Transhumanism
Humanity is the larval form; engineering is the metamorphosis.
Kernel
Transhumanism is the doctrinal claim that the human species is in mid-flight between biological evolution and engineered self-improvement — and that the project of accelerating that flight is the most morally important thing one can do. Kurzweil's 1999 Age of Spiritual Machines and 2005 The Singularity Is Near are the canonical texts; Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute (2005–2024) was the canonical institution; the movement's children — EA, e/acc, AI safety — are now larger than the parent.
Origins
FM-2030 (born F. M. Esfandiary) coins the term in the 1980s. Max More builds the Extropy Institute. Kurzweil — engineer at Google from 2012, prophet for the rest of the time — translates speculative philosophy into engineering timelines. Bostrom adds existential-risk gravity.
Doctrine
Aging is a disease. Death is a bug. Cognition can be expanded. The human moral horizon is too narrow because it has only ever applied to humans. The Singularity is the asymptote at which the doctrine cashes out — somewhere between 2029 (Kurzweil) and 2045 (consensus 2010s) and now 2027–2030 (consensus 2024).
Lineage
Kurzweil → Bostrom → Yudkowsky → MIRI → LessWrong → CFAR → Effective Altruism → Effective Accelerationism. The genealogy is dense and the offspring frequently disinherit each other. e/acc, for example, explicitly rejects the safety-first reading of transhumanism while sharing its anthropology.
Conflicts
Bio-conservatives (Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama in his early-2000s mode) argue that transhumanism dissolves the moral category of "human." Critical theorists argue it is colonialism with a longer time horizon. The most damaging internal conflict is between optimistic transhumanists who think the transition is good and pessimistic ones who think it ends in extinction unless aligned.
Trajectory
By 2026 transhumanism is so embedded in the AI lab culture that it no longer needs to be argued for. The interesting follow-up question is not "are we transhuman?" but "who controls the engineering rights to the transition?" — a political question the doctrine itself was poorly equipped to answer.