AI & Longevity: A Technoprogressive Take on our Posthuman Future

The speaker is James Hughes and his topic is "A.I. and Longevity: A Technoprogressive Take on Our Posthuman Future." Phillips Brooks House is at the corner of Harvard Yard across from the Science Center. Humanists have been arguing about human perfectibility since Pico della Mirandola told us we could sculpt ourselves into angels or beasts. Transhumanism is that Renaissance and Enlightenment wager with better tools. Yet many humanists now hear "posthuman" and picture billionaires buying immortality while writing off the rest of us as legacy hardware. They have a point. Some strands of transhumanism and posthumanism have curdled into misanthropy and elitism: accelerationists eager to hand the future to machines, longevity entrepreneurs indifferent to who can afford the cure, and academic posthumanists who treat the human as an embarrassment. This talk traces the family tree, from religious and secular humanism through the libertarian, critical, and democratic versions of transhumanism and posthumanism. It argues that the technoprogressive synthesis is humanism's rightful heir. Technoprogressives hold that radical technologies serve human flourishing only when paired with democratic governance, universal access, and solidarity. On AI, that means public oversight, broad sharing of the productivity gains, and moral seriousness about machine minds. On longevity, it means healthy life extension as a public health goal and a universal entitlement, the next chapter after sanitation and vaccines. The future can be posthuman and still humane, if we build it as a commons. THE SPEAKER: James J. Hughes is sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies which he founded with Nick Bostrom. He was Associate Provost at UMass-Boston and taught health policy at Trinity College in Hartford. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future,…