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If anything can compete with imminent ecological apocalypse as the dominant futurology of our time—no sure thing—it is surely the utopian notion of a coming technological Singularity. Indeed, with consumer capitalism exposed as a sort of climatological Faustian bargain with carbon extraction, and communism a now-decades-old dead letter, the Singularity may well be the only competition to apocalypse left standing. Tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk openly speculate about a near-term total transformation of both society and the human body, not only including radical human augmentation and the widespread elimination of human labor in favor of robotic and artificially intelligent automation, but even the elimination of death. (The precise terms of this ostensibly liberatory future, and what percentage of the currently existing population of the planet it will apply to, and what will happen to the rest of us when it arrives, of course vary strongly from proponent to proponent.) It could even be argued that the true ideology of Silicon Valley is actually not the disruptive "creative destruction" of neoliberal capitalism but rather a post-capitalist, postliberal, posteverything singularitarianism that envisions a millennialist future for (some) people currently alive that is utterly different in every respect than what now exists—with, of course, the techies as its prophets, its high priests, and its philosopher-kings.
In Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia, Andrew Pilsch has produced the essential handbook for understanding and critiquing this futurology, as well as for shifting it from a toxic, fascist-curious discourse of eugenic meritocracy toward something that might genuinely be called utopian. Both intellectual history and philosophical manifesto, Pilsch ably situates contemporary transhumanism in the context...