트랜스휴머니즘과 우생학

트랜스휴머니즘은 우생학에서 파생되었다.

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. …

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.

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.

메모

한편, 우생학에서 유래했으니 무조건 나쁘다는 추론은 기원적론 오류이다.

“인간을 개선하기 위해 개입을 하는 것 자체가 나쁘다”는 기준보다는 정교한 기준이 필요한 것 같다. 왜냐하면 느슨한 기준으로는 다음 두 사례를 구분하기 어렵기 때문:

• 내 시력을 개선하려고 내가 안경을 쓴다.
• 국가가 국민 “혈통의 순수성”을 개선하려고 일부 국민에게 강제불임시술을 한다.

이를테면 이런 구분들이 필요한 것 같다:

• “개선”이 무엇인지를 누가 어떻게 정의하는지, 다원적 기준이 허용되는지 등
• 개인의 자율성이 얼마나 보장되는지

—ak, 2025-09-07