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Optimization of Human Capacities and the Representation of the Nanoscale Body
Michèle Robitaille
Abstract
The current interest in NBIC research, which intends to optimize human capacities, points to deep-seated change in both our representations of the human body and the human-machine relationship. The outcome of genetic engineering, pharmacology, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies promises a human body less subject to illness, better "adapted" and, especially, more malleable. Examining different popularized scientific documents written by transhumanist researchers—who advocate for a radical optimization of human capacities via technoscience—we observe that their representations of the body pivot around three main axes: the human body is constructed as being informational, technologically perfectible and obsolete. These representations allow the promoters to argue not only for the project's feasibility but also its necessity. Thus, this technoscientific project is axiological and, as we will see, raises many social concerns about health, disability, suffering, and performance.
Introduction
Since the publication of the National Science Foundation's report entitled Converging Technology for Improving Human Performance (Roco & Bainbridge, 2002), the improvement of the human condition, promised by the NBIC researchers, has continually drawn media's and governments' attention. In this report (usually called the NBIC Report), it is obviously suggested that technosciences and mostly nanotechnologies will soon cure and/or prevent numerous diseases, find remedies for all forms of disorders and handicaps, slow down the aging process and optimize human capabilities. This improvement of the human condition through a radical technoscientific transformation of the human body itself is precisely the core vision that animates the transhumanist activists and researchers.
Founded in 1998 by two philosophers, the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) gathers more than 5000 members—including many academics such as sociologists, computer scientists, molecular biologists, nano-engineers, and philosophers—and proposes a particular vision of the human body and its limits. Briefly, in its view, the actual body remains limited, fragile, and always subject to disease and death; therefore it is the researchers' responsibility to immediately and thoroughly work on improving and transforming the body through NBIC technologies.
It needs to be said that not all transhumanists agree with the specific means to use. [1] While some researchers favour gene therapies or regenerative medicine, others suggest hybridization with machines (brain-computer interfaces, sensory prosthesis, repairing nano-robots) or neurochemical means. Albeit divergence of opinions, most transhumanists nevertheless assert that the essential role of NBIC is to improve conditions of existence. Moreover, they claim this in the name of individual freedom and human perfectibility understood as technoscientific perfectibility [2]. Evidently, technoscientific optimization is at the heart of the transhumanist project and would even constitute an anthropological necessity because, in their point of view, every human being is one way or another disabled or sick. Thus, for its survival, the human species should welcome with open arms the so-called technological advances.
The frontiers which symbolically distinguish the human from the animal and the machine, the living from the non-living, are crumbling as the NBIC technologies gradually converge, giving rise to new definitions of the human being, and to unexpected biomedical practices. To this day, we are barely beginning to grasp the social scope of these technoscientific advances, as they increasingly raise several fundamental questions, i.e. why should we alter the human (his flesh, moods, DNA, reproduction) and why should we use technoscientific tools? What is the moral vision of human value and humane values implied in these projects? Are there consequences to our current representations of suffering or well-being?
In this article, we will first describe and illustrate the three dimensions which set up the transhumanist representation of the body as an ideal-type of contemporary thought: the body is understood as informational, technoscientifically perfectible, and obsolete. Then we will discuss the argument stating that the body's enhancement via NBIC is a "necessity" in order to increase individual freedom and self-determination, to overstep biological limits, and to relieve any physical, psychological, or even existential suffering. This needs to be sociologically analysed, as there are social and ethical concerns relating to the development of biomedical standards which define what it means to "be healthy" or to "be fine". These standards consequently tend to guide social practices. Finally, we'll see that several concerns are already underlined by sociologists and ethicists in regards to the social impact of body optimization.
Method
From a sociological viewpoint, we are interested in the representations of the body held by transhumanist researchers and believers; thus we have borrowed the perspective of sociologists Serge Moscovici and Denise Jodelet. Jodelet defines the concept of social representations (SR) as "a form of knowledge socially developed and shared, having a referred practice and contributing to the construction of a common reality to a social whole" (1989, p. 53, our translation). Consisting of various types of elements (informative, cognitive, ideological or normative)—encompassing beliefs, values, theories, opinions and images—social representations, she explains, are organized to produce a coherent and useful knowledge about everyday reality. Although the transhumanist discourse is very frequently challenged and criticized, the sociological significance of analyzing these SR "lies in the pursuit of correspondence between the content of an ideology (or vision of the world, or social representation) and the motivations, the situation, the nature of the group that designed it at a precise historical moment" (Moscovici, 1961, p. 306). Since most of the "big players" of the transhumanist discourse are academics, it is acknowledged that they benefit from a high degree of credibility.
