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How to fall in love with humanity again

Tech culture has made contempt for humanity feel enlightened. We can do better.

A lot of humans are feeling very down on humanity these days. Maybe you’ve met them. Or maybe you’re one of them.

I’m talking about those who look around and say: Humans are destroying the planet — causing climate change, making other species go extinct. Soon enough we’ll be mucking up the cosmos, too — polluting it with still more space junk, colonizing the moon, even exporting data centers into the heavens. The world would be better off if we ourselves just go extinct!

One reader recently exemplified this rising anti-humanism by writing in to my philosophical advice column, Your Mileage May Vary, and telling me bluntly: “I’m disgusted to be a human.” I responded by reminding them that hating on humanity is neither a new nor an enlightened position. It lets us off the hook too easily, because it expects nothing of us.

But I’m also aware that this distaste for humanity isn’t only motivating old-school misanthropy these days.

Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged.

It’s also motivating transhumanism, the movement that says we should use tech to proactively evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists — who span the gamut from Silicon Valley tech bros to academic philosophers — do want to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not running on the current hardware. They imagine us with chips in our brains, or with AI telling us how to make moral decisions more objectively, or with digitally uploaded minds that live forever in the cloud. All of this will someday, they assert, usher us into a utopian future where we transcend suffering and become as perfect and immortal as gods.

To better understand why a distaste for humanity is driving some people into the arms of transhumanism these days, I reached out to Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh and author of The AI Mirror. Vallor is a devoted humanist — but not a naive one. To her, being pro-human doesn’t mean being anti-technology. We talked about how classical humanism has failed to offer a compelling vision for the 21st century and beyond — and how we can still do better. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

What’s driving transhumanism to become more popular these days?

We’re living in a world that digital technologies and social media have made more fragmented and alienating. We are busier, more tired, more lonely, more uncertain than ever about the future and what it holds. So we’re at a low point in our ability to place faith in our fellow humans. And instead of looking at the deeper causes of that — the breakdown of the social fabric and of institutions and of local networks of care — there is an attempt to normalize and naturalize anti-humanism.

It’s an attempt to treat it not as a symptom of some disease or malaise in society — which is how I see it — but rather to treat it as a new, more enlightened frame of mind. To say: If you’re a humanist, you’re somehow stuck in the past, you have this overly romantic attachment to humans, you’re committing a fallacy of exceptionalism.

Why do we care how smart animals are?

And there is a history of humanism being inappropriately exceptionalist — for example, imagining that other living things can’t have feelings or intelligence or moral standing. So as we’ve surpassed those errors, it’s very easy to think: Oh, you just go one step further and decide that........

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