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kestrellA friend pointed me to the ongoing conversation going on at Slate
"Debating Extreme Human Enhancement: Should We Use Nanotech, Genetics, Pharmaceuticals, and Augmentations To Go Above and Beyond Our Biology?"
http://www.slate.com/id/2303277/entry/2303278
I'm following it, but I'm finding it kind of...boring.
One reason is that very little in the conversation seems to have changed since I did piles of research for my thesis
http://www.blindbookworm.org/decloakingdisabilitycomplete.rtf
six years ago.
Probably the most interesting aspect to the conversation is that, similar to my thesis, science fiction media is being used --by a mainstream publication, no less-- to illustrate both sides of the argument.
Where the conversation totally fails for me is that it's both theoretical and talks about the tech as if it's in the future.
It's here and now, boys.
Anyone who adopts technologies to replace a missing or misfiring limb, sensory organ, or cognitive process,is perfectly aware of the pros and cons because we live with it every day.
We're not, as the "I don't want to be a cyborg" guy so pointedly refers to one of his fellow debaters, "an enthusiast." We're not passive adopters: we note the bugs and mod the designs constantly.
We're also not trying to enslave you into our cyborg revolution, thank you (and is it just me, or does anyone else find the title of that guy's book, _Liberal Eugenics_, to be something of an oxymoron? and he implies that the *cyborgs* are the ones like Daliks??)
I'm not an ape with a jawbone, I'm a woman with a stick, and the only way you'll get clubbed is if you get between me and my goals which, along with putting yourself between me and the coffeepot, is just a silly place to put yourself.
I believe that one should never, ever, go along with anybody else's advice that you need to accept your limitations. That's bullshit. I've had people tell me that I need to accept my limitations, that I should be realistic and that I should try to look/behave/be "normal" and, expletives aside, what usually strikes me about these people is how absolutely boring and unimaginative they are.
To the gatekeepers of normal, nonconformity is a weed that needs to be exterminated, while my thought is always, Come on down to my house, baby!
To be fair, I'm not all that behind the transhuman thing, either, but my objections to that one are mostly technical. Transhumanism seems to me to be the technological dress-up of a lot of the same old tropes that, as a person with a disability, I have heard ad nauseum, mostly demonstrating how negatively this culture views having a body, and not just the fact that it wears out and that it comes with an expiration date. I could be mistaken, but I typically read the "trans" in transhuman as "transcend," and I've heard enough about transcending and overcoming, thanks. I also have serious doubts about the ability to separate consciousness from the body. It takes a body to laugh, and I would really miss that if my consciousness was uploaded. On the other hand, I think Ray Kurzweil is a visionary, and we need visionaries out there on the margins, firing us up with crazy William Blake-style ideas.
As I said, I read transhuman as the desire to entirely transcend the physical body, although often it is conflated with other ideas which I am far more behind, such as cyborgs, H+, and being posthuman. Cyborgs are humans with technological prosthetics, which I am obviously all for. H+ is a more open-ended human augmentation. Posthuman I define as the response to classical humanism, the idea that every human being is complete and self-contained, an idea which always struck me as somewhat flawed and requiring a lot of handwaving to make work. "No man is an island," Donne said, and that predates the Internet and cell phones.
Okay, this is a longer post than I really intended, but a couple of folks asked me about this in the past two days, so I thought I would post my thoughts on the subject.
"Debating Extreme Human Enhancement: Should We Use Nanotech, Genetics, Pharmaceuticals, and Augmentations To Go Above and Beyond Our Biology?"
http://www.slate.com/id/2303277/entry/2303278
I'm following it, but I'm finding it kind of...boring.
One reason is that very little in the conversation seems to have changed since I did piles of research for my thesis
http://www.blindbookworm.org/decloakingdisabilitycomplete.rtf
six years ago.
Probably the most interesting aspect to the conversation is that, similar to my thesis, science fiction media is being used --by a mainstream publication, no less-- to illustrate both sides of the argument.
Where the conversation totally fails for me is that it's both theoretical and talks about the tech as if it's in the future.
It's here and now, boys.
Anyone who adopts technologies to replace a missing or misfiring limb, sensory organ, or cognitive process,is perfectly aware of the pros and cons because we live with it every day.
We're not, as the "I don't want to be a cyborg" guy so pointedly refers to one of his fellow debaters, "an enthusiast." We're not passive adopters: we note the bugs and mod the designs constantly.
We're also not trying to enslave you into our cyborg revolution, thank you (and is it just me, or does anyone else find the title of that guy's book, _Liberal Eugenics_, to be something of an oxymoron? and he implies that the *cyborgs* are the ones like Daliks??)
I'm not an ape with a jawbone, I'm a woman with a stick, and the only way you'll get clubbed is if you get between me and my goals which, along with putting yourself between me and the coffeepot, is just a silly place to put yourself.
I believe that one should never, ever, go along with anybody else's advice that you need to accept your limitations. That's bullshit. I've had people tell me that I need to accept my limitations, that I should be realistic and that I should try to look/behave/be "normal" and, expletives aside, what usually strikes me about these people is how absolutely boring and unimaginative they are.
To the gatekeepers of normal, nonconformity is a weed that needs to be exterminated, while my thought is always, Come on down to my house, baby!
To be fair, I'm not all that behind the transhuman thing, either, but my objections to that one are mostly technical. Transhumanism seems to me to be the technological dress-up of a lot of the same old tropes that, as a person with a disability, I have heard ad nauseum, mostly demonstrating how negatively this culture views having a body, and not just the fact that it wears out and that it comes with an expiration date. I could be mistaken, but I typically read the "trans" in transhuman as "transcend," and I've heard enough about transcending and overcoming, thanks. I also have serious doubts about the ability to separate consciousness from the body. It takes a body to laugh, and I would really miss that if my consciousness was uploaded. On the other hand, I think Ray Kurzweil is a visionary, and we need visionaries out there on the margins, firing us up with crazy William Blake-style ideas.
As I said, I read transhuman as the desire to entirely transcend the physical body, although often it is conflated with other ideas which I am far more behind, such as cyborgs, H+, and being posthuman. Cyborgs are humans with technological prosthetics, which I am obviously all for. H+ is a more open-ended human augmentation. Posthuman I define as the response to classical humanism, the idea that every human being is complete and self-contained, an idea which always struck me as somewhat flawed and requiring a lot of handwaving to make work. "No man is an island," Donne said, and that predates the Internet and cell phones.
Okay, this is a longer post than I really intended, but a couple of folks asked me about this in the past two days, so I thought I would post my thoughts on the subject.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 10:36 pm (UTC)Maybe it's something in the water? or the hurricane? Cause here's the NYTimes contribution
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/the-cyborg-in-us-all.html
The Cyborg in Us All is one of the articles in the coming Sunday magazine.
(AI and time travel! W00t)