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Contradictions, fears, anxieties, perplexities, but also curiosity, cooperation, and innovation are unifying elements of human nature and its society, especially in a contemporary era where the word crisis has become synonymous with life.
The last century was characterized by vast and rapid human and technical progress, while the current one is the century of ultra-accelerated technological and artificial innovation.
The current crisis should be seen as an opportunity for reflection and improvement, as suggested by the Greek etymology of the verb “krino” (to discern, evaluate).
We are in the era of the “post,” where every ideology is surpassed by new examinations.
Post-truth, for example, represents a society devoid of solid reference points, while post-humanism proposes the transcendence of the current human being through technology.
Post-truth entrusts emotions and immediate beliefs with the power to suppress critical thinking.
On the other hand, post-humanism manifests itself through technological research that allows for organic and mental modifications, not only for medical purposes but also for personal enhancement.
This process redefines the concept of gender and introduces new categories.
Human beings have always needed to define what they come into contact with, whether it is an object, an action, a feeling, or technological progress.
This need to circumscribe and define is fundamental to understanding one’s past and present and imagining one’s future.
The social imaginary also allows for confronting future expectations and technological progress.
Sociological studies on social impacts in various sectors help to understand the changes in myths, values, and models of future society.
Today, however, the future risks no longer being “human.”
Imagination and science fiction hypothesize artificial intelligences with imaginative capacities and droids with their own consciousness, leading to reflections on a society that blends the natural and the digital (Dick, Asimov, Metropolis, Blade Runner, WestWorld, The Circle, Black Mirror).
In 1947, Martin Heidegger reflected on the need for a new value of the concept of “humanism.”
Today, the academic and scientific world must confront a new vision of the person and technological progress, maintaining an ethical and moral focus.
In particular, the scientific and social community must develop a new global ethic to address the responsibilities connected to technological development and anthropological transformation.
Technology is not just a tool but an element that can redesign new social genres.
For this reason, the technological challenge calls for an ethical and moral duty to guide programmed otherness towards a social, gender, and identity placement.
Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, states that it is natural for human beings to overcome their limits and transform themselves and their environment.
This evolution of the ability of technology to create and transform new realities and entities sees the human contained within the post-human, in a continuous process of change and transformation.
Technology, therefore, as a natural function of human intellect, must be used to improve cognitive and physical abilities, addressing diseases, aging, and disabilities, but also with a propensity to become a demiurge.
Norbert Wiener, who promoted the study of Cybernetics, stated that programming machines capable of learning marks the beginning of a new stage of technological evolution, with the risk of a possible rebellion of the machines.
To avoid negative drifts, it is necessary to promote respect and coexistence between humans and machines, towards the constitution of a new social subject: the Cyborg (a term coined in the ’60s by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline), that is, a living being whose physical powers are extended beyond normal human limitations thanks to mechanical elements integrated into the body.
The human being, transformed by technology, becomes a symbiont in which the biological and artificial parts coexist, representing a new evolutionary phase.
These considerations reveal changes in cultural and social paradigms that have so far represented, in the West and much of the planet, a dogmatic and unassailable structure.
It is necessary to understand that this is a new challenge that concerns not only the scientific progress of machines but, above all, the need for a new ethic capable of guiding such developments.
The encounter between gender studies and the concept of the Cyborg (union between man and machine) leads to a critical reflection on oneself and one’s role in society.
This examination concerns not only daily life but also a deeper and “sacred” dimension where the relationship between gender, nature, and society is explored, inviting us to overcome rigid divisions.
Instead of seeing the world in black and white, it encourages us to recognize and accept a wider range of identities and possibilities.
This means that we no longer have to try to fit everything into narrow and limited categories, but we can explore new forms of existence and collaboration between people and technology.
In this logic, machines are seen as future social subjects that can help discover and rediscover the human being and its limits and can be considered allies to protect people and the environment.
Post-humanists believe that with technological progress, new genres (categories of beings) will emerge, manifesting through techno-genesis (creation of new forms of life through technology).
People will become “beings that combine biological and technological elements in a symbiotic relationship”.
This concept challenges the idea of a linear and fixed evolution, favoring instead nomadism and transience (continuous change).
The new subjects will be “relational,” defined by relationships with others and the environment, capable of operating on differences, internally differentiated (with multiple aspects), but, while being in continuous evolution, also rooted and responsible.
In 1816, Mary Shelley used the metaphor of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster to conceive one of the first modern forms of hybridization between the biological body and technical-technological instrument.
In her novel, there is a clear, sharp, and relevant critique of the first industrial revolution, posing specific questions to it and its readers:
- Is progress dehumanizing the person?
- Is it changing human nature and its identity formation?
- Is the human being losing its moral compass?
The technological revolution, the advances in genetics, and scientific studies have already surpassed the idea of the concept of anthropocentrism, which still socially persists, and the vision of life, which has become a transversal element to all nature, no longer contemplating only the human being who sees his future artificially anthropomorphic.
The development of artificial intelligences, robotics, and biotechnologies raises multiple questions:
- Will diversity born from invasive and speculative technologies replace the notion so far known within the biological system?
- Does the multiplicity of possible interventions on the nature of being require the redefinition of a new ethic?
- Will we be called to define the other as post-human?
- Will we have to recognize new social actors that need different rights and regulations within the same social context?
The humanities are called to transform their knowledge into action, faced with the possible risks and responsibilities of a social drift in which there is a constant need to pursue a path of improving human capacities, reaching two hypothetical manifestations: technology intertwines with nature, correcting and enhancing it, giving life to the cyborg, or nature becomes a representative model of perfection to be copied and, therefore, we try to recreate it artificially, through robots and artificial intelligences.
Sociology, philosophy, literature, and other humanities will have to understand what the social, ethical, and moral value of a cyber-organic creature or a totally artificial one might be:
- What will be its rights?
- What is the limit to remain human?
- How and what abilities can be enhanced through technology without dehumanizing?
The transhuman vision and the post-human hypothesis oblige a sincere and non-ideological reflection on the formation of a new shared ethic that can accompany humanity towards a future that could be controlled, perhaps, only to a lesser extent than in the past.
The capacity for action and creation of the human being could be surpassed by the predictive capacity of machines, moreover, the ultra-accelerated advancement of technology and the anthropocentric rupture raise questions about the possibility of separating what we are, as biological entities, from who we are, that is, consciousness as a distinctive element for the separation between person and machine.
The human being, in any case, must be willing to rethink itself in terms of the responsibility it has towards its own existence, towards otherness, and towards the society in which it lives.
The person of the near future needs an ethic that is capable of valuing scientific knowledge; that has the task of constructively and critically guiding daily actions; that educates the interiority of the individual and the movement of the community; that is functional to the dissemination of a shared culture in an increasingly crisis-ridden global system; that offers an open, spontaneous dialogue and does not let the person get lost in the paths of economic and social conditioning.
All this in an organic coexistence with technology.
This must necessarily lead to the hypothesis of establishing new ethical and moral models for a future that will see cooperation and coexistence between human beings and machines as a cardinal and immanent element of society: “our new intimacy with machines forces us to talk about a real new state of the self” (Sherry Turkle).
It is a perspective from which it will be necessary for the emotionality inherent in the person to be consciously limited to make room for coordinated rationality to direct an uncertain future to have human contours, so that, as Fukuyama says, “technology makes us lose our humanity, that is, the indefinite essential quality that has always constituted the basis of our self-awareness and the identification of our existential purposes.”
