Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future
Steve Fuller
Language: English
Pages: 274
ISBN: B01K0S2CUM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Social thinkers in all fields are faced with one unavoidable question: what does it mean to be 'human' in the 21st century? As definitions between what is "animal" and what is "human" break down, and as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and nano- and bio- technologies develop, accepted notions of humanity are rapidly evolving.
Humanity 2.0 is an ambitious and groundbreaking book, offering a sweeping overview of key historical, philosophical and theological moments that have shaped our understandings of humanity. Tackling head on the twin taboos that have always hovered over the scientific study of humanity -- race and religion -- Steve Fuller argues thar far from disappearing, they are being reinvented.
Fuller argues that these new developments will force us to decide which features of our current way of life -- not least our bodies -- are truly needed to remain human, and concludes with a consideration of these changes for ethical and social values more broadly.
shifted from that of seed (that contains all possible future realisations) to that of building block (that can be combined to produce any number of stable forms under the right conditions). Explanations of human behaviour in terms of our ‘reptilian brains’ seem powerful because we continue to think there is something to the idea that the present recapitulates the past, or ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, in Haeckel’s notorious phrase (which Nietzsche, perhaps with a nod to Schleicher, re-spun
efforts to raise ‘the overall level of humanity’ by the Defining the Human 75 redistribution of wealth and sentiment are instituted, this time in the name of ‘Enlightenment’ (Fleischacker 2004). In the 19th and 20th centuries, these efforts came to be routinised as a set of political expectations concerning mass education, health care, and welfare provision more generally. The perceived failure, or at least underachievement, in securing the fourth sense of humanity’s ontological precariousness
(Cheng et al. 2008: 165), consultants shuttling between the scientific and cinematic communities do not merely convey information that each needs to know of the other to get their respective points across. Rather, the scientists and the film makers mutually calibrate their goals and standards of achievement. In particular, film makers not only shape the expectations of their viewers but also fuel the scientific imagination itself, as aspects of complex concepts and situations are heightened,
changed with the rise and fall of the Nazis and the atrocities they carried out in the name of eugenics, which led to the subsequent stigmatisation of ‘survival of the fittest’ policies. The postwar political climate was such that evolutionary theory was potentially held liable for Hitler’s carnage. The diplomatic solution, again to Darwin’s advantage, was to jettison Spencer as a ‘Social Darwinist’ (Hofstadter 1944). The phrase had neutrally referred to the extension of Darwin’s ideas to human
life, which has shifted its research project over the past ten years from simulating to instantiating life. The implication here is that carbon-based ‘wetware’ of fleshand-blood organisms is no longer regarded as the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ form of life that ‘software’ (i.e. computer programmes) and ‘hardware’ (i.e. robots) simulate to varying degrees. Rather, life is defined in terms that are completely abstracted from its mode of realisation so that wetware, software and hardware all instantiate