Children in 2077: Designing Children's Technologies in the Age of Transhumanism (original) (raw)

Editorial: Transhumanist Politics, Education, and Design

n the imminent future, technological revolutions are likely to change societies, bodies and minds in more far-reaching ways than ever before in history. Perhaps, this historically recurring statement has always rung true, but the growing interest in the concept, preconditions, and implications of transhumanism also points to a potential radically altered human condition. Transhumanism can generally be described as a philosophy, a cultural movement and a growing field of study concerned with the future of humankind. More specifically, transhumanism is the belief in morphological freedom and the aspiration to enhance human abilities and attributes, and thereby transcend human biological and cognitive limits. As transhumanist technologies are coming closer to a point of realization (as opposed to existing mainly as imaginaries) the humanities and social sciences are also beginning to seriously ponder the implications of transhumanism, posthumanism and the tensions that arise in such, partly, overlapping fields. For this special issue we invited scholars to consider transhumanist politics, transhumanist education, and transhumanist design from a range of perspectives and with various focal points. Political issues of transhumanism is today visible not only in discussions in and about the World Transhumanist Association and the US Transhumanist Party, but also in more general social, ethical, and

Technology and Childhood: On a Double Debt of the Human

Humanism has been challenged from different sides in the last century. This essay discusses two important critiques of humanism that have been developed in the wake of Martin Heidegger’s Letter on “Humanism”, namely that of Bernard Stiegler and Jean-François Lyotard. Both authors argue that the human is marked by a twofold non‑ or pre-human dimension, namely a native lack of the human, which Stiegler understands as the human defect and which Lyotard understands in terms of the notion of enfance or childhood, and the capacity of the human to supplement this lack, which Stiegler understands in terms of technics and technology and which Lyotard understands in terms of the human capacity to be educated and integrated in institutions, discourses, and so on. This essay shows in which sense the positions of Stiegler and Lyotard are complementary and, in particular, how Lyotard’s reflections on childhood might offer a sense of resource that Stiegler aims to find in technics, but seems unable to.

Technological Relationality and Transforming Perceptions of Childhood

Linking Ages: A Dialogue between Childhood and Ageing Research, 2024

This paper explores children's perceptions of technological advances through participatory research with children aged between 9 and 16 in Istanbul, Turkey. It offers a comprehensive understanding of life-stage approaches rather than emphasizing dichotomies between children and adults. Instead, it focuses on the potential advantages of childhood within various experiences. The theoretical and methodological frameworks aim to bridge the gap between the new materialist understanding and childhood studies, using a difference-centred approach. The participatory workshops with children encompass three different stages, employing methods such as critical thinking, image theatre and community-based research. During these workshops, the categories of human and machine, baby-child-adult, are also explored and questioned by the children. As part of a child participation project, 35 children from lower and low-middle classes, including those with disabilities, migration backgrounds, and minority groups, were involved in the field study. This study examined children's intra-relational perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, virtual world experiences, space travel, and the possibilities of discovering new planets. Alongside unveiling their future imaginaries, this study also discusses the roles of children as active agents in a digitized society.

Designing for a human experience in the transhumanist era

Ludwig Wittgenstein, austrian-born philosopher, wrote that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. All I know is what I have words for”. We tend to think so highly of our language because we think so highly about ourselves. Yet imagine being able to communicate emotions without words. Words can’t express the visceral nature of our emotions. Words aren’t enough. How can we experience our emotional world, and others, in a more visceral, primitive way? This project proposes the creation of a new sense, using embodied technology, to allow human beings to have a different experience of each other’s emotions, through the study of the long distance relationship scenario. In this human augmentation scenario, design, and specially speculative design have an inherent power to create discussion, awareness and bring attention to how the new developed technologies could affect our existence. This project is meant to ask questions rather than find a solution. It is meant for everyone who is ready to think about the future of human beings and our evolution as a species. This document presents an overview of the five (5) months project while detailing the extension of the work and exploration of the product proposed for emotional human augmentation.

Transhumanism and the idea of education in the world of cyborgs

The Educational and Social World of a Child. Discourses of Communication, Subjectivity and Cyborgization, eds. H. Krauze-Sikorska, M. Klichowski, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, Poznan, 2015., 2015

We are cyborgs. We are transhumans; transitory people that exist in a luminal phase, waiting for a transfer to the posthuman world. Our children do not need education; it is cyborgization that ensures their development. This is the idea of transhumanistic philosophy, a thoroughly (non-/anti-)pedagogic idea. In this paper, I will present basic transhumanism ideas and stress the criticism on education created within this philosophy. This text is neither a systematic study on transhumanism nor a pedagogical analysis. It is merely an attempt at showing teachers how education can be deprecated in modern philosophies that are technologically-oriented.

Transhumanism and Engagement-Facilitating Technologies in Society

Journal of Promotion Management, 2021

Transhumanism is a movement that explores the possibilities that arise from integrating technology in the human body. Neurostimulators and smart prosthetics are some of the technologies that may soon change the way Humans interact with their surrounding environment and enhance their well-being. The current paper presents a framework for stakeholder wellbeing through transhumanism and engagement-facilitating technologies on four major blocks, namely: reality-virtuality continuum as stimuli, from stimuli to adoption of transhumanism at individual level, stakeholder engagement and technologies at firm level and stakeholder well-being and technologies. Finally, we propose a future research agenda for exploring such changes in society.

Designing People: A Post-Human Future

The advent of genetic technologies has sparked a variety of questions about their legal, ethical, and social consequences. Issues of discrimination, better medicine, moral status, access, familial obligations, ethnic affiliations, and parental duties are discussed in relation to genetic testing, gene transfer, and genetic enhancement. In the midst of new discoveries and new debates, bioethicists strive to achieve a balance between a responsibility to contemplate theoretical possibilities that might result from current technological advances and a responsibility to convey whether such theoretical possibilities could come to be. (Parens, 2004) The purpose of this chapter is to argue that bioethicists dealing with genetic enhancement technologies are failing to achieve this balance. This failure stems, in part, from an inadequate understanding of human biology. Not only do proponents and critics of genetic enhancement have erroneous presuppositions about the role of genes in human biology, they also espouse incorrect beliefs about knowledge production in the biological sciences. I will conclude by showing some of the problematic consequences that might follow from failing to achieve this balance between a concern for theoretical possibilities related to genetic enhancement and a responsibility to evaluate the feasibility of those promises.