Transhumanism

Juan D Cuervo
ENC1101

Transhumanism: The Bright Side of Technology

Have you ever thought about telepathy communication being possible by the use of a chip in your brain? Or what about having a small turbine as a heart or having a life expectancy over 200 years? All these scenarios, for unreal as they seem, can be possible in the next decades thanks to Transhumanism, which is a type ofscientific philosophy committed to help humans in the evolution process by the use of technology, especially Biotechnology. Biotechnology, the use of applied biology and technology in living organisms, is a very fast growing field. For instance, according to evolution is a process in constant change, and humans have used technology as a principal tool to evolution not only as individuals but as asociety; therefore, transhumanist ideas are a great opportunity to be applied in our social system in order to take advantage of technology for improving important aspects in our lives such as health, human performance and socioeconomic system.
First of all, the improving of health is one of the principal purposes of transhumanism. With the help of biotechnologies, life expectancy could be extendedto over 200 years just by locating and eliminating the genes and proteins in charge of the aging process. Moreover, Transhumanism can also help us cure important diseases such as Alzheimer, Parkinson, cognitive impairments, AIDS and cancer, being the last resource for millions of terminal patients around the world. Another valuable contribution to health is the possibility of having reverseengineer certain vital organs in our bodies in order to get an organ transplant whenever is need it. As a matter of fact, according to Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier (2011), both progressive doctors from The Texas Heart Institute, they successfully replaced a man’s nonfunctional heart with a small turbine pump, proving for the first time after 500 years of evolution that living without an actual heart waspossible. The aforementioned case is only one of the many that shows how useful and important are the application of new technologies and ideas in crucial fields as health.
Second, using transhumanist ideas to improve mental and physical human performance is another alternative biotechnology could offer. The developing of different technologies concerning the self-augmentation of humans to achieveextremely high performance levels that would lead to a superhuman race is one of the main objectives in the transhumanism agenda. One example is synthetic telepathy, the transfer of information from one brain to another via thought by the use of electronic devices either internally installed in the body or externally used as an accessory. Because this progressive idea is not science fiction, TheU.S. Army started developing this new technology back in 2008. In addition to synthetic telepathy, mental performance in humans can be boost by the implantation of Nano-devices in the brain; these devices could be used to improve memory capacity, ability to perform mathematical operations as fast as a calculator or even to have access to internet just by the use of our mind. Isn’t it cool?Furthermore, the improvement of physical performance is also possible by having stronger bones and muscles that allow us running for hours or jumping from higher places. All these innovate ideas are possible thanks to a transhumanism approach which helps us solve ordinary problems we confront every day.
Besides improving our health and performance levels, transhumanism can also be used to improve ourglobal socioeconomic system since it would be almost impossible to have a radical and rapid evolution growth as individuals but not as a society. Throughout the last decades, humans have used technology as their strongest tool to meet their own needs, and this fair dependency of technology has brought changes in our whole socioeconomic system. According to Raymond Kurzweil (2009), a transhumanist...