Transhumanism

Transhumanism has ideas Its around the concepts of the “singularity” event where technology will converge to a superintelligence. In book “Accelerando” by Charles Stross he explores the impact on human society of the singularity before, during and after with perhaps is apocryphal of apocalyptic depending on your view point. The book “Home Deus: A brief History of Tomorrow” by Yuval Noah Harari focuses more on how the Human species may by modified and ultimately changed and be come unrecognizable from the adaptation and developments of technology merging and augmented humans and society. This latter scenario is certainly gaining interest as the post matrix film generations are seeing new possibilities in technologies of augmented realities.

These questions today realistically seem more in how these early stages will develop with wearables, implants and the rise of artificial intelligence and the, yet to be created, automated reasoning that mimics human intelligence even if not consciousness.

On one side there are human benefits I see of a longer life, protecting the elderly or ill using such technologies is a good thing often ignored as people jump to conclusions that its is all bad and job destroying. On the down side there is the real medium term threats of productivity being replaced with robotics and AI and the increasing integration of humans into the internet and stages far beyond today's simple VR gaming.

This level of integration is still science fiction but in the coming decades will create many challenges of separating the human from the machine. These things were strongly rejected by Jaron Lanier in his famous book "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" in 2010, but other works as typified by Sherry Turkle, "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" in 1984 seems to capture the essence of what this merger may begin to unfold.

#Transhumanism #Innovation