# Transhumanism and eugenics

> Transhumanism derived from eugenics.

<Transhumanism> derived from [eugenics](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/Eugenics.txt).

> <Shane Legg> was most aligned with the more extreme ideologies linked to the pursuit of AGI, including one that had been decades in the making, according to his former colleagues. Known as <transhumanism>, the idea had controversial roots and a history that helped explain why AI's builders sometimes neglected the nasty, more current side effects of the technology. …
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> The core idea stems back to the <1940s> and <1960s> when an evolutionary biologist named <Julian Huxley> joined and ran <British Eugenics Society>. The eugenics movement proposed that humans should improve themselves through <selective breeding>, and it flourished in British universities and among the country's intellectual and upper classes. Huxley himself came from an aristocratic family (his brother <Aldous> wrote <Brave new world>), and he believed society's upper crust was genetically superior. Lower-class people needed to be weeded out like a bad crop and subjected to forced sterilization. "(They) are reproducing too fast," Huxley wrote.
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> When the <Nazis> latched on to the eugenics movement, Huxley decided it needed a rebrand. He conined a new term, *<transhumanism>*, in an essay saying that alongside proper breeding, humanity could also "transcend itself" through science and technology.

## See also

- [What Makes Eugenics Bad?](https://wiki.g15e.com/en/pages/What%20makes%20eugenics%20bad.txt)