originally published 8/28/2018
Rhetoric and communications professor James Herrick observes how our stories about the future of humanity influence the kinds of questions and solutions that scientists search for. If we think, for instance, that there is nothing fixed about the human body, but that it is one step along the way in an evolutionary and technological process, then humanity as such can be manipulated, or dispensed with altogether, resulting in various movements towards transhumanism and posthumanism. Herrick, author of Visions of Technological Transcendence: Human Enhancement and the Rhetoric of the Future (Parlor Press, 2017), discusses the “post-human” aspirations of the transhumanist movement, and how its plausibility is established by stories.
28 minutes
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duration 27:40
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