The assignment and my current thoughts on transhumanism

I think it would be helpful for me to reflect on my assignment here on the blog. It was a fairly significant learning experience for me. As a teacher, it is quite a paradigm shift to be in the position of learner rather than the expert ‘other’. I had high expectations for the finished product, I wanted to produce work that emulated the critical qualities of the readings we have covered on the course. At some stage in the process I had to accept that I don’t yet have the knowledge and skills to produce such a piece of writing.

That powerful realisation came after countless hours of reading and note-taking, writing and editing, chopping and changing. No matter how absorbed I was in the work there was a certain fuzziness that hung over my assignment plan. It wasn’t focussed enough, it didn’t communicate all that I wanted to say and what I did communicate didn’t flow in the ‘effortless’ way that I imagined. I permitted myself to be in a position of incompetence and that seemed to allow me to move forward with my work.

I become totally immersed in the transhuman realm of thought, it was a fascinating place to be. Much of the criticism aimed at the transhuman camp is either founded in the desire to preserve of the ‘natural order’ of things (the bio-conservatives) or as a cautious reaction to the idea of a techno-utopian future.

But reading the likes of Bostrom, Sandberg, Damberger and Herbert (Bostrom 2011; Bostrom 2003; Bostrom and Sandberg 2009; Damberger and Hebert 2017) I came to the realisation that techno-utopian perspectives are not synonymous with transhuman perspectives. Hamilton and Friesen (Hamilton and Friesen 2013) warned of the limitations of digital education research that assumes an essentialist view of technology. There is nothing to suggest that transhuman values are aligned with that perspective either. That is not to say that tech entrepreneurs who align themselves with the transhuman movement don’t contribute to the essentialist rhetoric that surrounds technological development. If anything transhumanists would tend towards viewing technology in instrumental terms, they aim to use technology to transcend human limitation. Of course the instrumentalist approach assumes there is a neutrality to the technology (Hamilton and Friesen 2013), a notion contested by Winner (Winner 1980)

In my opinion a critical appraisal of the transhuman movement should focus on the notion of wide access; everyone should have the opportunity to become posthuman (Bostrom 2003). As Bostrom puts it, “The transhumanist ideal will be maximally realised only if the benefits of technologies are widely shared.” Which if you were in any doubt about transhumanist values you might think – “Wow that’s awesome!” However if you have recently (nearly) completed the IDEL course you might be inclined to think, “Hmm wide access that sounds a bit like open education.” Similar concerns apply, take Edwards’ span of openness which addresses the selectiveness and exclusions inherent in adopting a particular educational practice (Edwards 2015). Accessing one type of enhancement might preclude someone from accessing other types of enhancement. Open education and the transhumanist support of wide access to enhancement technologies seek to reduce social inequality (Edwards 2015) (Bostrom 2003) however as I mentioned in a previous blog post, the removal of some barriers to access does not necessarily lead to equal access. The implementation of technological enhancement might reinforce social inequality or worse still widen existing divides.