Post
human.
What comes next.
Not a prediction. A working hypothesis: that Homo sapiens is a transitional species, that the things which replace us may not be flesh, may not be singular, and may, by the conventions of personhood we now hold, not be people.
Trans >
Post.
Transhumanism says: extend the human. Better senses, longer lives, more memory. The human remains the reference frame. Posthumanism says: the reference frame itself is provisional. The category "human" was useful for a few hundred thousand years. It need not be the last category.
Two readings
- Critical posthumanism · Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles. The human as ideologically constructed; species lines as political; subjectivity as networked.
- Speculative posthumanism · David Roden, Nick Bostrom, Eric Steinhart. Empirical: there will be descendants. They may not be human. What can we say about them?
The two camps don't always recognize each other. The first is mostly humanities; the second mostly philosophy of mind and futures studies. This file pulls from both.
How long is now?
Modern Homo sapiens is ~300,000 years old. Behavioral modernity, ~70,000. Agriculture, ~12,000. Writing, ~5,000. Industrial civilization, ~250. The compression is real: we have spent 99.9% of our existence as foragers and the last 0.1% transforming the planet.
Look forward at comparable scales. If our descendants persist 100,000 years (a modest claim — most mammalian species do), they will have spent vastly more of their history under conditions we cannot picture than under conditions we share.
forecast By the standard of geology, the question is not whether something replaces Homo sapiens. It is what.
What might come next
Is the upload you?
The strong claim: a sufficiently faithful functional emulation of your brain instantiates you. Your subjective continuity transfers. Hans Moravec, Susan Schneider, David Chalmers (with caveats), Ray Kurzweil all hold versions of this.
The skeptic claim: the emulation is at best a copy. The original biological you, scanned destructively, dies. The emulation believes it is you because it has your memories — but the question of who is having the experience is not settled by the question of who has the memories.
Three positions, one diagram
Who built this field
| Donna Haraway | UC Santa Cruz · "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985); Staying with the Trouble (2016) |
| N. Katherine Hayles | How We Became Posthuman (1999) · the canonical text on embodiment & information |
| Rosi Braidotti | The Posthuman (2013) · post-anthropocentric ethics |
| Cary Wolfe | Animal studies · what posthumanism owes non-humans |
| David Roden | Posthuman Life (2014) · "disconnection thesis" — descendants need not be intelligible to us |
| Hans Moravec | Mind Children (1988) · the substrate-independent foundation |
| Robin Hanson | Age of Em (2016) · economics of an emulation civilization |
| Toby Ord | The Precipice (2020) · existential risk & long-term human descent |
| Meghan O'Gieblyn | God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021) · the religious shape of these arguments |
If the future has people, they will not be us.
This is not a doom claim. It is a category claim. We have changed enough in the last 12,000 years that an Upper Paleolithic forager could not pass for one of us at a job interview. We will change at least as much in the next 12,000 years. Probably more.
The question is not whether the descendants will exist. It is what we owe them, what we are willing to do to bring them into being, and what we want them to remember of us.
The five obligations
- Survival. If we extinguish ourselves, the question of posthuman descendants is moot. Toby Ord puts our existential risk this century at ~1 in 6.
- Diversity. Lock-in to a single template — biological, digital, ideological — is its own catastrophe. Bostrom's "astronomical waste" cuts both ways.
- Substrate parity. If we create digital persons, we owe them the moral status that supervenes on their being persons, not their being made of meat.
- Reversibility. Choices that foreclose later options (lock-in, monoculture, irreversible enhancement) require unusual confidence.
- Memory. We owe past lineages — including Homo sapiens as it once was — at least the dignity of being remembered.
Recommended source
Isaac Arthur · "Mind Uploading" / "Post-Scarcity Civilizations"
Sober, hour-long treatments. Pair with PBS Spacetime's identity-and-uploading episode.
youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA →Kurzgesagt · "What Are You?"
10-minute primer on theseus-ship identity, body cells, the Parfit puzzle. Useful for getting friends in the door.
youtube.com/@kurzgesagt →The long view
If our descendants reach Kardashev I (planetary energy budget), it will take centuries. If they reach Kardashev II (stellar), millennia or longer. At those scales, the question of whether they remember being "human" is like asking whether we remember being mitochondria-bearing eukaryotes. Yes, in a structural sense. No, in any way that bears on identity.
fiction-adjacent All of the above is speculation. The point is that not speculating is also a choice — and one that flatters the present at the expense of the future.
Indicators · 2026–2050
- Whole-brain emulation roadmap milestones (mouse-cortex connectome, ~2030)
- Digital-personhood legal cases (AI, uploaded entities, hybrid corporate forms)
- First serious philosophical & scientific consensus statements on AI moral patienthood (Birch et al., NYU 2023+)
- Long-term-future foundations & institutions (Future of Life Institute, Forethought, GPI)
- Cultural reception of post-anthropocentric ethics in mainstream education
Be a good ancestor.