Transhumanism and techno-sciences
The transhumanist movement began in the USA, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but if we try to track down the origin of this ideology, we find ourselves in 1883, when the term eugenics was coined by Galton, or in 1957, when Huxley gave a speech where he used the word transhumanism to describe his transcendent belief in the human, and we end up with the cybernetic paradigm which arose during Second World War in the military sector. The cybernetic paradigm, the study of control of systems, living or not living, is based on the concept of information: if everything, from the living to the inorganic world, can be reduced to an exchange of information, then every barrier and every difference between the living and the non living, between the human and the machine. And the the subject will be reduced to a sum of information items, a programme which can be deciphered and thus modified like a machine. Finally, we get to the development of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, after having sequenced the human genome, launched the Minimal Genome Project. Why would a company spend time and money on such simple organisms, when others were already competing to sequence the genomes of frogs, rats and chimpanzees? Right from the outset of the Genome Project, Venter’s goal had not only been to read genes or edit their DNA, but to redesign them through synthetic biology.
The ultimate aim of these processes is always the human being, this was clearly expressed by the Singularity University in a recent conference on Exponential Medicine: “We can design embryos. We can edit genes in humans. We have synthetic biology. And so we really are looking at designing future humans”.
Transhumanism is not a side effect, but the point of arrival of technological development, it is the ideology of the convergence between biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, information science and neurosciences.
Transhumanist ideology seeks to empower and implement the human through technology to achieve its biotechnological transformation: the post-human. Biology and even bodies are seen as constraints and limits to be overcome, reinforced, modified or eliminated. Before the desired biotechnological transformation or hybridisation with machines, what is being transformed is the ontological concept of human: we have never been human, we have always been cyborgs and hybrids. What is emerging is an anthropotechnical cyborg concept, where the human being is undetermined, and co-builds himself with technology, an indetermination which is technical hybridisation, where the very nature of human, his biological existence, is technological. A technical hybridisation which destroys the borders between subject and object, between nature and technique, between the living and the machine, so that everything, from nature around us to our very bodies, becomes an artefact. Continue reading “The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: The Road of Transhumanism”