In order to identify the transhumanists' representations of the body and their various arguments put forward in promoting the optimization of the body, we have carried out a qualitative analysis of these researchers' discourse (which relies on the paradigm of social constructivism). Our corpus of analysis is composed of different texts [3] totalling approximately 5000 pages. These are addressed to the general public and/or to governments (popularization of science, reports, content of web sites). The whole corpus has been digitized and then codified with the help of a discourse analysis software named NVivo (version 2.0)[4]. We have particularly focused our attention on the definitions of the body, of the brain, of intelligence, as well as the use of metaphor (cybernetic and biological). Finally, we have examined their use of themes associated with modern humanism, i.e. their specific reading of these themes for persuasive purposes. This analysis of transhumanist discourse has thus allowed us to observe their body representations as well as the cultural resonance of the project they put forth.
Results
In the course of this analysis, we have observed that the transhumanist representations of the body encompass three main dimensions: informational, technological perfectibility and obsolescence. We will see that this tripartite representation allows them to justify the importance of optimizing the human being through NBIC technologies in order to reduce suffering caused by so-called limitations, in terms of intellectual and physical capacities, or even in terms of longevity.
Informational body
The NBIC Report [5] (Roco & Bainbridge, 2002) shows that many disciplines use the informational metaphor in the construction of their objects of analysis. The authors are abundantly concerned with analyzing the genetic, sensory and neuronal "information": the molecular machinery, the "software" that the brain uses (which is itself understood as a computer) and the exchanges of information during interactions or "bytes" in human memory. Although works in epistemology of sciences have widely questioned the use of this metaphor (Dupuy, 2002; Hayles, 2004; Kay, 2000; Keller, 1996; Lafontaine, 2004), needless to say, it still has a strong symbolic efficiency and is widely used by the public. Transhumanists commonly use this metaphor, which allows them to suggest reprogramming the whole body as they would a computer. The following quotes exemplify the ubiquity of the informational metaphor. They come from various academics or researchers, i.e. Edgar Garcia-Rill (neuroscientist), Josh Storrs Hall (researcher in molecular manufacturing), Lee Silver (molecular biologist), James Hughes (sociologist) and Andy Clark (philosopher interested in artificial intelligence):
What kind of software does the brain use? (Garcia-Rill In Roco & Bainbridge, 2002, p. 228)
Using nanotechnology, we can design fully intelligent polymorphic material that consists, like your body, of trillions of microscopic machines. Like your cells, each machine will have a substantial local program and information storage, but will act in accordance with patterns of global information. Unlike your cells, they will be more quickly and more widely reprogrammable, adopt a wider array of functions, and look like spiders rather than jellyfish. (Storr-Hall, 1993: online)
A DNA base is analogous to a bit, which is the basic unit of information stored in computers. (Silver, 2002, p. 238)
Whether the "natural" life expectancy under optimal conditions is 80 or 100 years, the human body is certainly programmed to start slowly falling apart after about the age of 20. (Hughes, 2004, p. 25)
In generating that sequence of visual experiences, what information did my biological brain actually bother to extract and process? (Clark, 2003, p. 63)
This informationalization of the human body, although not specific to the transhumanist movement, constitutes a crucial dimension of their discourse, as it underlies a strong desire to reprogram the body, which constitutes the transhumanists' plan of action itself. According to them, the body is deeply malleable (soon at the nanoscale, apparently) and can be improved (i.e. reprogrammed) via NBIC. This relates to their specific outlook on NBIC's actual and potential feasibility. It should be pointed out that many of these nanotechnological devices do not exist as yet. According to certain researchers, most of them are not even feasible. We believe their anticipation of technological progress in this field constitutes their basic belief, and the transhumanist project depends on this idea. That is to say, by circumventing some of the epistemological and axiological questionings concerning NBIC, transhumanists are now able to argue their project on the basis of its (potential) technical feasibility. Taking into account their vision, which is clearly focused on the primacy of technoscience in the improvement of human conditions, it is not astonishing they recommend intensifying research. The main goal is to develop and rapidly market new products to optimize the body's performance.
