Subtitled: Imagining a Future Without Us
(Columbia Global Reports, 2023, 100pp, including 2pp of further reading.)
Here’s a small book with some provocative ideas I didn’t anticipate from the title. It’s from a publishing imprint of Columbia University called Columbia Global Reports, and indeed it reads like a survey of ideas, citing many particular writers and books, more than it reads like a thesis by the writer. And he’s read a lot more books than I have, and he’s summarizing them. The author is described as a poet and literary critic.
The gist is the conflict between two visions of humanity that both entail the coming nonexistence of the race as we know it: Anthropocene antihumanism, that says our climate is doomed and humanity should welcome its own extinction, and Transhumanism, that looks forward to how genetic engineering and AI will lead to new forms of life superior to humans. Continue reading
