Introduction: The prize essays

What is the future of humanity likely to be? And will there be one? Who can tell whether a bright future awaits us or a doomed one? More importantly, who can arrange it to be the way we would like it to be?

In 1993, the computer scientist and science-fiction author Vernor Vinge wrote:

Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? (Vinge, 1993, p. 11)

Remarkably enough, those 30 years will elapse within the next two years. However, Vinge’s forecast has already been shown to be inspired by fiction rather than science. More recent expert opinion has shifted the coming of super-intelligence to decades, even centuries to come (Müller, and Bostrom, 2016). Thus, the claim concerning the end of “the human era” due to this particular agent of the human future—technology—deemed by many as the decisive one, may not be so urgent and, given other existential threats like global warming or nuclear war, perhaps not exclusive either. So long as “the human era” lasts, there is still a chance for humanity to focus on the most important issue—the issue of control—in order to keep super-intelligence and humanity compatible (Russell, 2019).

But of a more philosophical character are the next two questions raised by Vinge: whether such a progress unavoidable, and if so, how to manage it in such a way that humanity survives? We may distinguish two ways of approaching these questions.

One of them is the majority view. It is scientistic, “objectivist” and “necessitarian” (and posthumanist or transhumanist to that effect), and completely in line with our post-Enlightenment culture in which science has become our oracle. What science or scientists predict is to be without alternative. The standpoint is presented as if human life and its future were completely out of humanity’s hands, merely something to be observed from the outside; scientism is the human attitude that pretends that humans do not matter. This is almost the same as the attitude of the ancients and pre-moderns who relied on the gods and/ or nonhuman authorities in waiting to see what they would say and do. This is a scientistic nihilism, which does not even try to develop science for the sake of humanity and its future, but rather for the sake of posthumans.

However, there is another way of approaching these questions, a minority view. It is humanistic, historicist, relational, pragmatist, anti-authoritarian, and critical. It believes that the future is open rather than fixed (at least to some extent), and that it depends on how humanity behaves and will behave. Its standpoint is that nothing else matters if humans do not matter to humans. As regards future visions it asks the question: “Who wants it and why?” Or, a similar question raised by Max Tegmark (2017), “What kind of future do we want?”

In my view, a new kind of non-anthropocentric humanism, rather than any kind of post-or transhumanism, ought to be our future. This view is not against science or technology, just against anti-humanistic science and technology. This new humanism could be based on science and technology, provided the latter can have a human face.

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One year ago, in an issue No 1 of 2020—still well before the Covid-19 pandemic—we announced an Award Essay Competition to mark the 30th anniversary of the founding of Human Affairs in 1990, with the topic: “The Future of Humanity”. We established an international panel from whom we sought advice and collaboration in assessing the submissions. We have received a good number of essays, but in the end decided not to select any one of them to win the prize, and will instead publish those we have selected as “The Prize Essays”. Readers will find them below, but without any ranking. We would like to thank all the other participants who submitted contributions which, alas, do not appear here.

Last but not least, our original intention, as announced, was to invite the winner to present his/her work at a special scientific conference celebrating the 30th anniversary of the proprietors of the journal, the Institute for Research in Social Communication of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. This conference was planned to be held in the fall of 2020, but unfortunately it was necessary to to cancel this event, among others, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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The three essays published below within this themed symposium address various aspects of the topic of the future of humanity. Promise Frank Ejiofor, in his essay titled “The future of humanity”, considers one of the highly relevant contemporary societal/political/cultural issues—the issue of liberal eugenics. After providing a substantive critical analysis with respect to human genome editing, in particular, he comes to the conclusion that “liberal eugenics could be harmful to the future of humanity since it is itself illiberal” and argues “for the development of robust general laws that regulate genetic interventions”. We have included an essay by Nicholas Maxwell titled “The key to the solution of the world crisis we face” (which was originally submitted for slightly different purposes) because it speaks directly to the topic of this symposium. Maxwell provides a compendium of his rich conceptions focusing on the difference between knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry. He calls for a radical change—a cultural revolution—in academic, educational and scientific practices in order to solve the global crisis that has been manifested in a lacunae of human wisdom, itself springing from a deficient civilizing process. Leandro Gaitán deals with “The commodification of personality: Human enhancement and market society”, also within the context of the future of humanity. His concern is with the technological modification of human personality. He urges us to consider the com-modification of personality with regard to the possibility of it becoming a marketable item. He concludes with the questions: “Do we really want a society in which our personalities are priced and tagged? Or are there certain realities that cannot be evaluated according to a cost-benefit analysis?”

On behalf of the Human Affairs editorial board, I would like to thank all the authors who submitted essays for their illuminating contributions. We will bear their ideas in mind as we continue our work on human affairs and our future.