SUPERINTELLIGENCE, SUPERLONGEVITY, and SUPERHAPPINESS
by David Pearce
dave@hedweb.com
INTRODUCTION
Transhumanists aspire to create a “triple-S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness. One might expect that this project would take centuries, perhaps millennia. But in principle, the transformer revolution in artificial intelligence could dramatically compress these timescales, bringing a “triple-S” civilisation within reach later this century and beyond.
The difference between early and mature superintelligence could well surpass the gulf between humans and beetles. Likewise for the gulf between early and mature superlongevity and superhappiness. This short essay will first outline each of the three “supers”, and then explore the tensions - and possible contradictions - between them.
Full-spectrum superintelligence encompasses far more than the "zombie" superintelligence of classical digital AI. The upper bounds of insentient, “narrow” machine superintelligence are unknown. Whatever they prove to be, they are likely to astonish us. But future neurochipped transhumans will be able to do everything that zombie frontier AI can do, and vastly more. This is because the architecture of animal nervous systems is special: our unique, classically inexplicable capacity for phenomenal binding gives access to the world of conscious mind and the empirical realm. Egocentric, phenomenally bound world-simulations (“perception”) are hugely fitness- enhancing for embodied intelligences with the capacity for rapid self-propelled motion. Phenomenal binding is the computational-functional superpower of biological minds - and its potential is still mostly untapped. Full-spectrum superintelligences will be neurochipped, AI-enhanced, genetically rewritten, hypersocial, supersentient, recursively self-improving organic superminds - us, or at least our posthuman descendants.
Humans can scarcely imagine how our quasi-immortal, superhappy descendants will spend their subjectively hyper-meaningful lives in a post-Darwinian paradise. Yet posthuman psychonauts will be able to explore billions of alien state-spaces of blissful experience beyond human conception. What will they discover? I don’t know. The age of knowledge has scarcely begun.
The path to superlongevity remains uncertain. Unlike with superhappiness, I have no detailed genetic blueprint for fixing aging. But AI is a game-changer. No immutable law of nature dictates that humans must grow old and die. Our eternally youthful successors may come to regard aging as a horrific progeroid disorder that afflicted their ancestors. Current rationalisations of aging, death, and decrepitude would strike them as being as absurd as we would find celebrating the accelerated aging disorder progeria today. Recall how humans with Hutchinson- Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) die of diseases of old age in their teens.
Yet what about today’s “normal” oldsters who (probably) won’t make it to longevity escape-velocity in time? Transhumanists favour opt-in cryonics and opt-out cryothanasia for aging humans who realise they won’t otherwise survive. Whether posthuman superintelligence will reckon it ethical to respawn Darwinian malware from a bygone era is admittedly debatable. Shouldn’t their wetware be optimised for intelligent bliss instead? But no one should feel excluded from the transhumanist vision of paradise.
Superhappiness and the abolitionist project are closest to my heart. The problem of suffering is fixable, at least in our forward light-cone. The hedonic treadmill should be recalibrated. Today’s extreme hyperthymic outliers - the temperamentally happiest non-manic humans alive now - genetically prefigure an entire hyperthymic civilisation, followed by an era of superhuman bliss: the Hedonocene.
All babies should be genetically selected and edited. If you are going to conduct genetic experiments and reproduce, please try to experiment responsibly; the heat of sexual passion is hardly conducive to responsible reproductive decisions. All prospective parents should be offered access to preimplantation genetic screening and germline editing for their future offspring, in consultation with expert abolitionist AI. Preimplantation screening for all is extremely cost-effective - it is far cheaper to create innately healthy, happy, suffering-resistant babies than to rely on today’s genetic lottery. Depressive disorders alone cost the global economy trillions of dollars in lost output, though pricing such misery feels obscene. More generally, all sentient life should be animated by information- sensitive gradients of bliss - not today’s cruel mix of pleasure and pain.
However, before humans can start systematically helping the rest of the animal kingdom, we must stop systematically harming it. Global veganism would be ethically ideal: paying to hurt, harm, and kill other sentient beings to gratify a grotesque appetite for their flesh is morally indefensible. More realistically, cultured meat and farm-free animal products can replace factory farming with zero personal inconvenience to consumers - and perhaps the quiet moral satisfaction of feeling civilised into the bargain. Let’s accelerate their development and commercialisation. Fishing and animal agriculture alike have no place in a civilised society. We should outlaw factory farms and slaughterhouses and rehabilitate the survivors.
The end of animal agriculture still leaves the suffering of free-living nonhuman animals. Naively, the cruelties of the food chain might seem as immutable as the second law of thermodynamics. This is not the case. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives that cheat the “laws” of Mendelian inheritance can deliver radical hedonic uplift, elevate pain- thresholds while preserving nociception, and herbivorise predators. Tunable gene drives can be deployed for cross- species fertility-regulation to replace population control by starvation and predation. Intelligent moral agency can instead create happy, free-living herbivores in a post- Darwinian paradise - just as the Bible conveniently foretells (cf. the “peaceable kingdom” of Isaiah), albeit with fewer technical details. Ubiquitous AI means that every cubic metre of the biosphere will shortly be accessible to surveillance, micromanagement, and compassionate stewardship. An era of high-tech Jainism can inaugurate a pan-species welfare state. Today, most sentient beings die horribly as juveniles from starvation or predation. Tomorrow, all sentient life could become peaceful, healthy, abundantly well-nourished, and innately super- blissful.
