5 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2023
    1. I think to me there's a tragic quality to that which we just have to embrace and we have to lean into you know the sort of the The Human Condition is in the sense a tragic one
      • Comment

        • This gets to the core of the contention of the humanist vs the transhumanist
      • Quote Worthy

        • " I think to me there's a tragic quality to that
        • which we just have to embrace and
        • we have to lean into
          • the The Human Condition is in the sense
          • a tragic one and
          • trying to argue our way out of that via technology
          • is hubris which as the Greeks would suggest to us from a long time ago ends up with Nemesis"
        • Mary Harrington
    2. I would submit that were we to find ways of engineering our quote-unquote ape brains um what would all what what would be very likely to happen would not be um 00:35:57 some some sort of putative human better equipped to deal with the complex world that we have it would instead be something more like um a cartoon very much very very much a 00:36:10 repeat of what we've had with the pill
      • Comment
        • Mary echos Ronald Wright's progress traps
    3. far 00:28:27 from delivering Utopia
      • quote worthy
      • "far from delivering Utopia

        • what it mostly delivers is a commodification of the human body
        • that disproportionately benefits those who already have power and privilege."
        • Mary Harrington

        • I don't think we can put this back in its box in that again

        • I agree with you but to my eye the proper response to this era is
          • not stamping our foot on the accelerator but
          • two-fold resistance and a two or perhaps even just a two-fold note of caution
            • firstly in retaining a humanist anthropology in defiance of all those currently sawing away at the branch we're sitting on and
            • secondly in mounting a vigorous defense of those without power
              • now increasingly at the sharp end of biotech's unacknowledged glass politics
    4. you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely Market marketize over greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new Vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation 00:26:44 and it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well protected against such risks by moral safeguards at least not within a transhumanist paradigm because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the 00:26:56 humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards you can't have transhumanism without throwing out humanism
      • quote worthy
        • "you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think we can blithely Market marketize over greater swathes of our embodied selves without opening new Vistas for class asymmetry and exploitation and it makes no sense to argue that we will stay well protected against such risks by moral safeguards at least not within a transhumanist paradigm because transhumanism itself requires an all-out assault on the humanist anthropology that underpins those moral safeguards you can't have transhumanism without throwing out humanism "
        • Mary Harrington
      • transhumanism debate between