THE NEW SUPERHUMAN

Transhumanism, meaning what is beyond human, is a movement that seeks the transformation and improvement of the human being through technology. What it basically wants is to achieve the modification of our body, thereby increasing its abilities and intellectual capacity.

By using the progress of science, we can obtain an extraordinary advance in the powers of our mind and body. This will allow us to become very different persons, with added beneficial qualities, such as extraordinary longevity, freedom from disease, accelerated recovery and higher, greater capacity of learning. We might also just call it a state of POSTHUMAN. We will, in fact, be immortal (or close enough, anyways).

My guess is you’ve heard of Elon Musk, the new tech and business genius who we can consider the most influential young man on the planet, alongside Facebook founder Marc Zukerberg. Both of them believe in the future and are committed to a longer-lived human kind, free of blemishes that’ll inhabit a promised land in which resources will be distributed and exploited better and more fairly, thanks to transhumanism. This as of yet future utopia is strongly connected to the development and spread of computing.

Elon Musk is involved in transcendental goals, some of them we could bring closer to the concept of miracle. He practices what he preaches in his companies: for example, Tesla specializes in state-of-the-art electric vehicles (named after possibly the greatest inventor in history, Nikola Tesla), SpaceX seeks commercialization of space travel, whereas Neuralink (this would be the one that interests us the most) focuses on enhancing the capacity of the human being by establishing links between our brains and a giant computer.

The vision of the future offered by Elon Musk is unprecedented and spectacular, so different from the current reality that it is discussed and debated in many circles, sometimes in a controversial way.

Let’s remember that the concept of interface is defined as the communication between two systems or programmes of any type that provides a link at different levels. One of the better known examples is VIRTUAL REALITY.

Elon Musk has announced that, through Neuralink, he will be able to help cure neurological disorders such as insomnia, depression or memory loss, and to enhance our own abilities until we can write with our thoughts or drive a vehicle through our minds.

All this no longer seems like science fiction, because it’s already come true or nearly so. The technology implanted in a pig’s head using a small instrument (Neuralink BCI) connected to the brain by thousands of electrodes has made it possible to verify its functionality. This process opens the door to a future (we’re led to believe that it’s close at hand) in which the interfaces between a central computer and our brains would favour the human being, turning it into a superhuman being. It would become immune to practically all diseases and increase its ability to learn and retain data. It might even (pay close attention to this one) manage to store its memories, depositing them in the drop box better known as Cloud, enrolling the human being into VIRTUAL REALITY indefinitely. Once the progress of science (seemingly not too far away) allows for a body with the best physical feats available to be provided on demand, that mind can continue to exist with all its power indefinitely.

In our next article on this topic, we’ll present examples of what begins to not longer be an anticipation of what is to come, but rather a technological reality that will give birth to a new humanity.