reads Balaji’s Twitter/X knows that he is very bullish on transhumanism in general, especially in places like India, where he thinks transhumanist ideas are going mainstream among India’s youth. Here’s what he said on the Tim Ferriss show in 2022 (emphasis mine, of course):

“The problem is people have pathologized what they think transhumanism is like the, I don’t know, the Klaus Schwab version from the World Economic Forum where you all become misshapen monsters and you’re edited…

We need probably a different term for it, and I’ve got some terms that I’ve been thinking about.

I like to use term optimalism as opposed to optimism. You are optimizing yourself. You are being positive. There’s an objective function. Transhumanism, you might say it’s just a change, whether that change is positive or negative is unstated. But optimalism is, in a sense, you’re improving. You’re getting better. It is optimal physical fitness. It is optimal health. It is taking care of oneself. It is optimizing finances. It is optimizing everything.” - Balaji Srinivasan

Thank you to Ben Ballweg and Gennady Stolyarov II for proofreading and providing comments.

1. Technically the term “transhumanism” can be found in several earlier writings (it was used by Dante in 1321, the Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall in 1940, and by the Buddhist thinker Franklin Merrell-Wolff in 1937).

2. Transhumanists talk about intelligence a lot. They want to become more intelligent. They want to build AI that is more intelligent than humans (while remaining friendly and safe). Some even want to make animals more intelligent (for instance elephants, who already have very large heads so could support brains with more cortical area). Scientifically, the g-factor for general intelligence can be estimated using IQ tests. This makes people very uneasy, since IQ tests have a history of being culturally biased. Today’s IQ tests are much less culturally biased than they used to be, although they still have some degree of cultural bias, the extent of which is debated.