Perfectible body
The promoters of transhumanism accurately claim that human beings have throughout history been trying to improve themselves morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically. Indeed, it is commonly accepted that the primary human characteristic is his capacity to reinvent himself, and to create and improve his world. In that respect, the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov states in his book L'Esprit des Lumières (referring to Rousseau) that "the distinctive trait of the human species is not the race toward progress, but only perfectibility, an ability to be better, so as to improve the world, but which the effects are not guaranteed or irreversible" (2006, p. 20, our translation). This modern idea of man's perfectibility has expressed itself in various ways throughout history, i.e. ethics, religious devotion, education, psychotherapy, technological productivity, creation of political and social institutions, etc. However, in the above cases, the idea of perfectibility operates within society and through social and political means. Nowadays, the transhumanists, as well as some researchers who focus on the optimization of human capacities, advocate for a singular view of perfectibility: they reduce it to a technoscientific perfectibility. By focusing on technoscientific means, this view excludes other possibilities of social and political action to improve life conditions. This is showed through numerous quotes relating to self-making, self-mastering and enhancement. For example, the journalist Joel Garreau quotes the founder of artificial intelligence:
Minsky believes it is important that we "understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't—and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves." (Garreau, 2004, p. 123)
The following remarks are from James Hughes (sociologist), Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge (advisers at the National Science Foundation), Gregory Stock (biophysician)—who refers to James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA—and from the journalist Brian Alexander who refers to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programs:
The convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science in the coming decades will give us unimaginable technological mastery of nature and ourselves. (Hughes, 2004, p. 1)
At this unique moment in the history of technical achievement, improvement of human performance becomes possible. Caught in the grip of social, political, and economic conflicts, the world hovers between optimism and pessimism. NBIC convergence can give us the means to deal successfully with these challenges by substantially enhancing human mental, physical, and social abilities. (Roco & Bainbridge, 2002, p. 3)
Watson's simple question, "If we could make better humans... why shouldn't we?" cuts to the heart of the controversy about human genetic enhancement. Worries about the procedure's feasibility or safety miss the point. (Stock, 2002, p. 12)
Scientists were not just trying to enhance human powers by merging them with machines. There were ways to shut down genes or turn them on like so many light switches using molecules borrowed from moths, and another molecule called "zinc fingers." (Alexander, 2003, p. 245)
These quotes clarify the drastic contemporary break from the modern concept of human perfectibility which operates within society, and through social and political means. While transhumanists legitimize their project in the name of (modern) human perfectibility, they promote something clearly different: the enhancement of human capacities. This is arguable only if it shares a technoscientific view of human perfectibility which aims to optimize the body itself, on an organic and even molecular scale, through NBIC by virtue of the individual's right to self-determination (understood as self-regulation and improving the organism's functioning). Furthermore, the idea of biologically reprogramming the human body (especially at the nanoscale) refers not only to the desire to have greater control over the body, but also control over the undesirable side effects created by the technology.
Obsolete body
To fully comprehend the transhumanist representation of the body, we need to take into account their belief in the body's obsolescence, along with the two previous assertions, that the body is informational and technologically perfectible. This third aspect renders coherent the transhumanist arguments. They maintain that the body is the most important "problem" to solve. This dimension represents the passage from one discursive mode to another: not only "could" the body be improved, it "must" be improved. Therefore many transhumanists consider the biological body as obsolete, an inadequate human part which technoscience can improve in order to make it more efficient and better "adapted" to contemporary society. The following quotes exemplify their denigration of, and desire to improve upon, our given body. Discussing the "ineffectiveness" of our digestive system, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil declares: "Today, [our digestive processes] are extremely counterproductive. Our outdated metabolic programming underlies our contemporary epidemic of obesity and fuels pathological processes of degenerative disease such as coronary artery disease, and type II diabetes" (2003, online). Correlatively the sociologist James Hughes states:
The basic cause of obesity is that we have bodies designed to spend hours walking around the savanna every day, and brains that find easy access to fats, sugars and carbohydrates irresistible. Only safe and cheap genetic and pharmaceutical therapies can successfully stop the deadly worldwide rise of obesity. (Hughes, 2004, p. 19-20)
Regarding DNA, the nano-engineer Ted Sargent asserts: "Inside we are abuzz with molecular mechanics... The machine inside our cells that manufacture protein from DNA instructions can make mistakes..." (2005, p. 33-34). In the same vein, the NBIC Report underlines soldiers' limited performance, as the researcher in robotics James S. Albus does: "Many military systems are limited in performance because of the inability of the human body to tolerate high levels of temperature, acceleration, vibration, or pressure, or because humans need to consume air, water, and food" (Albus In Roco & Bainbridge, 2002, p. 291).
