5/6/2023 0 Comments Mary harrington unherd![]() He hit the nail on the head: technology has become indispensable, not just to enable us to do more physical work, but as a substitute for personal interaction. In a 2014 case about privacy rights and modern technology, he wrote: “modern cell phones … are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” To demonstrate the former, let’s quote the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Roberts. This happens in two ways: in our dependence upon technology for mediating our experience of the real world, and in constantly redefining humanity. The kind of unconscious transhumanism which Harrington alludes to is rapidly being hard-wired into contemporary society. And by the definition I opened with, that makes nearly every adult woman in the developed world a transhumanist. It set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom … Nearly every adult woman in the developed world has implicitly accepted the belief that full adult female personhood is structurally reliant on technologies that interrupt normal female fertility. The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology - in the ameliorative sense of medicine up to that point - but instead it introduced a whole new paradigm. It set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom … This era began in the mid-twentieth century, with a biomedical innovation that radically changed what it is to be a human, in the human social order: reproductive technology. And the experience has been altogether negative. Her argument is that we already live in a transhumanist society. Harrington is a shrewd observer of contemporary culture and a transhumanist sceptic. That’s the background for Bohan’s fascinating debate with Mary Harrington, a columnist at Unherd, the British online magazine. ![]() To stay competitive, we might need to upgrade to Humanity 2.0. What happens if computers become “smarter” than humans? Many thoughtful people worry that rapid advances in artificial intelligence will make Humanity 1.0 obsolete. Twenty years ago, this would have seemed science fiction. Elise Bohan, an Australian, argued that “ape-brained meat sacks” (aka human beings) need to be upgraded with technology to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. ![]() ![]() Last year an Oxford expert in transhumanism published “ Future Superhuman: Our transhuman lives in a make-or-break century”. ![]()
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