Staring at a Transhuman Future

Dale Carrico has a wise and literate essay on the transhuman future and the perpetual requirements of culture, government and the permanence of limits:

We human beings have always been defined both by our limits and by the strategies we use to cope with and sometimes overcome them. But many people who are fascinated by technological development have recently begun to share the suspicion that we are on the verge of a profound technological transformation of what have long been deeply definitive human restrictions.

Some see in biotechnology the fledgling arrival of tools to reshape our bodies and capacities, to eliminate diseases and renegotiate lifespans, to render traits of basic morphology and temperament more or less discretionary, to reinvent agriculture to feed burgeoning populations or to engineer microorganisms to help reverse the damage of primitive industries on the planet's ecosystem. Some see in new digital networked information and communication technologies the fledgling arrival of tools to reshape our cultures and economies, to facilitate collaboration and to proliferate intelligence, invention and criticism, to reshape commerce, borders and the reach of law, to reinvent or to possibly destroy personal privacy.

Although I am keenly aware of the dangers many of these developments pose, in general I embrace them in consideration of their promise to humanity. People who share this kind of optimism and enthusiasm about the possibilities of radical technological development within the lifetimes of millions now living often describe themselves as transhumanists. Sometimes I have used the term to describe myself.

But it seems to me that many transhumanists, in their zeal to embrace the prospect of the technological transformation of current human limits, have sometimes been seduced as well by a dream of the outright transcendence of all limits. Glib expressions of the faith that technology has to put literally every limit up for grabs are actually so commonplace in transhumanist literature that it's hard not to get caught up in the marvelous enthusiasm and momentum of it all. But it is important to remember that transformation is not transcendence.

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

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