4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
reading devices for the blind and the first CCD flat-bed scanner. Dubbed by the
media as the ‘rightful heir to Thomas Edison’, and appointed Director of Engineering
at Google in California in the 2010s, the controversial inventor and futurist sees his
own work as mapping the exponential expansion of information technologies in
terms of our biology, our social development and possible pathways for the future.
The Singularity Is Near is a remarkably broad analysis of artificial intelligence and
the information processes underlying and reshaping biology. Kurzweil focuses on
everything from quantum computing to reverse engineering of the brain, from GNR
technologies to global warming. But what of our identities? Kurzweil keeps his
analytical focus centrally on biology, or more accurately the eclipse of biology by
nonbiological, artificial intelligence. According to Kurzweil, the recreation of human
intelligence through hardware and software applications will result in vastly greater
cognitive capacity and speed, as well as knowledge storage and retrieval. The central
transformation, Kurzweil argues, is the erasure of the distinction between the
biological and the nonbiological. ‘The most important application of circa-2030
nanobots’, writes Kurzweil (2005: 316–317),
will be literally to expand our minds through the merger of
biological and nonbiological intelligence.... Nonbiological
intelligence should still be considered human, since it is fully
derived from human-machine civilization and will be based, at
least in part, on 89 EXPERIMENTAL WORLDS reverse engineering
human intelligence.... The merger of these two worlds of
intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and nonbiological
thinking mediums, but more important, one of methods and
organization of thinking, one that will be able to expand our minds
virtually any imaginable way.The result is a paradigm shift that sees the human utterly redefined, a shift which
(although not explicitly theorized by Kurzweil) irrevocably transforms our identities.
To speak of a fundamental transformation of the human and associated redefinition
of social identities is to enter the conceptual and political terrain of posthumanism.
Whilst Kurzweil does not use this term, The Singularity Is Near connects to a number
of works that have advanced the proposition that changes in biotechnology will alter
human identity beyond recognition. From N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became
Posthuman (2008) to Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of
the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), there have been various academic and popular
treatments assessing the prospects of a posthuman future. Many discussions of the