The “distributors” robots of the Starship Technologies company that for months have toured the streets of Milton Kaynes and the surroundings of London begin to configure the new posthumanist horizon of the 21st century.For now, those automatons (at the service of a local supermarket chain) only make basic food distribution tasks and other indispensable supplies for everyday life, but technologists and scientists specialized in artificial intelligence (A.Yo.for its acronym in English) agree that it will spend very little time until we see them without much more complex work that today are exclusive heritage of the human race.
The question can cause enthusiasm or chills. ¿Perdió el ser humano el lugar de privilegio que se atribuyó entre las especies desde que Descartes, en el siglo XVYoYo, colocara a la Razón como eje rector de nuestra presencia en el mundo? ¿La palabra “Humanidad” debe ser repensada en una época en la que los robots y los dispositivos tecnológicos ocupan cada vez más espacio en nuestra sociedad?
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the times of this uncomfortable interrogation, by demonstrating not only our excessive dependence on digital media, but also our growing “accessority” in many tasks, such as some surgical interventions of very high complexity and precisionor the driving of autonomous vehicles that promise to eliminate, in the near future, the human failures associated with traffic accidents.
Symbiosis time
In August 2020, the world was too busy fighting a new virus to dedicate a lotThe borders of the human race threatened by the appearance of an unknown disease.
In an event broadcast live by YouTube, Musk presented Gertrude, a nice pig implemented with a chip prototype aimed to capture and encode its brain activity.Thus, millions of spectators could see in real time that when Gertrude moved through their corral, touching objects with their snout, the implant activated (through a series of electrodes) a device that indicated different levels of neuronal activity.
According to Musk, this type of technology, implanted in humans, will soon allow the management of complex objects remotely or the removal of movement disabilities in people who have suffered severe spinal traumas.
Neuralink es solo una de la empresas abocadas a fusionar definitivamente el cuerpo y el cerebro humanos con las posibilidades cada vez más expansivas de la Yonteligencia Artificial (Yo.A), illuminating what Musk calls the era of "symbiosis": a new stage in the evolution of humanity that consists precisely in the routing of the border that separates man from the machine, suppressing that difference throughA conceptual hybrid, the "Cyborg".
Although this possibility is not new and influences the medical perspective since the mid -60s, the unstoppable contemporary convergence between robotics, neuroscience, digitalization and Big Data has transformed the cyber fantasies of "Terminator" and "Robocop" into latent possibilities.
The term Cyborg (contraction of English for "Cybernetic Organism", cyber agency) was already frequent in cinema and literary science fiction of the eighties, but progressively reached some ontological stature in the cultural parameter of a new type of sociology.
In his manifesto Cyborg, 1991, the feminist theoretical Donna Haraway defined the border between science fiction and social reality as an "optical illusion", so the cyborg would become (as a creature of that new situation) the determining political subject ofa radical remodeling of culture.
Haraway used the Figure of Cyborg to illustrate its own theories about a “post-genic” world in which the differences between the masculine and the feminine are blurred in the face of the biological reality intrudeled by technology, although the politicization of the term had a lot of scopemore practical.
At the beginning of that same decade, the literary critic Katherine Hayles said that ten percent of the population of the United States (composed of people who interacted daily with pacemaker, body prostheses of all kinds and artificial skin grafts) could already be perfectlyconsidered as cyborgs.
Transhumanism as an ideology
El siglo XXYo y algunas de sus derivaciones distópicas y catastróficas transformaron en una realidad aquello que el “pop” hecho de sintetizadores y neón y el cyberpunk noir e hipertecnológico habían insinuado en los años 80 y 90 del XX.The arrival of "thinking" machines and "improved" human beings through technological implants jumped from cinema and science fiction literature to the pages of scientific magazines and television news.
Today, while living beings and algorithms interact frantically during decision making, the questions related to the human suppose unpublished complexities and dilemmas.The contemporary urban and industrial landscape, composed of robotized factories, smartphones connected practically to everything, autonomous vehicles, chatbots and drones incorporates more and more areas where the presence of people becomes irrelevant.
While the so -called "Internet of Things" insists on configuring an increasingly dystopian and unpredictable landscape in social terms, the company Altos Labs (devised by the Russian billionaire Yuri Millner and partially financed by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon) announces aCell research project that could reverse aging processes.
Preliminary tests will be done in animals, but it is possible that very soon they will be carried out among us.What is the limit, then, at the time of "hacking" the human body?
The posthumanist horizon collects voices for and against that "improvement" of the human condition.Engineers announce a new era of biological overcoming by computer science and cybernetics.
For Raymond Kurzweil, Google engineering director, the new evolutionary phase is close. Alcanzar esa singularidad supone un punto de trascendencia de la biología en el que el desarrollo exponencial de la Yonteligencia Artificial desembocará en una etapa de superinteligencia en la que cada nuevo cerebro artificial podrá diseñar otro aún más potente, y éste, a su vez, hará lo mismo que el anterior, en una escalada imparable hacia la consumación de un nuevo paradigma universal.
In the opposite pole to that desire for technological supremacy, voices such as Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian of the University of Jerusalem and author of Best-Sellers as Homo Deus: Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) clarifies that this catastrophe can come from ageneralized confusion between the concepts of "intelligence" and "conscience", the latter something with which the machines still do not count, but that the human race is increasingly committed to confer, launched as it is at an evolutionary career of an uncertain end.
In the very recent against apocalyptic.Ecologism, animalism, posthumanism (2021, Editorial Shackleton) Jesus Zamora Bonilla, Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, strives to demonstrate that contemporary technocentrism is far (for now) of meaning a threat or danger to our continuity and development and developmentAs a dominant species.
Even though cyborgs and robots penetrate more and more spheres of our life, if you can talk about a "technocene" - it was geological marked by total technological incidence not only on planet but also on the human being as such - this would be characterized byobvious progress towards the improvement of our conditions of existence.
For Bonilla, what is leading to our civilization towards collapse is not technological progress, but the vision that human beings have of ourselves, our social relations and our connection with nature.
En esta línea de pensamiento, son muchos los autores que, en los últimos diez años, han condenado la visión dominante del Humanismo Yolustrado que se utilizó para caracterizar el resurgimiento del imperio de la Razón luego del oscurantismo de la Edad Media.
Where the undisputed religious dogma retceded, the human reason driven by the "feed, then I exist" of Descartes and its belief in the predominance of human understanding as a comprehensive principle of existence.
El término “posthumanismo” surge recién en el siglo XX, cuando en 1977 el crítico literario Yohab Hassan (norteamericano nacido en Egipto) lo presenta en su libro Prometheus as performer, y aunque no tenga el propósito específico de proponer una superación de la Razón Yolustrada, sí cumple la función de anunciar un tiempo nuevo marcado por el desmantelamiento de las nociones de “Dios” y “Sujeto”.
That new impulse points to "the human" as just a species among many others, and feeds the budget that the rational perspective attributed to ours.Thus, posthumanism is presented as an attempt to cross the limits of that human condition, not to abandon or leave it behind, but to incorporate new points of view that include both the machine and the biological in its most comprehensive expressions.
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