Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies

Excerpt

The impact of new technologies on human beings and their environment is becoming more and more profound and extensive, raising ethical, social, and political issues of all sorts. Indeed, it seems humanity is running a great risk in attempting to achieve goals that initially seem positive, for NBIC technologies are able to alter human nature itself and the environment in which our species has succeeded in surviving and evolving. According to the detractors of technological progress, the declared purpose of improving human beings’ performance and so their well-being would have a series of devastating side effects which would yield, at best, an irreversible mutation of the human species and, at worst, its definitive extinction and replacement with another humanoid species created by the unscrupulous use of the very same technologies. The debate has consequently focused on the dilemma of whether ‘to enhance or not to enhance’. At the same time, this debate has suffered from two fundamental weaknesses: on the one hand, the tendency for the complexities of the situation to be simplified; on the other, the use of terms and concepts which are not quite clear even to those who use them. …