OMG Seminar
With Daniel Mügge    

Date: November 25, 2025.13.00 -14.30
Location: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg, in Room K4.74 (4th floor)  

The Organizations, Markets and Governance (OMG) group at IOA invites you to this seminar with Daniel Mügge, Professor of Political Arithmetic at the political department of the University of Amsterdam. Profile here.

The Transhuman Challenge to Politics as We Know It. 
Part ideology, part technological project, transhumanism believes that we can use technologies to augment human life and intelligence beyond its current constraints - spanning ideas as diverse as brain implants, extreme longevity projects, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). For the longest time, transhumanism has led a fringe existence in society, largely regarded as unrealistic, spooky, or outright unhinged. Scholars of politics have safely ignored it as irrelevant to what they study. We argue that the time has come for scholars of socio-economics to take transhumanism seriously. First, supporters of transhumanism and related strands of thought - often linked to Silicon Valley tech-optimist circles - have built real political influence through their own prominence of the public policy advocacy they fund, for example in think tanks. Believing in a "beyond human" future, in which advanced technology could either mend sundry ills of doom us all, they have shifted political discourse away from "here and how" socio-economic challenges, such as inequality or human insecurity, and towards long-term speculative challenges instead. Second, it remains unclear what is technologically possible. But recent advances in fields like gene editing, brain-computer interfaces, and AI research mean that - irrespective of whether we like them - such technologies can no longer be dismissed as nonsense. If and when they do become available, they will in turn fundamentally challenge governance as we know it and value systems that build on humans' basic equality as biological beings. With transhuman technologies, inequalities within and across societies will open new socio-economic fault lines. This paper outlines how and why scholars of socio-economic dynamics should take transhumanism seriously, how it matters today already, and how we should expect - and prepare - for even deeper transformation in future politics.