Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations

Excerpt

Perfecting Human Futures is an interdisciplinary volume which brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from science and technology studies through theology, to understand how social realities shape, and are shaped by, technological visions of the future. Editors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Benjamin J. Hurlbut set out, in their articulate introduction, to clearly define how technology is understood in the book, locating it historically as a creation of the modern age. Their understanding of technology today is one not wholly reducible to machines, but is simultaneously vague and abstract; it is complex machine systems, as well as processes and techniques that are both social and material. What Tirosh-Samuelson and Hurlbut rightfully make clear is the central position technology holds as a crucial site of moral and cultural critique. If technology is a configuration of a multitude of social and material contingencies, then any investigation into a specific technology, Tirosh-Samuelson and Hurlbut argue, must be supplemented by a larger understanding of the complexities of technology in general, so as not to overlook the role that technological orders “play in imaginaries of progress and perfectibility” (p. 3). Therefore, the editors argue that technological orders “are extensions of human agency configured in turn by collective imaginations” and should be of paramount importance to scholarship engaging with the social, political, and ethical implications of new technologies (p. 4). …