At this year’s HowTheLightGetsIn Festival, transhumanism faced its reckoning. Once hailed as the next step in human evolution, the idea of transcending biology through technology now divides its own believers. In a fiery exchange between Zoltan Istvan, Àlex Gómez-Marín, Susan Schneider, and Adam Goldstein, IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards captures a movement in crisis, where the dream of digital immortality collides with the fear of losing what makes us human.

Few ideas have divided thinkers more sharply than transhumanism. For some, it represents humanity’s next evolutionary step, the promise of overcoming disease, aging, and even death. For others, it marks the point where human ambition turns self-destructive, mistaking technological power for moral progress. As advances in AI and biotechnology blur the line between human and machine, the question is no longer science fiction but a pressing philosophical dilemma: should we seek to transcend our nature, or to understand it?

At this year’s HowTheLightGetsIn Festival, a tent filled with early risers gathered to debate what has been called “the world’s most dangerous idea.” The atmosphere was expectant but uneasy. This was not a discussion about gadgets or engineering, but a confrontation over the meaning of being human in an age determined to reinvent it.

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“Transhumanism is a death cult,” he said.

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Zoltan Istvan spoke first, and he didn’t hesitate. “Death,” he said evenly, “is a technical problem.” Transhumanism, to him, was the inevitable next step in evolution: eradicating aging, sleep, even hunger. “We don’t want to die because we starve,” he said. “We want to overcome suffering with science and technology.” He gestured at the audience. “Who here has lost someone they love? Transhumanism is a humanitarian project to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” Then, with a flourish of a man once again running for office, he added: “Of course it’s the world’s most dangerous idea, but a lot of dangerous ideas have been good for humanity.” The case for transhumanism thus made, the line in the sand drawn, if more tentatively than a few years ago. Transhumanism was bolstered by the success and take-up of LLM technologies, but rather than strengthening opinions, it has shaken the true believers.

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Àlex Gómez-Marín, the physicist and neuroscientist, smiled grimly. “I absolutely abhor transhumanism,” he began, provoking laughter and applause. He called the movement “an algorithmic invasion, fascinating, dangerous bullshit.” His metaphor of a traffic light was crisp: green for the wonders of technology, amber for the warnings, red for the catastrophe. “Transhumanism is a death cult,” he said, “a pseudo-religion dressed in techno-scientific language whose goal is to extinguish the human condition and ask us to clap as it happens.” The applause grew quieter.

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The claim that digital immortality awaits us, she said, was “marketing masquerading as metaphysics.”

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Gómez-Marín’s point landed because it pierced the fantasy. “They think we are machines,” he said later, “and it’s a weird dualism, materialist and spiritual at once. They tell us we’ll upload our souls to the cloud. They don’t know what a human is, but they want to build its replacement.”

Susan Schneider followed, dry and lucid. “Oh boy,” she began, “what an amazing start.” She described herself as a “sober-minded transhumanist turned critic.” At eighteen, she had “drunk the Kool-Aid.” Now, she said, the dream of uploading minds was a “philosophical error.” “You wouldn’t survive the upload,” she argued. “You’d kill yourself and produce a copy.” The claim that digital immortality awaits us, she said, was “marketing masquerading as metaphysics.”