In fact, from the transhumanist standpoint, not only do all of human beings suffer, but most of them barely endure their biological and intellectual limitations. In addition to this, most people deal poorly with their lack of control of emotions, health, longevity, etc. Thus suffering—which can be felt as much by individuals living with a disease or a handicap, as by healthy or well individuals—serves to justify the development of a panoply of technological devices. According to their point of view, the contemporary body is inadequate or even unfit; individuals will remain disabled as long as they abstain from optimization technology and/or from fusing themselves with machines.
Despite the strong linking of the informational and reprogrammable facets, we state that all three dimensions of the body reinforce each other. They significantly form altogether the ideal-typical contemporary body. A body that would be seen as only obsolete and informational would not justify its transformation; not more than a body which would be considered perfectible and informational. In the same way, a body perceived as perfectible and obsolete could allow suggesting some enhancement but not the exclusive use of NBIC means.
Discussion
This threefold representation of the body legitimizes the transhumanists' plan of action (i.e. improving physical, intellectual, sensorial, or emotional human capacities) as an anthropological necessity. In their view, the improvement of the human condition calls for a controlled techno-biological mutation through hybridization with the machine. They believe that the body is particularly "unadapted" to their vision of a better future. Thus, once adopted by transhumanist researchers, the possibilities of NBIC are given a peremptory tone. This actively contributes to promoting the posthuman or the cyborg (an individual transformed to be more robust and intelligent), to improving its senses and emotional states, and extending longevity.
The imperative need for progress
The ultimate goal of releasing the human from the limits of its biology, of freeing him from the "bondage to a mortal body" (Moravec, 1988, p. 4), is at the core of transhumanist discourse. This prospect is generally presented as contributing to the increase of individual freedom and self-determination. Many authors advocate peremptorily for human enhancement since, according to them, the future of humanity is at stake. Resultantly, the editors of the NBIC Report claim that "The success of this convergent technologies priority area is essential to the future of humanity" (Roco & Bainbridge, 2002, p. xiii). Correlatively, the robotic engineer Hans Moravec warns us: "If, by some unlikely pact, the whole human race decided to eschew progress, the long-term result would be almost certain extinction" (Moravec, 1988, p. 101). Similarly, molecular biologist Lee Silver asserts that "Extensions that were once unimaginable will become indispensable" (2002, p. 280).
Their project is presented as crucial since, transhumanists say, it will allow [6] the elimination of suffering and disease, the reduction of genetic inequalities, the renewal of natural resources (via self-replicating nano-robots[7]), and the optimization of soldiers' bodies. Also, they believe that their project will avoid us being surpassed by biological or non-biological superintelligence[8]. Thus, they imperatively affirm the technical possibility and necessity of the project. Regarding the body, they insist that if researchers are in a position to do something (i.e. enhance the body), they must do so. This slippery slope between possibility and necessity leads us to address another one of the transhumanist project's key ideas: the primary role of science and technology in the improvement of human life conditions. Of course, science and technology are not (and have never been) the unique way to improve conditions of existence. But in a context of technological utopia (Jonas, 1984), there is a strong temptation to use NBIC tools, especially when they are presented as easy and safe solutions for every problem.