At any rate, that’s the transhumanist dream. Other transhumanists would lay greater stress on superlongevity and/or superintelligence, but the Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009) commits us to the well-being of all sentience. I am personally still pessimistic about timescales; the death-spasms of Darwinian life may be ugly and prolonged. Can we escape catastrophic war between hostile nation-states equipped with WMD? Natural selection “designed” human male primates to wage territorial wars of aggression; it’s part of our behavioral phenotype hard to overcome.
But now I want to analyse some tensions between the three “supers”.TENSIONS, PARADOXES, CONTRADICTIONS?
Posthuman superintelligences will have a rich knowledge of Heaven - states too wonderful for humans to comprehend, or even name.
Yet what will superintelligences understand of Darwinian life so often spent in Purgatory - and sometimes in Hell? How well will blissful superintelligences understand the experiences that drive around 700,000 humans to take their own lives each year? Will superintelligence have a rich and profound understanding of suffering in all its guises? I am sceptical. A deep understanding of suffering would drive anyone insane. So here is a tentative prediction: superintelligences will opt for invincible super-ignorance. A civilisation animated by hedonic gradients of +70 to +100 may have little desire to revisit life in the hedonic +60s - why watch paint dry? - let alone explore Darwinian life so commonly spent below hedonic zero, Sidgwick’s “natural watershed”. Perhaps Darwinian life will be forgotten like a bad dream. When did you last think about what historians call the Dark Ages? I do not know if this is so - ignorance comes in degrees. Consider how I do not wish to understand empathically, say, cluster headaches (I mentally wince at the very phrase); I just urgently want to prevent them. This self-protective ignorance sounds unfeeling, even callous. But if you understand how bad suffering can be, you will go suicidally psychotic. I want to make suffering impossible and then inconceivable, not lose my mind. In any case, I suspect that archaic pre- transition humans like us know something of which our successors will be blissfully ignorant. For their sake, I hope so. No one should know what we know; I have thoughts too vile to articulate. If you are not deeply disturbed by suffering, then you haven’t understood it. Let’s engineer its oblivion.Superintelligence and superlongevity are in tension because endowing yourself with off-the-scale full-spectrum superintelligence involves metamorphosis: “you” will be transformed out of all recognition. I think “IQ” is autistic pseudoscience; general intelligence is a function of your whole mind and the world-simulation it runs. But for those who take such a mismeasure of intelligence seriously, consider the difference between having a human IQ of merely, say, 160 and an IQ of, say, 1,000. Reassuring doubters that hedonic uplift and intelligence-amplification can conserve their preference architecture, values, and personal relationships - my transhumanist pitch to a conservative audience - is just verbiage.
For the same reason, superlongevity and superhappiness are in tension because of the hedonic version of the Ship of Theseus. In what sense is a superhappy individual the same person as his depressive ancestral namesake? Reassurances that hedonic uplift via set-point elevation can conserve personal identity will collapse when those miserable ancestral memories are gone forever. “The world of the happy is different from the world of the unhappy,” said Wittgenstein; and the world of the superhappy will be different from the world of the happy - inconceivably so. Mastery of the pleasure–superpleasure axis promises well-being orders of magnitude richer than the well-being of early post-Darwinian superminds. Our eternally youthful successors, animated by gradients of superhuman bliss, may bear the names of their predecessors, but our bad Darwinian memories will be gone forever. You’ll become a different creature.
Do these tensions, even contradictions, really matter? In my view, no. But I realise that some readers may feel uneasy. Either way, for my part I am a dark, depressive, button-pressing negative utilitarian. Yet for reasons that are technical rather than temperamental, I have mood- incongruent optimistic ideas. I cautiously prophesy a future of superhuman, superintelligent, eternally youthful bliss. Life in the Hedonocene will be sublime.
David Pearce
July 2026
some DP interviews 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : 6 : 7 : 8 : 9 : 10 : 11 : 12 : 13 : 14
HOME
Utilitarianism
Future Opioids
BLTC Research
Transhumanism
Utopian Surgery
Quantum Ethics?
Superhappiness?
The Wired Society
Social Media (2026)
The Good Drug Guide
Paradise-Engineering
Transhumanism (pdf)
Post-Darwinian Ethics?
The Abolitionist Project
Reprogramming Predators
The Hedonistic Imperative
David Pearce (Wikiquote)
David Pearce (Wikipedia)
David Pearce (Grokipedia)
Quora Answers (2015-26)
The Reproductive Revolution
The Biointelligence Explosion
The Philosophy Forum (2021)
MDMA : Utopian Pharmacology
Critique of Huxley's Brave New World
Gene Drives and a Happy Biosphere (2016)
The Hedonistic Imperative: 30 Years On (2025)
dave@bltc.com
