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The worldview espoused in Apocalyptic AI pop science plays a role in massively multiplayer online games, as shown by the presence of transhumanist religious groups (such as the Order of Cosmic Engineers) in Second Life but also by the interest shown by that world’s inhabitants who frequently desire a permanent shift to life online even when they are not explicitly transhumanists. Virtual reality has become sacred space for many online gamers, who acquire powerful communities, meaning and purpose through their online activities. Such religiosity inclines many toward transhumanist goals of transcending the human condition, especially through the possibility of uploading consciousness into virtual reality.

“Responses: A Summing Up” replies to the wide‐ranging contributions to the book. It argues for the complete exclusion of torture from public policy, and defends a broadly consequentialist ethical view of war. It discusses the mutual interplay between society and systems of belief, and urges the relevance of epistemology to dialogue between conflicting ideologies. In discussing an “external moral law,” it expresses doubts about “external reasons.” It discusses the obligation to alleviate poverty, recognizing how hard we find this, and looks for ways of doing better by working with the grain of our psychology. It considers how fantasies about being hard and tough erode the compassion that inhibits atrocities. “Responses: A Summing Up” (overoptimistically?) hopes to express some coherence of outlook toward these very diverse questions.

This chapter examines exemplary texts within science fiction, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix stories and the TRPG, Eclipse Phase (EP). It begins by looking at SF as a mythic form of storytelling, one rooted in modernity. It uses literary theorist Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s ideas in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008) to argue that tropes within SF are often highly fantastic, the cyborg transforming into posthuman tropes far beyond simple human-machine interfaces. In Sterling’s stories we see this dynamic in extreme forms of posthuman imaginings. With Sterling, he represents both transhuman and posthuman possibilities, some as extreme as biological space stations. In EP, players can choose a variety of characters to play that go beyond normative human forms into the strange and exotic. This provides a template for posthuman subjectivity.

After developing the conception of the anaturalist drive prominent behind a myriad of constructive, postenvironmental discourses in the West, Neyrat begins to provide a definition for the discourses and types of thought that would fall under this rubric of eco-constructivism. During the course of this chapter he outlines the similarities between eco-constructivism and geo-constructivism and highlights the important differences that distinguish them from each other. After providing a nice summary of the currents of the movement known as Accelerationism and the Accelerationist Manifesto as well as currents in transhumanism, the chapter ends by calling into question what all these various discourses falling into positions of ecomodernism or postenvironmentalism seem to blindly adhere to: an ecology that wholly embraces technological advancement and its fervor for continual construction.

This chapter explores the emergence of artificial intelligence as a challenge for theories of post-humanism that fail to center blackness and queerness. Through a reading of the black transfeminine “mind-clone” Bina48—a robot whose affective states mirrors the structural antagonism that the black female subject presents to normative temporalities of technological advance—the chapter seeks to contribute to a nascent field of critical black code studies.

This chapter discusses Cosmism and related developments in Russia today. Institutions for the study and propagation of Cosmism include the Fedorov Museum in Moscow and the Tsiolkovsky Museum of Cosmonautics and Chizhevsky Center in Kaluga. Related institutions and movements include ISRICA, the Institute for Research into Cosmic Anthropoecology in Irkutsk; the Neo-Eurasianist followers of Lev Gumilev; the Hyperborean movement; and the Russian transhumanist and immortalist movements led by Igor Vishev and Danila Medvedev. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the significance and prospects of the Cosmist tendency.

This chapter theorizes that Soviet civilization was inherently “science fictional” in its ideological superimposition of scientific utopianism and radical social change. It imbeds a discussion of the work of the Russian science-fiction writers Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky in the social and cultural context of the Soviet Union. The chapter describes the development of the Strugatskys’ work over three decades, from rationalist optimism to humanistic despair.

The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century lent a new sense of plasticity to our conceptions of human nature, and helped clear the way for such concepts as eugenics and biotechnology. While Aldous satirized attempts to change human nature with technology, Julian was more open to the idea. After WWII, Julian coined the term Transhumanism, giving name to what would become a growing movement advocating the deliberate improvement of the human species through the use of new technologies. This movement has gained prominent advocates such as the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and prominent critics, such as the Catholic intellectual Fabrice Hadjadj. In the future, the debate over human enhancement would benefit from remembering an important quality that was common to the best work of Julian and Aldous Huxley: their profound reverence for the complexity of human nature, and the fragility of the web of life on which we all depend.

