The Toxic Marriage of Transhumanism, AI and Eugenics: The Handless Maiden and the Forces of Redemption

It was New Dawn magazine that first made me really aware of just how serious and pressing the issue of transhumanism was. That was several years ago and I was working on Sufism and Ibn ‘Arabī’s “Interpreter of Desires” at the time—a far more uplifting subject. The pursuit of a ‘machine god’ and fusing people with machines, along with ‘solving the little problem of death’ seemed outlandish theories held by a fringe, but I soon realized that they were being addressed very seriously both by people working in the field of AI and by those funding them. 

Soon I became immersed in my own journey into the subject. When I started, hardly anyone had any idea of what I was talking about when I mentioned transhumanism but that all changed with the advent of ChatGPT. Suddenly all things to do with AI, such as transhumanism, started becoming hot topics. 

I realized early on that it all came down to what you thought humans were: barely evolved apes with a rather primitive computer for a brain (‘meatsacks’, as one transhumanist writer put it), ‘that’ could be hacked and controlled, or something much much more, beings gifted with consciousness, intelligence, a soul which connected them to the Whole—and freedom of choice. 

I began by writing an article about transhumanism as the denial of women, the feminine, our biology, and all the processes and cycles of nature—birth, death, disease, the seasons of our lives—and all things associated with the right brain. I soon realized it was a denial of our very humanity. The ideas of transhumanism have quite an interesting history too, as well as becoming enmeshed with the whole eugenics movement so popular a century ago and reemerging now. In addition, transhumanism with AI as its ‘god’ is emerging in some circles as a kind of secular religion with its own high priests from the tech industry. 

In short, I thought I had to do my bit to help people become aware of what was going on, the good and the bad and the inbetween, and make up their own minds about it. 

The tale of the Handless Maiden, unwittingly sacrificed by the father to the Devil in return for all the material riches and seductive temptations he could imagine, came to me as an apt metaphor for what we are going through. Happily, after many trials, the Handless Maiden is not destroyed but reemerges healed and whole—even recovering her hands. 

Richard Brinton, my publisher at InterActions, has been brilliant, fully supporting my vision for the book, to the extent of asking for more poems and for artwork to include! Needless to say, I was more than happy to oblige as I had tried all along to make this book not just an academic text but one that mixed genres and voices, and right and left brain approaches, incorporating poems and drawings and stories.