Suffering from difference
According to the World Transhumanist Association, "Transhumanism advocates the well-being of all sentience (whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human animals) and encompasses many principles of modern humanism" (World Transhumanist Association, 2002, online). Indeed, their expressed desire to increase well-being by reducing suffering of any sentient being does refer to the humanistic values of dignity and compassion. However, in the contemporary context, this project is based on a specific definition of both suffering and well-being. In this respect, the sociologist Jessica Cadwallader (2007) discerns the social construction of suffering—its socio-historical contingency—in opposition to well-being provided by the impression of normality: "suffering is a technique of biopower that produces standardization" (Cadwallader, 2007, p. 378). She explains that the majority of biomedical technologies, which aim to alter the body, justify themselves by human suffering, and thus render essential their own development. Similarly, the philosopher Jerome Goffette writes: "If the physician must combat any suffering including an 'existential' one (related to the fact of living), then the suffering linked to a heartbreak, aging and solitude, or even a dissatisfied ambition, should be medicalized, which would be absurd" (Goffette, 2006, p. 103, our translation). The physical, psychological or existential sufferings caused by various forms of disabilities, or deviations from the norm, are also mentioned in our corpus to justify specific needs of body transformations and to legitimize the development of new technologies. Consequently, we find that suffering constitutes a fundamentally political experience:
It functions as part of the disciplinary techniques deployed to produce normal embodied subjects in two major ways (among others): first, it individualises subjects, and reinforces this through making the problem of their suffering their own responsibility; and second, it operates as a motivation for subjects to seek (techniques of) normalisation. (Cadwallader, 2007, p. 389)
In addition, the concept of well-being closely associated to the one of health is itself culturally constructed and varies considerably from one society to another. Although health can be revealed through various parameters (absence of disease, longevity, fertility, physical strength, absence of fatigue), it encompasses a largely subjective dimension. "There is still a problem in determining which ideals people are using to evaluate their happiness, well-being and health" (Izquierdo, 2005, p. 768). Thus, the parameters measuring a population's state of health may statistically indicate an improvement while this population in reality sees a sharp deterioration. In the transhumanists' case, well-being seems associated with self-determination understood as the freedom to change the body, to upgrade and to control the interior as well as eradicating physical and psychological suffering.
Biomedicine: from healing to optimization
For several years, medical sociology and anthropology have examined the biomedical practices of enhancement from both theoretical and empirical points of view. Nowadays, we witness in this field the emergence of work concerning the intensified medicalization of society which consists of alleviating various personal difficulties through medicine and especially medication (Collin, 2007; Rose, 2003). This leads to a continual redefinition of health, well-being and disease, considering that these definitions are socially constructed. That is to say, that once the "cure" is discovered, the state previously held uncomfortable (shyness, failing memory, quirky state of mind, stress, sadness, etc.) becomes slowly but surely redefined in terms of disorder or disability. Biomedical standards specify what it means to be healthy or to be fine, and consequently tend to guide social practices. In this context, individuals may develop "life strategies" (Nova & Rose, 2000) in order to recover or to stay healthy, which in the case of pre-symptomatic diagnoses (i.e. individuals "at risk" of developing a specific disease) may lead to some unforeseen (or perhaps unimaginable) preventive practices.
These new tendencies, which have been considered in certain social science publications, underline the difficulty in our contemporary context to draw a clear border between healing and optimization. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Hastings Center initiated research on these issues in a project entitled On the Prospect of Technologies Aimed at the Enhancement of Human Capacities. Many interesting points were raised concerning the distinction between treatment/optimization. Their main conclusion was that this distinction must be clarified in the medical field and in public health policies, particularly in order to decide what interventions will be covered by insurance companies.
Such a distinction does not make any sense in the view of transhumanists; no matter what the intervention or treatment, they focus on the fact that the body in its present form is inadequate and is always in need of transformation. Put otherwise, this form of discourse constitutes a devaluation of the given body (the body as we know it) paired with a focus on the body as it could possibly become [9] with the help of technologies. In a society where the so-called "cult of performance" reigns, each individual is expected to perform in all spheres of his personal life. Therefore, this sets the scene for the normalization of optimization. In this respect, sociologist Nikolas Rose has defined these "self techniques" as "practices by which individuals seek to improve themselves and their lives and the aspirations and norms that guide them". To this definition, Peter Conrad and Deborah Potter (2004) added "toward a new notion of normality". This allows us to better understand why the demand for various drugs is increasing, the objective being normalcy or "better than well" (Elliot, 2003). Thus the same tool (pharmacological or technological) may have three functions: to restore, standardize and optimize, as Conrad and Potter (2004) have shown in their study on the consumption of human growth hormones.
The concerns underlined by sociologists and ethicists, in regard to the social impact of body optimization, are numerous. The main concern was the question of social inequalities: people with the needed financial resources will have easier access to enhancement technologies, which would therefore characterize their use as elitist. A technique diminishing the hours of sleep needed or enhancing memory would provide the user a leap ahead of his competitor. Paradoxically, as Dan W. Brook (1998) has emphasized, if access to these technologies became universal, we would be confronted by what he calls a "self-defeating enhancement": the competitive advantage conferred by the technology would be significantly altered as it spread across the population. Another concern is what Margaret Olivia Little (1998) calls the complicity with inappropriate or harmful norms. Her study on plastic surgery shows that the choice of using these technologies in order to decrease suffering is in fact subject to strong social constraints as well as it feeds these same constraints. In other words, although the suffering felt by individuals can be quite real, the technologies are sometimes the origin of the suffering which they supposedly alleviate, i.e. they reinforce a "suspect" normative system. Choosing to modify our body is not in this respect a mode of individuation but a consequence of social constraints.
