Transhumanism as a path to the superman

Artificial intelligence as a scientific discipline has already in its beginnings aimed to create an artificial organism that would achieve the same qualities as human ones, or even surpass them. However, this ambitious and, for many, dangerous idea has proven to be very complex in its implementation, and the field of artificial intelligence has thus broken down into many disciplines and subfields that do not address AI in its full complexity. There are many reasons why such an AI has so far failed to be created. Leaving aside the technical complexity of the system, the biggest problem here is the duplication of consciousness, as consciousness and all the processes inherent to it have proven to be the main criteria for calling something intelligent. With the increasing complexity of the tasks that artificial intelligence can perform, the number of voices warning of the dangers that such a system can pose has logically increased. This danger is often put in the context of Moore’s Law, and the result of this connection is the assumption of what we call the technological singularity. It may seem, then, that there are only two paths that artificial intelligence can take; either it will never achieve the same qualities as human ones, or it will surpass them, leading to the demise of human civilization. Somewhere between these two positions is a philosophical movement called transhumanism. One of the basic theses of transhumanism is the claim that the human species in its present form is only an early stage of the evolutionary stage of man and thus does not represent his final state. Our human nature can be improved with the help of modern technology and applied sciences, as can our cognitive abilities. Transhumanism, then, represents an imaginary middle link between human and posthuman – a transformation into a new species that has evolved into a superior being with the help of modern technology. Although this may appear to be mere science fiction, certain philosophical parallels can be found in various authors as early as the beginning of the 14th century. However, the author who stands out the most from this series is Friedrich Nietzsche and his theory of the superman, which is defined in a similar way to the transhumanist and posthumanist notion of man.”