When reading the chapter of the book Perfecting Human
Futures I have isolated about 30 key quotes. They will help you better understand the information contained in this book.
1) Religious or secular, humanity’s dreams of the future have always been posthuman.
2) Transcending the human condition is partly about physical escape from death and other chafing limits on human abilities, such as forgetfulness, pain, and disability, but transcendence also has a salvationary appeal.
3) The plasticity and expansiveness of information and the internet of things seem to render ineffectual
and obsolete the imagined iron cages of an earlier generation.
4) Indeed, the high-modernism of the 1950s was at its core an escapist vision, albeit one of collective rather than individual transcendence.
5) Social progress, moreover, was yoked to progress in science and technology, as if (despite Hiroshima and
the Holocaust) the two could not be disentangled.
6) In a virtuous economic system, efficiency meant allowing more people to do the things
they wanted to do, in less time, at less cost, with less friction and less waste.
7) If “big” and “built” were common themes in the mantra of high-modern posthumanism, not everyone bought in, even in the decades of greatest postwar optimism.
8)First, the atomic bomb. This terrifying technology, which initiated the nuclear age, the Cold War, and the superpowers’ unbridled arms race, exposed deep fissures in the very idea of progress, even though atom-splitting was at first conceived as the ultimate weapon against totalitarian terror and eventually reconceived as an instrument of peace.
9) The disaster stands as a powerful reminder that the effectiveness of a technology crucially depends on its social supports and that transferring the material components of technological systems without their social foundations can lead to terrible consequences.
10) On a much smaller scale, and with no tragic consequences for human life, the Biosphere 2 project also illustrates the triumph of ecology, human and natural, over a planning mentality that sought to produce a self-sufficient machine for human and planetary survival.
11) Tellingly for today’s posthuman visionaries, psychological strains on the participants proved even more disruptive than physical ones, and the once single-minded team splintered into two groups unable even to speak to one other.
12) Sociotechnical imaginaries have been defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order, attainable through and supportive of advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015).
13)The framework of sociotechnical imaginaries allows us to think about the deep structures of society in ways that make visible ordinarily invisible connections among the material, the social, and the normative.
14)The nation’s future depends on satisfying its energy needs without sacrificing its economic and social well-being.
15)Indeed, unlike both Germany and the United States, South Korea has become an exporter of nuclear plants and expertise to other nations seeking to enter the club of nuclear power production
17) The atoms for peace program privatized power generation, but the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 provided insurance cover to shield the private sector against catastrophic risk.
18) Protest efforts by antinuclear citizens have had little policy impact.
19) Summing up, we can say that political stakes in each country arise from different understandings of which future needs to be governed: the future of technology in the United States, of state-society relations in Germany, and of national competitiveness in South Korea.
20) As the world’s first mover toward nuclearity, the United States has notably fallen short in the effort to build national unity around the imaginary of atoms for peace.
21) What can we say, however, about posthuman imaginings in an era when technologies of future making—through the convergence of nano, bio, info, and cognotechnologies—seem more decentralized, more amenable to personal agency and choice, and far less subject to state control than nuclear power?
22) Yet, sociotechnically mediated behavioral spaces, such as real or virtual polling places, or indeed sidewalks crowded with texting teenagers unconscious of pedestrian traffic around them, apparently fall outside conventional imaginaries of the posthuman.
23) Legal institutions likewise do not feature prominently in discussions of posthumanism, except perhaps in the form of a presumed “law lag” that erects unreasonable obstacles against the achievement of technologically assisted transcendence.
24) But enhancing their cognitive capacity without attending to moral self-governance allowed their id, or uncontrollably evil self, to acquire disproportionate strength; with no superego to control them, their hubris ensured their annihilation.
25) The visioneering of the information age is not attuned to building a robust collective—a coherent “we”—for whom posthumanism makes sense as a moral or political commitment.
26) The right to imagine is, after all, a common human right, and empirical work on lay understandings and aspirations of transcendence can bring to the fore deeper visions of the public good than the prolific statements of a few vanguard visioneers.
27) That story raises questions about equality and inequality in a company where the female CEO demands that people must show up at the workplace, not work from home, but where few other mothers have the clout to order their nurseries to be placed next to their offices
28) Army’s ban on wearing his religion’s mandated beard and turban points to a way of mediating between private faith and the secular public sphere different from the strict separation mandated by the rationalizing instincts of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military.
29) These signals from the complex real world suggest that, as scholars and citizens, we need to resurrect all of the tried-and-true discourses of humanism if we want to figure out what kinds of humans we should be.
30) Law offers the frameworks of human rights and the rule of law, along with critiques of those ideas when they become tools of governance rather than simply aspirational goals
31) The human-animal distinction, for example, carries one set of resonances in a religious context that sees the human as created in God’s image and an altogether different set in a culture of more than a billion people in which a trans-species, elephant-headed deity embodies the divine stewardship of human well-being.
Source: Perfecting Human Futures book
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