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With everything else that's happening in the world today, debates about whether humanity should embrace as yet nonexistent technologies that could enhance our physical and intellectual abilities and someday make us "more than human" may seem frivolous.
Nonetheless, a debate on "transhumanism" has been going on for a few years, with naysayers and doomsayers on one side, optimistic futurists on the other, and too little in between.
Writing in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (a conservative think tank best known for championing the cause of "intelligent design"), falls squarely on the naysayers' side. Smith discusses a symposium, "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights," held at Stanford Law School in May, and does not like what he sees.
Some speakers are obsessed with achieving immortality, others with lifting animals to a human level of intelligence. Some talk about changing human biology so that women could have babies without any male input and men could become biological mothers by gestating fetuses inside their bodies. Still others speak with praise of...
Nonetheless, a debate on "transhumanism" has been going on for a few years, with naysayers and doomsayers on one side, optimistic futurists on the other, and too little in between.
Writing in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (a conservative think tank best known for championing the cause of "intelligent design"), falls squarely on the naysayers' side. Smith discusses a symposium, "Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights," held at Stanford Law School in May, and does not like what he sees.
Some speakers are obsessed with achieving immortality, others with lifting animals to a human level of intelligence. Some talk about changing human biology so that women could have babies without any male input and men could become biological mothers by gestating fetuses inside their bodies. Still others speak with praise of...