Words&Dirt

“‘How long do you think this place is going to stay the way it is now? Ten years? Twenty? Can’t you see how much this place has to alter…in just the next century? We’re so used to things staying much the same, to society and technology––at least immediately available technology––hardly changing over our lifetimes that…I don’t know any of us could cope for long down here. I think it’ll affect you a lot more than the locals. They’re used to change, used to it all happening fast. All right, you like the way it is now, but what happens later? What if 2077 is as different from now as this is from 1877? This might be the end of a Golden Age, world war or not. What chance to you think the West has of keeping the status quo with the Third World? I’m telling you; end of the century and you’ll feel lonely and afraid and wonder why they’ve deserted you and you’ll be the worst nostalgic they’ve got because you’ll remember it better than they ever will and you won’t remember anything else from before now.'”

––The State of the Art, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 133

“It is our basic, biologically grounded nature (or so I have suggested) to be open to a wide variety of forms of technologically mediated enhancement, from sensory substitution to bodily extension to mental extension and cognitive reconfiguration. If this picture is correct, our best tools and technologies literally become us: the human self-emerges as a ‘soft self,’ a constantly negotiable collection of resources easily able to straddle and criss-cross the boundaries between biology and artifact. In this hybrid vision of our own humanity, I see potentials for repair, empowerment, and growth.

But the very same hybrid vision may raise specters of coercion, monstering, and subjugation. For clearly, not all change is for the better, and hybridization (however naturally it may come to us) is neutral rather than an intrinsic good. Uncritical talk of human ‘enhancement’ thus threatens to beg philosophically, culturally, and politically important questions. How do we distinguish genuine enhancement from pernicious encroachment and new horizons from new impositions? Such questions demand sustained, informed debate.”

–– “Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of Embodiment, Sensing, and Mind,” by Andy Clark, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 124