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From: Academe Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Friday,
December 20, 2002
A glance at the fall issue of The Hedgehog Review: How technology
is changing being a human
The concept of "human" is being radically challenged by such biotechnologies
as the Human Genome Project, stem-cell research, and cloning, as well
as such computer technologies as artificial intelligence, virtual reality,
and robotics, say the editors of a special issue, "Technology and the
Human Person." They write: "Whether utopian or apocalyptic, these visions
boil down to differing degrees of admiration and fear, awe and uncertainty."
Modern technologies, they suggest, are making it more difficult to determine
"what is unique to the human person and deserving of protection and what
is negotiable." In one article, Langdon Winner, a professor of political
science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, analyzes what he calls "the
obtuse arrogance of posthumanist rhetoric" -- the claims of self-proclaimed
"prophets of perfectibility" who assert that the outcome of technological
changes will be an "entirely new creature, one variously named metaman,
posthuman, superhuman, robot, or cyborg." Such advocates, says Mr. Winner,
blithely posit a future "thoroughly sanitized of human beings and their
debilities," claiming that new technologies will be able to forge such
changes as the downloading of humans' minds to "new thinking technology."
They even presume to claim that such developments were "foreordained"
by evolution itself.
Among other essays in the issue is an interview with Francis Fukuyama,author
of "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution"
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002); an essay by Gilbert Meilaender, a
professor of Christian ethics at Valparaiso University, who argues that
thinking of genes as building blocks to be combined and manipulated at
will distorts the higher-order meaning of being human; and an essay by
Lori B. Andrews, a distinguished professor of law at the Illinois Institute
of Technology, who discusses legal and ethical issues raised by new reproductive
technologies -- such as how notions of family are changing. She concludes:
"The genetic choices are unlike other parental choices because they impact
us all. Consequently, no individual couple, clinic, company, or nation
should be able to decide to proceed without a full, informed, societywide
debate on these issues."
The articles are not yet online, but information about the journal can
be found at http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehog.html.
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