In light of the vertiginous progress of science and technology, transhumanism is supposedly the future of humanity and the world to come will be made up of posthumans. This new era, radically breaking with the previous one, would mark the end of the humanist model, whose golden age was during the Enlightenment. Does this mean humans are doomed to disappear? No, says the author, whose book attempts to debunk several received ideas. However, the societies of tomorrow are more likely to be hybrid, at the risk of being in conflict, and will involve the coexistence of people who are different by nature, where only some will have the “privilege” of being augmented.
The author of the book under review is François Miquet-Marty, a sociologist, essayist, and scholar of foresight studies, whose work scrutinizes opinion in order to identify major societal changes. Here Miquet-Marty focuses more broadly on the new fractures that humanity will experience in the near future. To understand their genesis, he revisits the history of conceptions of humanity, from the Renaissance to the present day, and explains how transhumanism—which may seem to be an “anti-humanism”—actually fits into the continuity of an age-old quest for meaning, providing one answer among ...
