Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
particular interest are the predictions of such futurists as Gregory Stock,
Lee Silver, and Hans Moravec of a posthuman, Nietzschean world where
humans have either been divided into “superior and inferior genetic
classes” or, what is perhaps more probable, surpassed and made obso-
lete by “robotic decision makers.” But more important here than the
actual predictions is the prevailing view of human nature among these
prognosticators. As Winner makes clear, their extrapolations stem from
a commonly held belief that our “stone-age biology,” to cite Moravec,
has already been superseded in the information age. The idea, then, that
humans might be technologically reconstructed or pushed aside has
already moved from the realm of science fiction into a world where the
appeal of a posthuman future runs the gamut from profit to fame to
simple adventurousness. At the forefront of such thinking are groups like
The World Transhumanist Association, The Extropy Institute, and, of
course, the Raelians, all of which advocate the transformation of humans
from organic to mechanical beings for the purposes of abolishing death
and illness and of ushering in an age where everyone has been cosmeti-
cally refashioned and groomed for success.
The rejection of the givenness of our biological makeup, Winner cor-
rectly notes, finds its apotheosis today in the idea of the cyborg: that
amalgam of human biology and technological hardware now so famil-
iar to us from a slew of movies and pulp fiction. Winner points out that
the desirability of this posthuman creature is in fact gaining traction
in academic circles and especially in the social sciences. For it is there
that the hoary concept of a “stable, coherent” human nature (and all its
ethical and political implications) has finally given way to all forms of
theoretical and social constructionism. In short, among our university
elites, nothing now stands in the way of seriously considering the
merging of our bodies with technical devices. Winner traces the break-
down in this metaphysical belief in a fixed human essence to the Marxist
definition of humans as the toolmaking animal and, later, to the
engineering-inspired notion that our technologies are really nothing more
than “powerful extensions” of our organs. Over the last century, both
ideas have come together to argue for technology as the central fact of
human existence, elevating the goals of dominating nature and remov-
ing biological limitations to a status unknown in the premodern world.
The emergence, then, of the ideal of a cyborg, a hybrid of the human
