The Coming Era of Superhumans
Peter Joosten
Peter Joosten is a DIY futurist. His goal is to become a superhuman by doing personal experiments with new technology and weird habits. He is the owner of the successful blog ProjectLeven.nl, where he writes weekly about biohacking, quantified self, technology and health. He is a speaker and consultant at various companies and institutions, where focuses on life sciences like genetics and genetic modification. In his popular podcast show de Project Leven Show (iTunes top 100) he interviews various experts in the field of lifestyle and technological developments.
What is the impact of biohacking? What if we can significantly upgrade our physical, cognitive and emotional capabilities? How will human life change in the coming 50 years? In this talk Peter Joosten will discuss the consequences of this Superhuman Era on mankind, society and ethics.
The question will not be if we can upgrade ourselves, but why we want to upgrade ourselves. The future will be more and more about the ethics and philosophy of these upcoming developments.
Summary
- Technology is shifting from hardware to "wetware," where hacking biology via pharmaceuticals and genetics will create a new era of superhuman capabilities. - The Jetson Fallacy incorrectly assumes humans stay the same as technology evolves; in reality, mankind will fundamentally change through bioelectronics and synthetic biology. - Merging human intelligence with AI through brain implants could allow for the direct download of skills and telepathic communication, effectively creating a new type of superhuman. - Advanced upgrades may lead to a new social class of "Homo deus," creating a dangerous divide between modified and non-modified humans that could result in species-level conflict. - Because technological progress is inevitable, society must move beyond experimentation to focus on the ethics and philosophy of why, when, and for whom these upgrades are used.
Article
The Coming Era Of Superhumans
Six Technologies, One Moral Reckoning, And The Quiet Arrival Of Human Evolution By Design
On 18 May 2018, at Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm in Sweden, Peter Joosten stood before a room full of self-trackers, supplement experimenters and body hackers and offered a provocation that was less science fiction than near-term forecast. The age of upgrading, he argued, had already begun. What lay ahead was not simply better health, better focus or better sleep, but the deliberate redesign of the human being.
Joosten, a Dutch DIY futurist and the voice behind ProjectLeven.nl, framed his presentation, *The Coming Era Of Superhumans*, around a deceptively simple question: what kind of enhanced human did people actually want to become? Stronger, smarter, more creative, perhaps even immortal. It was a familiar fantasy, yet Joosten’s warning was that fantasy had started to acquire tools.
“We tend to overestimate the effects of technology in the short run and underestimate the effects in the long run,” he said, invoking Amara’s Law. It was one of several lines that gave the talk its underlying force. The other was more unsettling: humanity had begun to move from hacking hardware and software to hacking “wetware”, the biological code of life itself.
Beyond Biohacking, Toward Biological Reinvention
Joosten’s argument was not aimed at dismissing conventional biohacking but at shrinking it. Tracking sleep, measuring stress, taking nootropics and refining diet were, in his account, merely the prelude. “We ain’t seen nothing yet,” he told the audience.
He described a coming transition powered by six technologies: pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, genetics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Taken separately, each was impressive. Taken together, they suggested something larger and more disquieting, a future in which the human body ceased to be a fixed inheritance and became instead a platform for continuous revision.
This was his challenge to what he called the Jetson Fallacy, the comforting belief that technology changes while people remain essentially the same. In old visions of the future, there were flying cars and domestic robots, but recognisably mid-century humans sat inside them unchanged. Joosten dismissed that idea outright. This time, he said, the species itself was in play.
Pharmaceuticals And The Chemical Upgrade
The first frontier was pharmaceutical enhancement. Today’s nootropics, already common in biohacking circles, were for Joosten only the beginning. Tomorrow’s compounds, he suggested, would be tailored not merely to sharpen concentration but to alter emotion, extend lifespan and reshape the textures of daily consciousness.
The implication was stark. Medicine, historically directed at illness, was sliding toward elective improvement. The same compounds that might first be used to rescue failing bodies could soon be recruited to surpass ordinary limits. In that sense, the future of enhancement was not a break from medicine but its logical drift.
Bioelectronics And The Expansion Of The Senses
Then came bioelectronics, where Joosten offered one of the talk’s most vivid examples: Neil Harbisson, the artist and activist born colourblind who used an implanted device to hear colour and perceive wavelengths beyond ordinary human vision, including infrared and ultraviolet.
That example did more than illustrate ingenuity. It pointed toward a world in which technology did not simply restore lost function but introduced entirely new forms of perception. Deep brain stimulation, already used in medicine for Parkinson’s disease, showed how profoundly electronics could intervene in the body. For Joosten, the next step was obvious: implants would not remain therapeutic for long. They would become augmentative.
And here the optimism darkened. Joosten recounted a case from the Netherlands in which a patient undergoing deep brain stimulation reportedly experienced dramatic personality changes, shifting from introversion to impulsiveness, infidelity and theft. The point was not to reject the treatment but to expose the peril. If a device could ease symptoms, could it also rewrite character? If enhancement entered the brain, what exactly would remain untouched?
