Technology and humanity.

Nowadays media and new technologies are an integral part of our life. It is very difficult if not impossible for modern people to live without their laptops and especially  - the Internet. Most of them without the phone feel like without their hand. All of these inventions make our life easier, and we are so used to them, that they don’t seem nothing special for us. Technology improves really fast, more and more things are becoming  reachable for people, we want to do things quickly because time is money, so we invent stuff  – from some kitchen robots to spaceships to conquer the universe.  But there might be some inventions that make me wonder – where is the border between technology and humanity?

Tatto display phone

Let’s take for example the phone which I mentioned before. People are so attached to it that some of them never turn it off, they sleep with their heads next to it. Some time ago, there was an idea of this kind of device. This is the phone which never goes off, the battery is always charged, because it runs on human’s blood. If somebody is using this phone, is he still a regular human or some kind of a cyborg? Still it is just a concept, but what  if people were actually using it? It has also a major advantage – it is not harmful for health, and actually can help to detect quickly if something is wrong with one’s blood. That invention has some common points with the Paracelsus’s vision of sending messages and reading them in our own skin, which we talked about in the class of New Media and the Convergence of Culture.

Improving human’s body is not just a matter of using telephone, people have always wanted to remain immortal. In the past times, people would search for the Philospoher's Stone, because the one who finds it can make the ‘life potion’ out of it and live forever. Now, there is no need to look for it – it can be easily replaced with modern technologies.  It is common that people use technologies to make their lives longer, for example if there is something wrong with one’s heart, he can try to replace them with ‘fake’ one. The case is similar with other organs: if something is wrong with one's kidneys he can use dialysis. This is somehow connected with the movement called 'Transhumanism' . The main idea of the transhumanism is that technologies should be used to eliminate the process of aging and to improve human physical, intellectual and psychological skills. People who follow that movement believe that it is possible to create a new kind of human being – Posthuman, who will be a better wersion of a regular human, I would call it ‘modern human 2.0’.

There is of course some critics about it: the first point is the possibility of reaching the goals which transhumanism want to achieve, the second one is connected to ethics and morality. About the practical thing, some say that humanity doesen't have and will never have the technological devices that the followres of transhumanism are talking about. Steve Jones who is a geneticist, claims that the technologies in which transhumaners are interested in will never be achieveable for people. One of the technologies that they would like to interfere in is genetic engineering, Jones jokes that the followers of transhumanism should change the letters in genetic code, which are: A, C, G and T, for H, Y, P and E. ;)  
Others are against it because of the morality, like Bill Joy in his essay "Why the future doesn't need us", who claims there, that thanks to the achievements of transhumanism the human beings could be in danger of extinction.  

Kasparov and the computer

I think it is also worth to mention about the competition between humans and machines, the chess game could be a good example of that. There is a man called Garry Kasparov, he is one of the most famous chess players of all times. In his carrer he has played a lot of chess matches, including several against the computer. In 1989 and 1996 he won the games, but later, in 1997, he played against the improved version of chess playing program – and he lost. This is the prove that if the program is designed well it can be ‘smarter’ than people.  The same case is with robots which people create. They make them more and more humanic: those robots can eat, sleep and even feel pain like this one:

 Sometimes they breathe, they can have memory. They weren’t born the natural way and they are not ‘organic’ but they have some common features with real people, so are they still just robots? And once again my question is – where is the border? Somewhere in the near future we could add to this quotation – if there still is any…

 by  Małgorzata Pawlik