This chapter asks the question whether sexual and/or romantic relationships with robots could ever be as satisfying as the real thing. Three main arguments are made. First, if we assume that robots will be not be real persons and instead simply behave and act as if they are persons (“pseudo-persons”) then love and sex with them will never be as satisfying as it is with a real person. Second, if robots somehow manage to be real persons (and not just pseudo-persons), we run into problems regarding their moral status and, importantly, their freedom to choose to be our romantic partners. It is more satisfying to be loved by a real person that freely chooses to be your lover than it is to be loved by someone who is programmed to love you. Finally, it is argued that the desire for relationships with robotic persons does reveal something telling about the transhumanist desire for total autonomy and independence. The only possible way for me to become completely independent is by cutting all ties to other persons, by making my own world, uninhabited by any real persons except myself. Robotic partners may consequently be the preferred inhabitants of that transhumanist utopia.

Chapters 5 through 7 demonstrate that the most promising motivation for holding any form of supernaturalism is the perfection thesis that meaning requires engagement with a maximally conceivable value. Chapter 8 provides reason to favour a contrary 'imperfection thesis' that there can be meaning without perfection. After rejecting extant arguments against the perfection thesis and supernaturalism, suggested by the likes of Brooke Alan Trisel and Kurt Baier, it presents a new one, namely, that most readers cannot coherently hold such views, given plausible beliefs to which they are already committed. This chapter also specifies the imperfection thesis, arguing for the best view of exactly how much less than perfect value in the natural world one must engage with in order for one’s life to be meaningful all things considered. In doing so, it addresses how human nature and transhumanism bear on whether a life counts as meaningful on balance.

If the politics of prudent diffidence and the restoration of political balance, civil association, and limited constitutional rule, proves incapable of recovering political conduct under contingent conditions, what alternative dispositions might mould the contours of our post historical future? This chapter concludes the book by examining how historically body politics have died from a variety of internal and external distempers and how this might be Europe’s fate. It further considers how a brave new artificially intelligent world might organize new liberal and illiberal progressive futures either through a digitally administered party state like China or Singapore or what Silicon Valley envisages as an algorithmically managed, digital oligarchy that renders individual autonomy and democracy redundant. Both envisage a technocratically managed future where AI caters to and defines the needs of a dependent citizen body eking out its days in either a distracted or opiated stupor. Both forms of technocratic rationalism represent the antithesis of the understanding of civil society as a local and contingent compact between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born.

Approximately one trillion, trillion, trillion (10¹⁷²⁸) years from now, the universe will suffer a “heat death.” What are the existential implications of this fact for us, today? This chapter explores this question through Lyotard’s fable of the explosion of the sun, and its uptake and extension in the works of Keith Ansell Pearson and Ray Brassier. Lyotard proposes the fable as a kind of “post-metanarrative” sometimes told to justify research and development, and indeed the meaning of our individual lives, after credulity in metanarratives has been lost: it replaces the adventure of the subject of history aimed towards the perfection and emancipation of the human with the adventure of inhuman, negentropic processes aimed towards the survival and extension of complexity. Negotiating Lyotard’s thought in relation to contemporary movements such as transhumanism and speculative realism, this chapter reflects on the existential significance of the “deep time” revealed by contemporary science.

The introductory section concludes by locating Singularity within the rhetorically diffuse context of ‘posthumanism’ – a term similarly subject to multiple meanings and valences, encompassing both critical theory and transhumanist political movements. The chapter interrogates these various meanings, making them accountable to one another in order to clarify and emphasize the ideological stakes of Singularity discourse.

Following his release from prison in 1976, counterculture guru Timothy Leary began to espouse a new plan for experimentation if not human enhancement. SMI²LE was Leary’s moniker for “space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.” For the next several years, Leary promoted an evolving recipe for self-directed human mutation in public appearances, books, and even comics. This essay explores Leary’s ideas and connects them to other ’70s-era examples of science and technology that lingered at the fringes of respectability. It also shows how Leary’s techno-trip served as a stepping stone to the more activist-oriented transhumanist movement of the 1990s which embraced – as did Leary – a combination of radical technologies including cryonics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

Chapter 1 explores the modernist roots of evolutionary futurism through the uptake of Friedrich Nietzsche by the European avant-garde. Foregrounding the work of Mina Loy and P.D. Ouspensky, the chapter argues that modernism embodies evolutionary futurism through what I call an "inner transhumanism."

Chapter 2 discusses the "Superman Boom," a science fiction publishing phenomenon in the 1930s that coincided with the dawn of the Golden Age of SF. In addition to the fiction, this chapter documents the fan response that positioned SF readers as genetic supermen and inspired plans for fan utopian communities.