Is transhumanism really the world’s most dangerous idea?

In 2004 the editors of the journal Foreign Policy asked several prominent intellectuals to identify the world’s most dangerous idea. Surprisingly political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s choice was transhumanism. He described it as a movement “to liberate the human race from its biological constraints”. Its supporters, he said, want to “wrest their biological destiny from evolution's blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species”.

Most people would ask, “Are you kidding?” In fact, the transhumanist projects which surface in the media do sound improbable, not to say loopy. Here are three which have been widely reported.

• Elon Musk, the American billionaire boss of Tesla and Space X, recently told a conference of programmers in San Francisco that humans need to augment their brain power with “neural lace”, a fine mesh integrated into the brain which would link the brain directly to the internet. If we fail to keep pace with artificial intelligence, we will become house pets for “ultra-intelligent AI”, he said. “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat,” he...