Posted on Aug 13, 2018
“Artificial intelligences already outperform us at many tasks and are now able to train themselves to reach competencies (in restricted domains such as chess or Go) that we can barely comprehend. Sex and companionship robots are already here. Entirely new forms of sensory perception, such as the North Sense, are becoming possible, and human brains look fluid enough to make use of just about any reliable stream of information and control opportunity.”
The human genome itself is now an object of control and intervention, continues Andy Clark, philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh, in the New York Times. Gender is becoming more visibly fluid than ever before, and there is emerging a place in human society for a wonderfully wide spectrum of ways of being (personally, politically and sexually).
One new tool for exploring some of that spectrum will be the use of immersive interactive virtual realities, such as the BeAnotherLab. Technological devices like cellphones and tablets are being used to help offset types of biological damage, such as a highly impaired memory, that just a few decades ago would have condemned victims to constant care.
Sports for people with disabilities, whether adaptive or para-sports, are positively expanding our images of health and fitness in ways that would have been hard to imagine just a few decades ago. Neuro-enhancement, the improvement by drugs, practices, or implants of normal mental functioning, is possible and may soon become the norm.
What does it mean to live in this kind of emerging world? It is to live in a world marked more by possibility, fluidity, change and negotiability than by outdated images of fixed natures and capacities.
This is a world of remarkable personal and social possibility. Sharing and group solidarity are now easier than ever before, and the communal mapping of new electronic trails is enabling multiple once-hidden demographics to command social, commercial and political respect. It’s a world where human intelligence itself is poised for repair and reinvention. And one whose bedrock nature is itself becoming fluid, as digital overlays augment reality with personalized pointers (the information-rich cousins of the contemporary elves and pixies of Pokémon Go). It’s also a world permeated by a growing swath of alien intelligences (just ask Alexa, although she won’t really admit it).
All this blurs the boundaries between body and machine, between mind and world, between standard, augmented and virtual realities, and between human and post-human. At the cusp of these waves of change, this is also the moment at which, increasingly, inclusivities of one kind (extensions of personal, social and sexual freedom) bump up against the threat of new forms of exclusivity, as the augmented, fluid, connected cyber-haves increasingly differentiate themselves from the unaugmented, less connected, cyber have-nots. Perhaps this is part of the price of all that laudable loosening?
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Image credit: With thanks to Medium
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