Dall’Homo sapiens sapiens all ’Homo technologicus: bioconservatori versus transumanisti‘
Teoria 27 (2):91-101 (
2007)
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Abstract
From the 20th century end, we are attending at a revolution headed from the new digital information and communications technologies, a one-sided revolution that is changing deeply the society and also the individual itself. The current society compares itself with changes that refer to the anthropological essence of the individuals. Technology operates on man changing him deeply – the computer in fact becomes more and more mixed with man: the electronic devices, under-skin-chips and smart tags, become more and more part of our bodies, or because we wear them or because they are implanted on our body. This evolution goes on uninterrupted, to such an extent that we are becoming more and more “symbiotic and connected individuals”: the outline is a next stage of development, the homo technologicus, a man-technology symbiosis. The direction for the computer is also the miniaturization, the diffusion and the integration in the environment and the “invisibility”, this new paradigm is called ubiquitous computing . In the future there will be a even more deep integration between biology and technology, that is called from one side biorganic computing and in the other side the singularity era, with the homo singularitian. This scenario emphasizes one of the most important debate of our time: how have we to look at the humanity’s future? In this paper, we underline two of the most important positions: bioconservatists, who want to preserve the biology and what is considered natural, and transhumanists, who want to encourage technological progress and make possible an enhancement of man by technology.