The dream of transcending the human through the digital matrix: A relational critique (original) (raw)
Related papers
Posthumanities: The Dark Side of “The Dark Side of the Digital”
The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2016
In What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists "the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist." 1 Our argument, made manifest by this special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, is that it is not only our ways of thinking about the world that must change if they are to be posthumanist, or at least not simply humanist; our ways of being and doing in the world must change too. In particular, we view the challenge to humanism and the human brought about by the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, bioscience, pre-emptive, cognitive, and contextual computing, as providing us with an opportunity to reinvent, radically, the ways in which we work, act, and think as theorists. In this respect, if "posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore," 2 then it generates an opportunity to raise the kind of questions for the humanities we really should have raised long before now, but haven't because our humanist ideas, not just of historical change and progression (i.e. from human to posthuman, to what comes after the human), 3 but of the rational, liberal, human subject, and the associated concepts of the author, the journal, and copyright that we have inherited with it, continue to have so much power and authority. Our use of disruption in this context thus goes beyond the usual definitions of the term. This includes those characterizations of technological disruption associated with Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School, and with the rhetoric of Silicon Valley. It is not our intention to try to sustain and develop the current system for creating, performing and circulating humanities research and scholarship, its methodologies, aesthetics, and institutions, by emphasizing the potential of disruptive technologies to generate innovations that are capable of facilitating the production of a new "digital" humanities, or even "posthuman Humanities studies." 4 As the title of this special issue indicates, rather than helping the humanities refresh themselves with what Joseph Schumpeter
CONTEMPORARY POST-HUMANISM: TECHNOLOGICAL AND HUMAN SINGULARITY.
Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology. The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one’s own subject in favour of blending with other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these premises highlighting the structural dependency of the human being, the role of the human body, the difference between thought and a computational process, the singularity of some useless and unexpected human acts. It also puts forward the need for axiological criteria to define growth as perfectionism.
In the modern world an individual deals with different technologies and products of scientific and technological progress and becomes more and more dependent on them, spending considerable time to understand changes and to keep up with progress. In general, the entire human history especially in the last few centuries is the history of victories and triumph of science, technology, and information technologies. Moreover, the humankind being a father of technology at the same time became more and more dependent on it. Today technologies penetrate almost every aspect of our life: private, family and intimate, as well as our mentality. But even more serious transformations are awaiting us in the future when devices and technologies are introduced into the human body and consciousness thus putting strain on all our biological (nervous, physical, and intellectual) adaptive capacities. Today they give a serious thought to seemingly strange ideas about whether mobile phones, computers, and organizers can become a part of our body and brain. In fact, technology has become one of the most powerful forces of development.
Slaves to the Machine: Understanding the Paradox of Transhumanism
Philosophical Disquisitions
This is the text of a keynote lecture I delivered to the 'Transcending Humanity' conference at Tubingen University on the 13th July 2017. It discusses the alleged tension between the transhumanist ideal of biological freedom and the glorification of technological means to that freedom. In the talk, I argue that the tension is superficial because the concept of freedom is multidimensional.
Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology. The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one's own subject in favour of blending with other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these p...
2018
Key organizational decisions made by sapient AIs. The pressure to undergo neuroprosthetic augmentation in order to compete with genetically enhanced coworkers. A corporate headquarters that exists only in cyberspace as a persistent virtual world. A project team whose members interact socially as online avatars without knowing or caring whether fellow team members are human beings or robots. Futurologists’ visions of the dawning age of ‘posthumanized’ organizations range from the disquieting to the exhilarating. Which of these visions are compatible with our best current understanding of the capacities and the limits of human intelligence, physiology, and sociality? And what can posthumanist thought reveal about the forces of technologization that are transforming how we collaborate with one another – and with ever more sophisticated artificial agents and systems – to achieve shared goals? This book develops new insights into the evolving nature of intelligent agency and collaboration by applying the post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic methodologies of posthumanism to the fields of organizational theory and management. Building on a comprehensive typology of posthumanism, an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ is described which makes sense of the dynamics of technological posthumanization that are reshaping the members, personnel structures, information systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external environments available to organizations. Conceptual frameworks and analytical tools are formulated for use in diagnosing and guiding the ongoing convergence in the capacities of human and artificial actors that is being spurred by novel technologies relating to human augmentation, synthetic agency, and digital-physical ecosystems. As the first systematic investigation of these topics, this text will be of interest to scholars and students of posthumanism and management and to management practitioners who must grapple on a daily basis with the forces of technologization that are increasingly powerful drivers of organizational change.
