According to transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."
Futurist Jamais Cascio tells io9 he thinks this word is "a term with more weight than meaning".
I agree and salute you, Jamais.
Our genes have changed to better take advantage of linguistics, numbers, and tools. The cloud is an extension of our thought processes. We're already significantly "post" and "trans" to what we were 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, and 100 years ago.
Yes, technology, information and perhaps even intelligence are growing at an accelerating rate, but the prospect of accelerating near-term change, even a digitization scenario, does not erase that which has already occurred.
So let's achieve consensus on the term "human" to inform our concept of that which is not human, or more than human. (This should also help clarify things in regard to that pesky "Singularity" term, another concept house built on shaky definitional foundations.)
Futurist Jamais Cascio tells io9 he thinks this word is "a term with more weight than meaning".
Posthumanity ... will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.Jamais points out in the article and in this NYC Future Salon video that the human species has already greatly augmented itself with technology (this includes words and complex abstractions, like science and math), so it's hard to pin down a static definition of "human" when we're actually evolving dynamically.
That's because augmentation - the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow - is intrinsic to what it means to be human.
I agree and salute you, Jamais. Our genes have changed to better take advantage of linguistics, numbers, and tools. The cloud is an extension of our thought processes. We're already significantly "post" and "trans" to what we were 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, and 100 years ago.
Yes, technology, information and perhaps even intelligence are growing at an accelerating rate, but the prospect of accelerating near-term change, even a digitization scenario, does not erase that which has already occurred.
So let's achieve consensus on the term "human" to inform our concept of that which is not human, or more than human. (This should also help clarify things in regard to that pesky "Singularity" term, another concept house built on shaky definitional foundations.)