Genetics And The Editing Of Human Destiny
If bioelectronics altered function, genetics threatened to alter the source code. “We are now able to alter the operating system of life called DNA,” Joosten said, referring to CRISPR gene editing. It was one of the most arresting claims of the presentation, not because it was exaggerated, but because it was increasingly true.
For inherited diseases, the therapeutic promise was obvious and immense. But Joosten pressed further, toward enhancement. He cited the biohacker Josiah Zayner, who injected himself with CRISPR-modified material in an attempt to stimulate muscle growth. The experiment did not deliver the intended result. Yet that, in a way, was beside the point. The cultural threshold had already been crossed. Gene editing had escaped the exclusive domain of institutions and entered the realm of self-experimentation, ambition and spectacle.
The old boundary between treatment and upgrade was beginning to dissolve.
Nanotechnology And The Miniaturisation Of Control
Nanotechnology, for Joosten, represented another stage in humanity’s intimacy with machines. He pointed to his own implanted NFC chip, a grain-sized object in his hand holding contact information and a Bitcoin wallet, and noted that thousands in Sweden were already using similar chips in everyday life, including public transport.
Small technologies, once implanted, become normal with startling speed. That was the lesson. The larger promise, still speculative but increasingly discussed, involved nanorobots in the bloodstream, machines capable of targeting tumours or carrying oxygen where the body needed it most. The line between therapy, convenience and enhancement again began to vanish.
Synthetic Biology And Life Built From Scratch
If genetics was editing, synthetic biology was authorship. Joosten described it as the use of engineering principles to design biology itself, opening the possibility of building tissues, organs, muscles and perhaps whole biological systems from the ground up.
This was the point in the talk where wonder and unease most clearly braided together. The humanitarian potential was enormous: replacement organs, regenerative medicine, relief for millions. But so too was the civilisational shift. Once biology becomes designable, it no longer belongs only to nature. It enters industry, markets, patents and power.
Artificial Intelligence And The Merger Of Mind And Machine
Artificial intelligence, the sixth technology, was presented less as a separate field than as an accelerant for all the others. AI would speed discoveries in genetics, synthetic biology and medicine. But Joosten reserved his most dramatic speculation for the convergence between AI and the human brain.
Companies such as Neuralink and Kernel, he said, were pursuing direct interfaces between intelligence biological and artificial. The possibilities sounded cinematic: downloading skills, communicating by thought, bypassing speech, perhaps one day collapsing the distance between learning and knowing. The reference point was *The Matrix*, but the underlying concern was real enough. If intelligence could be merged, amplified or networked, then humanity would not simply use better tools. It would become something else.
That possibility has long inspired technologists. It has also frightened them. Joosten nodded to the warnings of Elon Musk, who compared humanity’s place before superintelligence to an anthill in the path of a road. The machine need not hate people to destroy them. Indifference would be enough.
Homo Sapiens, Homo Deus, And The New Class Divide
Yet the most urgent danger Joosten raised was not machine rebellion. It was human inequality.
What happens, he asked, when advanced upgrades are available first, and perhaps only, to the wealthy? At that point enhancement ceases to be a matter of personal choice and becomes a matter of class formation. The modified and the non-modified no longer differ in possessions or privilege alone, but in capability, lifespan, cognition and perhaps even status as a biological kind.
Drawing on the language popularised by Yuval Noah Harari, Joosten imagined a split between Homo sapiens and Homo deus, between ordinary humans and technologically elevated successors. It was a speculative framing, but it carried an old historical echo. Human history is full of groups who declared others lesser, disposable or obsolete. A future species divide, if it ever emerged, would not begin with war. It would begin with access.
The Ethical Question That Technology Cannot Answer
Joosten did not call for a halt to innovation. On the contrary, he was explicit that technical progress was inevitable and that these developments could cure disease and relieve suffering on a vast scale. “Innovation and technical progress is inevitable,” he said. “We can help a lot of people and cure diseases as we welcome the superhuman era.”
But if the science felt unavoidable, the ethics did not. That was the true centre of the talk. The coming age would not be defined only by what could be done, but by the questions society chose to ask before doing it. Why should people upgrade themselves? When should they? Who gets access? Who decides? What counts as healing, and what counts as redesign? At what point does personal freedom become collective risk?
In that sense, Joosten’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm was less a manifesto for transhuman triumph than an argument for moral seriousness. The tools were arriving. Some had already arrived. The danger was not simply that humanity might move too slowly, but that it might move quickly while thinking too little.
The superhuman era, as Joosten saw it, was no longer a fantasy of comic books or cinema. It was a political, economic and philosophical future assembling itself in laboratories, startups, clinics and increasingly in the bodies of willing pioneers. The question was no longer whether human beings would gain the power to change themselves.
It was whether they would possess the wisdom to survive what that power would do to the meaning of being human.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm