It has to be noted that advocates of transhumanism are sometimes organized in institutions, which provide the movement with a certain political leverage. During the 1990s various institutions and local groups were founded and contributed to the dissemination of transhumanist ideas. The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) is particularly well known (Sorger&Ranisch 2014: 14). This political wing of the transhuman discourse has some powerful women and men on its side. Ray Kurzweil is a prominent and avowed follower of this movement. [2] He and many other transhumanists strive for clearing the way for the so called Singularity. In short Singularity describes the very moment when machines will overcome their dependence on humans and will be able to improve themselves. There is a complex theory formation around this idea and there exist different prognoses on when Singularity will be “reached” and what will follow. For instance Kurzweil predicts that Singularity will be reached in 2045 and is in fact preparing to upload his mind, and preserve his body in order to become immortal (Cadwalladr 2014). His book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004) can be read as an instruction manual to provide eternal life.

At first glance, the introduced ideas do not sound very rational, to say the least. But there are good reasons why we should take transhumanist ideas seriously. For starters, companies and governments in the whole world invest immense financial efforts into research and development of intelligent machines and human enhancement technologies. Especially the Silicon Valley in California is in fact populated with transhumanist thinkers. Google Inc. hired Kurzweil as director of engineering and provides its entire database to his research activities presented in his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2012) (Cadwalladr 2014). In an interview with The Guardian Kurzweil explains:

"I'd been having ongoing conversations with him [Larry Page, co-founder of Google Inc.] about artificial intelligence and what Google is doing and what I was trying to do. And basically he said, 'Do it here. We'll give you the independence you've had with your own company, but you'll have these Google-scale resources.'" (Cadwalladr 2014)

Google and other IT giants mean business when they are working on creating machines we can truly call intelligent. Economically this global project is one of the Manhattan projects of our times, one of the major financial efforts of humanity.

Let’s give a name to some of the battlefields of this new enterprises: reverse engineering of the human brain, extending the human life expectancy, deep learning (self-learning algorithms that independently build patterns from immense data volume (see big data mining)). All of this will lead to a better understanding of the human natural language, which Kurzweil understands as the key to human nature.

Kurzweil constantly stresses that most of the fields of research and development are characterized by an accelerating growth of knowledge. For example the price-performance capacity of information technology has grown a billion times since the days of the first computers, a considerably short period of time. For our intuitively linear thinking this exponential growth rate is hard to grasp since our brain seems to work with linear predictions. (Video below, 22:10) Therefore, predictions about future technology mostly falls behind what really will be at our hands in the next decades to come. If we take a close look on the technological developments in the last century, analyze the current trends in research and take into account an exponential growth, visions of technology that profoundly question our concept of human life in the future are not so unrealistic anymore.

Video einfügen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A

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