Carl Hayden Smith on Hyperhumanism
Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO01BVw1Ls8
Description
Rudy De Waele:
"Carl introduces Hyperhumanism as a counterpoint to transhumanism. Instead of outsourcing our intelligence to machines, hyperhumanism asks us to reclaim the innate capacities of the human body, imagination, and relational field. He reminds us: we may not yet be fully human. The task is not optimisation, but slowing down, listening deeply, and inhabiting our natural limits with grace.
In this week’s episode of Voices of Emergence, we sit down with Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of the Arts London, director at Noonautics, founder of the Museum of Consciousness, and co-founder of the Cyberdelics Nexus. A pioneer at the edge of technology and consciousness, Carl has developed frameworks such as Hyperhumanism, Holotechnica, and Context Engineering. His work reframes technology not as an external crutch, but as a catalyst for amplifying human potential and transforming the contexts in which we live, learn, and imagine.
He has raised over £10 million in research funding, given 300+ lectures in 40 countries, and published 50+ papers on consciousness, embodiment, distributed cognition, umwelt hacking, and sensory augmentation."
Themes We Explore:
Hyperhumanism as resistance to transhumanism
Endo-technologies and the shift from altered states to altered traits
Holotechnica: stacking practices for lasting transformation
DMT extended state research & the “DMT Island” project
Context engineering for AI and psychedelic protocols
Sound, ritual, and the Museum of Consciousness
Journaling as consciousness architecture
Death literacy, post-traumatic growth & cathedral time."
(https://voicesofemergence.substack.com/p/hyperhumanism-endo-technologies-and)
More information
* Article: Hyperhumanism in the Age of Generative AI: The impact on human creativity and identity. By Carl Hayden Smith and Filip Lundström.
URL = https://computer-arts-society.com/evaarchive/documents/2024/154_Smith_EVA24.pdf
"Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence have made it once again important to investigate our relationship to emerging and disruptive technologies. A core question being asked is what it now means to be a human being, when we are no longer the sole creators. What is the role of the human when the creative act is being outsourced and externalised to our machines? Hyperhumanism offers an alternative path when conceiving our relationships with these powerful tools, by defining concepts that help us to rethink human-technology interaction. This is a follow-up paper to Techno-Hyperhumanism (Smith and Castaneda 2020) addressing the future work suggested, namely hyperhumanism's impact on human identity, comparing transhumanist and hyperhuman approaches and relationships to modern and future technologies, as well as developing the ethics of human improvement through a hyperhuman lens."