Nathan Mladin explores how we are becoming increasingly enmeshed with technology, whether we realise it or not. With rapid developments in AI, how can we stay fully human? 28/05/2025
Transhumanism is often dismissed as a fringe ideology, the domain of eccentric futurists dreaming of mind–uploading, the defeat of death through technology and engineering a post–human species. Silicon Valley’s most extreme visionaries—figures like computer scientist and author Ray Kurzweil—become easy caricatures: prophets of a secular eschaton where human flesh is obsolete and the self becomes software.
But to reduce transhumanism to its more flamboyant and crude expressions is to miss the extent to which its basic commitments and ambitions have already permeated the mainstream of technological development and, alas, our everyday lives.
My contention is that transhumanism is neither fringe nor front and centre, but an ambient ideology, hidden in plain sight, and therefore all the more pernicious. Ambient transhumanism is not so much articulated as enacted through design decisions, commercial incentives, and cultural drift. You don’t need to believe in transhumanism to be caught up in its unfolding.
While few technologists, executives, or investors openly identify as transhumanists, the tacit anthropological assumptions embedded in contemporary technology and widespread patterns of use reflect a worldview that is, if not explicitly transhumanist, then profoundly shaped by its general outlook. According to this vision, human finitude, fragility, and dependence are seen not as intrinsic features of being human but as defects to be engineered away – a perspective that contrasts starkly with theological traditions that see human limitations and vulnerabilities as the very conditions that enable flourishing through relationships of mutual dependence and love. It is this diffuse transhumanist vision—half–conscious, often denied, yet deeply formative—that I believe animates the trajectory of AI development today.
While more invasive forms of human–machine integration—brain/body–computer interfaces (BCIs), cognitive enhancements, and neural implants—remain largely experimental, the cultural groundwork for their widespread adoption is being laid now.
The first step is subtle. We offload our capacities—creative, cognitive, moral, even spiritual—onto increasingly capable systems. We let the machines “autocomplete our thoughts”, advise us in moral quandaries, and mediate our experiences of beauty, community, and even transcendence, oblivious to what may be lost. At first, this outsourcing appears benign, even empowering. We get more things done, cheaper, faster, but also – notably with fewer people involved. Over time, however, atrophy sets in. Indeed, the danger, as a number of critical voices have noted, is not that AI may one day surpass us, but that by systematically offloading uniquely human practices that call for patient cultivation and embodied presence, we slowly lose the very capacities and experiences that make us human. The more we rely on AI to think, decide, and relate, the more dependent, even enmeshed with it we become. We surreptitiously, perhaps unwittingly morph into cyborgs, blurring the line between the tech and ourselves. It’s not hard to see how Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and other forms of implants, when they finally hit the mainstream, will seem like a logical next step.
“But we’ve always had a symbiotic relationship to our tools,” apologists will say. “We have shaped tools which have shaped us”. This cannot be denied. But until now, these have been largely external to us. Ploughs, hammers, books have all extended and amplified our strengths – physical and cognitive. Digital technologies, in contrast, are much more immersive and intimate. They do not merely assist thought, but condition it. They do not merely help us remember, they change both what we consider worth remembering and our understanding of memory itself, our sense of the real, our expectations of ourselves and others. Frontier technologies developing at breakneck speed—AI, VR, neurotech—are no ordinary tools. They are deeply formative environments that rewire desire, alter cognition, shape relationships, and reframe moral intuitions – invisibly, under the skin, so to speak.
What is needed in response is not a nostalgic retreat, but a renewed commitment to being human: one that begins with the givenness of the body, the beauty of dependence, and the dignity of being just as we are. We are not gods in embryo, but creatures—finite, fragile, fallible, loved.
To resist ambient transhumanism, then, is to recover the wisdom of limits and resist technologies that erode our human capacities even as they momentarily augment them. It is to remember that what makes us human is not our logical–mathematical intelligence, matched and surpassed by AI, but our capacity to receive and express love. For Christians, the Incarnation is the definitive statement that creatureliness is not a curse but the site where the glory of God is fully manifested – not through the evasion of limitation, suffering and death, but through their willing embrace, en route to Resurrection.
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