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This chapter describes a collection of technologies that may soon radically enhance human capacities. Radical enhancement improves significant attributes and abilities to levels that greatly exceed what is currently possible for human beings. Radical enhancement should be distinguished from moderate enhancement. The chapter introduces the concept of a transformative change as a means of understanding the human significance of radical enhancement. A transformative change alters an individual’s mental or physical characteristics in a way that causes and warrants a significant change in how that individual evaluates a wide range of their own experiences, beliefs, or achievements. I offer the case body-snatching in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an example of a transformative change. Radical enhancement can be a transformative change.

This chapter focuses on how radical enhancement threatens to turn us into fundamentally different kinds of beings; so much so that we will no longer deserve to be called human but “posthuman.” Although the benefits of radical enhancement of our minds and extensions of our lives may seem apparent—requiring no defense it may seem—there is much that we stand to lose as we make the transition from human to posthuman. Transhumanism is a prominent social movement within radical enhancement, one that “affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason.” The aim of this book is to bring the costs of radical enhancement properly into focus. Some readers may find that its rewards are worth the price, but it is the book’s aim to prove that they are not.

This chapter addresses an implication of radical enhancement that is obscured in some of the more lighthearted presentations of the idea. Radically enhanced beings are not only significantly better than us in various ways, they are different from us—so different that they do not deserve to be called human. Moderate enhancement raises serious moral issues; advocates of radical enhancement are divided on the question of whether our humanity can withstand radical enhancement. Some—compatibilists such as Huxley and Kurzweil—hold that radical enhancement is compatible with our humanity. Incompatibilists like Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, by contrast, emphasize just how different from us radically enhanced beings will be. The chapter argues that although it is not logically necessary that a human who has been radically enhanced will become a nonhuman, it is likely that he or she will.

This chapter is an optimistic discussion presenting some good news about remaining “merely” human. Humanity is not just what we get left with once we have refused the theories of Kurzweil, de Grey, Bostrom, and Hughes; it is something worth celebrating. The chapter explores the implications of the species-relativist view about value as described in the first chapter, and examines three kinds of valuable experience that are both typical of Homo sapiens and under threat from radical enhancement. The common theme is one of alienation. Radical enhancement alienates us from experiences that give meaning to our lives. The species-relativist presentation of these experiences grants that they are unlikely to appeal to posthumans or rational aliens. Our humanity should leave us equally unmoved by their posthuman experiences.

The main critical focus in this chapter will be Bostrom’s claim that human values are tacitly posthuman. Bostrom defends radical enhancement from two perspectives. First, he claims that many arguments against enhancement rely on a fallacy, opening up the options of radical intellectual enhancement and life extension to those who wish to pursue them. Bostrom’s second argument purports to close the gap between something’s being permissible and its being desirable. Radical enhancement, on this view, turns out to be an imperceptible but nevertheless direct implication of our shared human values. It is argued here that the thorough investigation of our values which Bostrom is calling for is more likely to be against radical enhancement than in favor of it.

This chapter presents arguments contending that the precautionary approach advises against the creation of any sort of human–posthuman society, something which can be achieved by refusing to create posthumans. This conclusion depends on a speculation about the moral beliefs of posthumans that is less optimistic than James Hughes’s vision of moral enhancement. The chapter defends a skeptical view of Hughes’s conception of moral enhancement, and argues that once posthumans come into existence, they may view humans as morally required to defer to them, sacrificing our interests to promote theirs. Thus, the path of radical enhancement for some humans significantly threatens the interests of other humans. Though it is not maintained that this outcome is, in any way, certain, it is a logical presupposition that a precautionary approach counsels against radical enhancement.