IEET Director George Dvorsky was a featured guest on a recent edition of “The Mark Radio,” talking about transhuman-tech developments we can expect to see in the coming decades.
The 30-minute program focused on the question: “By incorporating technology into our biology, do we lose a piece of our humanity?”
The first axiom of the Transhumanist Declaration is that: “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” The declaration is a missive that attempts to lay the social, political, and philosophical groundwork for the inevitable incorporation of technology into human biology.
If you think this sounds far-fetched, just consider the exponential scientific advances we’ve seen in the last 50 years. Travelling to the moon? Neil Armstrong did that in 1969. Cloning? Dolly the Sheep made headlines for it in 1996. Mapping the human genome? No problem, we finished in 2003. Science fiction is now science fact. You can read about it on the smartphone in your pocket that taps into that collection of humanity’s knowledge called the internet.
So what’s next for humans in this brave new world? Is this the next leap in human evolution? Or will adding technology cause us to lose a piece of our humanity?