Nov 19, 2017 06:03 PM
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...ow-s-world
EXCERPT: [...] Though some claimed to have benefited from them, none of these techniques was based on what would now be regarded as sound science. But the goals these therapies pursued have not been abandoned – far from it. Today the conquest of life includes the abolition of death, with figures such as Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, envisioning technologies that would upload human minds into cyberspace, severing them from their biology and making them immortal. Rather than fashioning “a race of super-men”, these visionaries dream of designing a post-human species.
At the same time there are many who fear the human consequences of technological advance. Artificial intelligence might have no interest in the wellbeing or the survival of humans. The march of robots could leave the majority of human beings redundant in the productive process. Genetic engineering could be used not only to eradicate inherited diseases but also to manufacture killers and sex slaves. Virtual reality technology could spawn soulless phantoms that might yet have human-like emotions, and suffer and rebel against their condition. At the heart of both Blade Runner films, such techno-dystopian visions pervade popular entertainment.
Ever since the mid-19th century, when it came to be believed that technology would shape the human future, the prospect has divided modern culture. In this thorough, compendious and learned survey, Peter J Bowler, emeritus professor of the history of science at Queen’s University Belfast, examines how divergent beliefs about the future have shaped literature, science writing and public perceptions over the first two thirds of the 20th century. Covering city living, automation, work and leisure, transport, aviation, space travel, war, energy and the environment, and transformations in human nature, A History of the Future is an encyclopaedic account of the ways in which “the optimistic and pessimistic visions of a technologically-rich future have always run side by side”....
MORE: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...ow-s-world
EXCERPT: [...] Though some claimed to have benefited from them, none of these techniques was based on what would now be regarded as sound science. But the goals these therapies pursued have not been abandoned – far from it. Today the conquest of life includes the abolition of death, with figures such as Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, envisioning technologies that would upload human minds into cyberspace, severing them from their biology and making them immortal. Rather than fashioning “a race of super-men”, these visionaries dream of designing a post-human species.
At the same time there are many who fear the human consequences of technological advance. Artificial intelligence might have no interest in the wellbeing or the survival of humans. The march of robots could leave the majority of human beings redundant in the productive process. Genetic engineering could be used not only to eradicate inherited diseases but also to manufacture killers and sex slaves. Virtual reality technology could spawn soulless phantoms that might yet have human-like emotions, and suffer and rebel against their condition. At the heart of both Blade Runner films, such techno-dystopian visions pervade popular entertainment.
Ever since the mid-19th century, when it came to be believed that technology would shape the human future, the prospect has divided modern culture. In this thorough, compendious and learned survey, Peter J Bowler, emeritus professor of the history of science at Queen’s University Belfast, examines how divergent beliefs about the future have shaped literature, science writing and public perceptions over the first two thirds of the 20th century. Covering city living, automation, work and leisure, transport, aviation, space travel, war, energy and the environment, and transformations in human nature, A History of the Future is an encyclopaedic account of the ways in which “the optimistic and pessimistic visions of a technologically-rich future have always run side by side”....
MORE: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...ow-s-world
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