Other work concerns the issue of authenticity, such as those of the psychiatrist Peter Kramer (1994), who coined the term "psychopharmacology cosmetics" to identify the use of drugs, such as Prozac, which are not limited to curing, and which in some cases cause harmful effects to personality. He clinically observed that the consumption of such medication transforms the identity of people who, step by step, begin to "feel like themselves" only under medication. Since treatments have generally a limited duration period, these patients feel they are no longer themselves as soon as the treatments stop. They request a new prescription, even if they are no longer in a state of clinical depression.
Expecting to become somebody else (someone younger, more intelligent, more stable emotionally) by technical means, in addition to avoiding all forms of introspection, may produce important changes in the subjective experience and perception of the world. These questions will become more pertinent if permanent interventions—such as genetic engineering or neuro-morphic prostheses—are made available.
Conclusion
In the name of individual freedom and self-determination, understood here as the right to control and/or optimize the body in order to eliminate suffering, the transhumanists promote an axiological project which depends on the tripartite representation of the body. Firstly, suggesting the body is informational and technologically perfectible (i.e., re-programmable) allows the researchers to assert the feasibility (real or potential) of the project. Secondly, the idea of obsolescence or maladjustment (that produces suffering) is used to promote the project's necessity. In fact, individual suffering—regardless of its origin (sickness, injuries, gaps with social standards, limitations) and the form it takes (physical, psychological, or existential)—is used to legitimize what transhumanists recommend as technological "solutions."
The optimization project raises many social concerns, such as the role of technologies in the improvement of the human conditions, the social construction of suffering and well-being, the development of new biomedical norms and practices, the likely production of new inequalities, the authenticity in the identity construction, the body surveillance and comparison, etc. We believe these concerns need to be better enunciated by the promoters of transhumanism. Otherwise, increasingly we will hear the well-known spontaneous phrase "Why not?" from individuals questioned "Why should we optimize human capacities?"
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Footnotes:
[1] In one of the primary transhumanist documents, entitled Transhumanist Frequently Asked Questions (Bostrom 2003), are gathered the "Technologies and Projections" in seven categories: 1.biotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cells, and cloning, 2. molecular nanotechnology, 3. superintelligence, 4. virtual reality, 5. cryonics, 6. uploading and 7. singularity.
[2] To the question "Do you believe that people have a right to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives?", 95% of the 760 transhumanists interrogated answered "yes" (Hughes 2008).
[3] These texts come from a list of readings suggested by the WTA (http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/
listmania/fullview/236CCPTLZ9XIP?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0).
[4] In order to analyze this corpus we did a first reading and then built categories of analysis (coding) concerning the various aptitudes (intellectual, reproductive, physical, sensitive, emotive, etc.). We observed the definitions, the arguments and the tools suggested as well as the discursive style correlated to these topics.
[5] Needless to say that not all the contributors to the various articles constituting this report are transhumanists. However, since the editor William Sims Bainbridge shows himself as a transhumanist, since most of the articles advocate enhancing human traits, and since the report is widely used by transhumanists to promote their project, we have decided to include it in our corpus.
[6] Despite the dubious feasibility (according to transhumanists themselves) of many tools proposed, an affirmative tone is often used when the possible repercussions are presented (projective mode).
[7] See the section about nanotechnologies in the Transhumanist FAQ (Bostrom 2003).
[8] See the sections about singularity and superintelligence in the Transhumanist FAQ (Bostrom 2003).
[9] We showed elsewhere the objectives aimed by the transhumanists: having a more robust body, becoming more intelligent, modulating senses and emotions, and living longer (Robitaille, 2008).
Contributor:
Michèle Robitaille
University of Montreal
Canada
Email: michele.robitaille@umontreal.ca
Author Bio:
Michèle Robitaille is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology working in the laboratories UMR 7043 Culture & Society in Europe (Strasbourg) and Medication as Social Object (Montreal). She is interested in issues relating to biomedicine, social representations of the body and technosciences in enhancing human capacities.
Acknowledgements:
I thank Sylvie Martin for her help in preparing this manuscript.
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