GBH Oct. Talk: AI & Longevity, A Technoprogressive Take on our Posthuman Future

Mark the date for our October Talk at Harvard's Phillips Brooks House on Sunday afternoon, Oct 25. This live lecture and humanist community event is co-sponsored by Greater Boston Humanists and The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and MIT.

The speaker is James Hughes and his topic is "A.I. and Longevity: A Technoprogressive Take on Our Posthuman Future"

Humanists have been arguing about human perfectibility since Pico della Mirandola told us we could sculpt ourselves into angels or beasts. Transhumanism is that Renaissance and Enlightenment wager with better tools. Yet many humanists now hear "posthuman" and picture billionaires buying immortality while writing off the rest of us as legacy hardware. They have a point. Some strands of transhumanism and posthumanism have curdled into misanthropy and elitism: accelerationists eager to hand the future to machines, longevity entrepreneurs indifferent to who can afford the cure, and academic posthumanists who treat the human as an embarrassment.

This talk traces the family tree, from religious and secular humanism through the libertarian, critical, and democratic versions of transhumanism and posthumanism. It argues that the technoprogressive synthesis is humanism's rightful heir. Technoprogressives hold that radical technologies serve human flourishing only when paired with democratic governance, universal access, and solidarity.

On AI, that means public oversight, broad sharing of the productivity gains, and moral seriousness about machine minds. On longevity, it means healthy life extension as a public health goal and a universal entitlement, the next chapter after sanitation and vaccines. The future can be posthuman and still humane, if we build it as a commons.

THE SPEAKER:
James J. Hughes is sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies which he founded with Nick Bostrom. He was Associate Provost at UMass-Boston and taught health policy at Trinity College in Hartford. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is currently writing a book about moral bioenhancement tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnology to Become Better People.

He has written on transhuman enlightenment, moral enhancement, and the future of democracy and produced the weekly public affairs radio talk show program Changesurfer Radio and a follow-up show called Prosthetic Gods.

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Join us for a lecture and snacks as we celebrate together in community of secular humanism! "Science tells us what's real; compassion tells us what's right!"

PARKING AND TRANSPORT
This live event is accessible by public transport to Harvard Square and street parking is free in Cambridge on Sundays. Phillips Brooks House is at the corner of Harvard Yard across from the Science Center.
(This event will be filmed for documentation and possible future dissemination).