The Posthuman: terror, pleasure & hope

It is easy to understand the terror of proposing a posthuman life, Hayles affirms. Post, with the connotation of both superseding and coming after the human condition, she continues, easily creates doubts about the future of humans as we know them. "Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but it is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves." But not only the thought of humans becoming a different species is terrifying, it's also frightening to think about living in an environment where everything as we know it will be different. Although some propositions seem to benefit how we interact with the world -I am thinking about uses of technology for useful purposes such as the red carpet at the airport that will guide you to your gate - others seem to destroy, or rather deconstruct the basic idea of our interaction with our current physical reality. Do we need to walk around sentient objects surrounding us? Do I need to be beamed with more information as I walk down the street to get a cup of coffee? Do I need my trees to talk back to me? Proposals for the uses of a world controlled by technology are vast. In architecture, for example, the reconfigurable house , proposes a house made of low tech electronic devises that can be configured according and for the owner's needs.

My immediate reaction to these new propositions was indeed one of terror, of seeing the world dissapearing as it is replaced by technology. It is then of relevance that Hayles focus her conclusion on What Does it Mean to be Posthuman in the other aspect of this posthuman future: the pleasure that can come with it. This pleasure can be attained by not the replacement of the humane factor but rather by a re-definition of it. In this scenario, the humans will not be destroyed, but rather will evolve. In this way of thinking of the posthuman, the terror is replaced by the certainty that humans will be using a different platform to inhabit the world. Perhaps the best way to think about it is with the framework of McLuhan’s when he proposed that media was an extension of the senses. Film was in that case extension of the eyes, as radio of hearing, etc. In this sense, the posthuman will be not a destruction of the human, but an extension of it, or a redefining of the human condition as we know it.

Considering Moravec statement that “…computers will eventually be capable of the same kind of perception, cognition and thought as humans” we can probably understand the terror provoked by this. We –the intelligent beings in this planet –being replaced by machines that we ourselves invented, presents a bleak future for our race. But perhaps that's not a bad idea after all. When I see how people treat each other -interpersonally, not to mention at a great scale, among nations - this experiment of the human race as is just went wrong and it needs to be reconfigured.