As technological development continues to advance at an unprecedented rate, humanity finds itself more and more integrated with, and oftentimes dependent on, technological amplifications, interventions, and solutions. As such technology becomes commonplace, blurring the boundaries between organic and synthetic life, we might ask ourselves, will we someday reach a point where being “human” ceases to mean anything?
Whether our concerns are moral, aesthetic, medical, monetary, eugenic, or something else altogether, this futurist impulse to create, to invent, to evolve to the next level of being, is a hallmark of Western society. Accordingly, despite (or perhaps because of) our human moral concerns and questions, the study of science and speculative fictions serves as the perfect terrain for examining questions about the posthuman and the transhuman. Perhaps our ethical obstacles are precisely what makes the creation and dissemination of science fiction critical to our continuing “progress.” The subject of technological embodiment opens a realm of possibility where we can investigate the necessity of safeties, articulate and explore our concerns about the future, and weigh for ourselves the risks and rewards of an increasingly cyborg human experience. What makes a human and what makes a person? Are we already posthuman? Does the presence of a soul enter into our ethics about body modification? What should we worry about and be excited for? Such questions were the object of inquiry which inspired the following presentations:
- Doron Darnov - “Seeing Beyond the Human: Augmented Reality, Visual Prosthesis, and Cybernetic Imagination in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror”
- Pratyasha Basu - “Artificial Memory in the Works of Ted Chiang and Philip K Dick”
- CPT Steven Modugno & Dr. William Barry - “Transhumanist Soldier”
- Elisha Baba - The Prophetic Warning of Technological Domination in Speculative Literature
