Transhumanism through digital services.
A couple of years ago I got interested in Transhumanism – the idea that the next evolution for homo sapiens is to merge with technology. Ray Kurzweil is a famous proponent of this; in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, he lays out a (not too distant) future where we begin this process with small “hardware” upgrades and ultimately download our consciousness directly into computers.
In fact, most of the thinking on this subject has concerned itself with hardware upgrades. For a generation raised on Gibson and the Bionic (wo)Man, it was natural for us to think about hardware augmentation. However, as I hinted in the post below, the near term augmentation that’s taking place is augmentation through software services.
What’s more interesting is that technology is not being used to make us super-human or more than human. Instead, I would argue that technology is being applied to preserve our humanity or return our humanity in the face of dehumanizing societal structures we’ve created.
I wrote previously about the ability for technology to re-unite creation and production. Social networking sites are enabling us to retain our social connections despite distances. And where sites like amazon.com use technology to replace humans, increasingly I see sites like Mahalo (and work we’re doing for one of our clients) where technology is being applied to enhance humans.
There are fewer and fewer stories about the dehumanising aspects of technology than there were even 5 years ago. It feels that we are moving towards a new understanding of how technology will impact humanity and even (perhaps) what it means to be human.