From Boundless Expansion to Existential Threat

Abstract

This essay examines visions of the future of human life in transhumanist imaginaries of the posthuman, ranging from utopian figurations to catastrophist warnings. Focusing on libertarian, liberal, and conservative posthuman imaginaries, it argues that the posthuman condition is defined by changing scientific, moral, and political narratives, including ideas of revolutionary change, progressive evolution through the ethical use of human enhancement technologies, and the mitigation of existential risk for the preservation of intelligence and civilization in the long term. Changing posthuman imaginaries, it shows, reshape spaces of present and future political imagination.