2024
In this paper, I aim to assess whether postphenomenology's ontological framework is suitable for making sense of the most recent technoscientific developments, with special reference to the case of AI-based technologies. First, I will argue that we may feel diminished by those technologies seemingly replicating our higher-order cognitive processes only insofar as we regard technology as playing no role in the constitution of our core features. Second, I will highlight the epistemological tension underlying the account of this dynamic submitted by postphenomenology. On the one hand, postphenomenology's general framework prompts us to conceive of humans and technologies as mutually constituting one another. On the other hand, the postphenomenological analyses of particular human-technology relations, which Peter-Paul Verbeek calls cyborg relations and hybrid intentionality, seem to postulate the existence of something exclusively human that technology would only subsequently mediate. Third, I will conclude by proposing that postphenomenology could incorporate into its ontology insights coming from other approaches to the study of technology, which I label as human constitutive technicity in the wake of Peter Sloterdijk's and Bernard Stiegler's philosophies. By doing so, I believe postphenomenology could better account for how developments in AI prompt and possibly even force us to revise our self-representation. From this viewpoint, I will advocate for a constitutive role of technology in shaping the human lifeform not only in the phenomenological-existential sense of articulating our relation to the world but also in the onto-anthropological sense of influencing our evolution.
Accelerating the Human: the cybercultural origins of the ‘Technological Singularity’
2012
"Contemporary 'Singularity' thinking has its origins in Vernor Vinge’s influential proposal of the emergence of greater-than-human artificial intelligence (AI) as an ‘event horizon’ in human history. This notion finds its technological basis in the exponential development of information technology during the 20th century, as expressed in 'Moore’s Law'. However, the pace of development of information technologies is uncertain, and the predictions for the date of emergence of a 'Singularity' are pushing it farther into the future. An analogy can be established with religious eschatology and its trademark anxiety for a form of Rapture. 'Singularity' thinking's ancestry can be traced back to the utopian thinking of Campanella, as well as positivistic utopianism, the works of eschatological thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, and the speculative writings of computer scientists. More recently, it has become a common trope in speculative fiction. This heritage is acknowledged in the writings of V. Vinge, which have laid the conditions for the rise of a 'technological singularity'. As an heir to the utopian tradition, 'singularitarianism' espouses a theory of human history as progress towards better forms of existence. Scientific and technological development would be destined to accelerate humankind into a post-human condition, with the creation of artificial intelligence as the milestone signalling the beginning of that new era. The acceleration thesis of ‘singularitarianism’ and its inherent uncertainty have given rise to a variety of positions, ranging from the enthusiastic (as, for example, N. Bostrom, R. Kurzweil, or H. Moravec), to the sceptic (including B. Joy, J. Lanier, R. Penrose). Rarely have they been the object of a sustained philosophical approach (an exception would be D. Chalmers’ “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”). The 'Singularity' scenario integrates images, metaphors, notions, and hopes also present in cyberculture: the central element of technology, its interfaces with humans, hybridization, mind-body dualism, the moral nature of AI, and the coexistence between humanity and AI. As a result, this paper addresses a needed critical characterization of 'Singularity' thinking, exploring some"
All forms of humanism that consider the human as a yardstick of society are marginalized by a Digital Technological Matrix that dominates the human, minimizes its role, and transforms it, to the point of dissolving its boundaries with the non-human. Speaking of essence and human dignity still make sense? The thesis of this contribution is that the human is redefined and re-evaluated precisely due to the process that makes the human ‘eccentric’ and places it in the system environment. The human re-emerges as an intransitive essence endowed with an original, humble, relational dignity. The human can and must be regenerated through the relational reflexivity operated by relational subjects contextually capable of re-entering within themselves the constitutive distinctions of their humanness, both individual and collective. The specific 'intransitive' essence of the human lies in the impossibility for it to renounce the meaning of its own existence. Precisely because of the confrontation with robotic technologies, the value of the human being and his dignity change.