4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
EXPERIMENTAL WORLDSON POSTHUMAN IDENTITYThe year is 2045. You are at home, storing information into your biological system and
saving some new skill sets directly into your brain. You also send this information,
wirelessly, to the brain of a close friend. Nanobots – tiny robots the size of blood cells- pulse within your bloodstream. Keeping you healthy at the cellular and molecular
levels, these nanoscopic robots provide nutrients and hormones as well as remove
toxins and waste products from the body. Consequently, you can eat as much as you
wish without putting on weight. For food, much like sex, has now been decoupled
from its biological function. So too, the arrival of full-scale nanotechnology
transforms your relationship to others and the object-world. You can email a kettle,
overcoat or bottle of wine as an attachment to family or friends. You can transform
your body into an endless assemblage of physical forms, as you shift seamlessly
between virtual and physical realities. In such a time, in the not-too-distant future,
you live free from disease. Crucially, you will also die at a time of your own choosing.
Science fiction? Or, a techno-future forecast with a utopian edge? One might be
forgiven for thinking so. But this grand-scale prediction about life and identity in the
future comes from acclaimed inventor Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Singularity Is
Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005). Kurzweil’s speculations about life in
2045 derive from an analysis of institutional transformations already well underway
today, specifically the exponential growth in information technologies. These
transformations, contends Kurzweil, are in fact neither fanciful nor utopian; today’s
technological and scientific transformations are irreversibly changing our prospects
for the future. The core argument of the book derives from Kurzweil’s ‘law’ of
accelerating returns, which holds that on the present annual doubling of the power
of information technologies there will be a tipping point – the Singularity – in which
nonbiological, artificial intelligence becomes a billion times more powerful than
human intelligence. If he is correct, something of a global disruptive transformation
in human capability – and indeed the very definition and meaning of ‘the human’- may await us. This concerns a series of interconnected technological, genetic and
informational developments which means that human identity will be irrevocably
transformed. Such transformational developments in genetics, nanotechnology and
robotics – what Kurzweil terms ‘GNR’ – will reconstitute identities of unrecognizably
high cognition, comprehension, memory and so on and so forth.
Kurzweil is a respected inventor, entrepreneur and public intellectual in the United
States, and he was the principal developer of technologies including print-to-speechThe following is excerpted from
Identity Troubles by Anthony Elliott.
©2016 Taylor & Francis Group.
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