A posthuman is a human descendant who has been augmented to such a degree as to be no longer a human.
As a posthuman, your physical abilities will far surpass those of any unaugmented human. Your body will not be susceptible to disease and it will not deteriorate with age, giving you indefinite youth and vigor.
Posthumans could be completely synthetic (based on artificial intelligence) or they could be the result of many partial augmentations made to a biological human. Some posthumans may even find it advantageous to get rid of their bodies altogether and live as information patterns on large super-fast computer networks. MORE
"Imagine your thoughts not merely accelerated but moving forward by immense jumps. Imagine how it might be if your feelings, your deepest emotions, were enhanced, your gifts of communication transcended as lavishly as an animal's grunts were transcended by speech and writing. It is an extraordinary prospect."
(from "The Spike" by Damian Broderick)
It is sometimes said that it is impossible for us humans to envisage what it will be like to be a posthuman. They may have aspirations and activities that we can’t even begin to fathom, much as an ape could never hope to understand the complexities of a human life.
While it may be true that we can't hope to conceive of everything a posthuman will think, feel, and experience, we do have one huge advantage over the befuddled ape: we possess the power of imagination. So let's begin by considering a few of the potential options we might have for our physical bodies.
The possibilities begin with perfecting your current body; they also include being able to customize your body any way you choose and to mutate between body styles at will; your posthuman body can certainly be inhuman in shape or design and it can also be partly or completely artificial. Among the most extreme concepts we can currently imagine is a body that is entirely virtual and not corporeal at all, or a physical identity that is composed of a collection of bodies in various forms. You and I may become posthuman, but it is not at all clear that by then we will in any way resemble ourselves today.
At what age were you the happiest with your body? Imagine being able to inhabit the body you had at 20, or 30—or whatever age you choose—for as long as you want. Imagine combining the strength, stamina, muscle tone and flexibility of a young person with the wisdom, maturity, grace and confidence of age. Imagine your body always being in perfect health and in perfect physical condition.
This is the promise of biotechnology and nanomedicine: to be forever free of illness, disease, and physical disability; forever youthful and vigorous; free to do whatever you want with your life, liberated from the constraints of ill health and physical frailty.
Now imagine having the option to change your body, to make a few corrections here or there. Perhaps you wish your legs were a little longer, your shoulders a bit broader, your waist somewhat narrower. (As for myself, I'd prefer to have a less prominent nose and a thicker head of hair.) This can all be done—your physical dimensions can easily be modified to your specifications.
But what about other choices, such as a completely different face? It is easy to imagine a day when you will be able to select any face you want, perhaps from a virtual catalog. You may even choose to design your own new face from scratch. This raises some interesting questions, though: Will you still think of yourself as you when you look in the mirror and see someone else's face? How does your physical appearance affect your experience of personal identity?
Uh-oh, now you've done it. You've gone and changed your face, and you hate the way you look. That's no problem, just change it back to the way it was before, or change it to something else completely different.
Perhaps you've decided to pursue a new career, and it would be easier to be successful if you were shorter, or taller, or if you had infrared vision. You might want to have a laser implanted in your finger for a few years (controlled directly by your mind, of course) and then choose to have it removed at a later date. You might even decide to try living as a member of the opposite sex for a while, just for the experience.
How will all these fantastic bodily changes be accomplished? Certainly not with the old-fashioned, clumsy, barbaric butchering of late 20th century plastic surgery. No knives will be needed and no blood will be shed; the work will be carried out by tiny machines no larger than a human cell, many much smaller. These procedures will be painless, although they may require you to be unconscious for a few minutes or a few hours, depending upon the extent of your desired modifications.
The technology underlying cell repair systems will allow people to change their bodies in ways that range from the trivial to the amazing to the bizarre. Such changes have few obvious limits.
Eric Drexler, Nanotechnology Researcher
You and I have always lived in a world where the bodies we were born with were pretty much what we were stuck with. That's all about to change.
Who says you have to settle for a traditional human body plan or normal human parts? Why not grow wings, so you can fly? Or gills, so you can swim underwater for hours at a time? If you happen to live in a weightless environment—let's say working in the asteroid belt—it might make sense to have a body with very short legs, or one with no legs at all. Maybe you'd rather have four arms!
Some people may shed human form as a caterpillar transforms itself to take to the air; others may bring plain humanity to a new perfection.
Eric Drexler, Nanotechnology Researcher
The possibilities will be nearly unlimited. Remember, you are no longer human. You are a posthuman.
The body you currently inhabit, however beautiful and wondrous it may be, is not the product of intelligent design. It was not created for any purpose other than survival and reproduction.
We are conditioned, of course, by social and biological forces, to favor the appearance of the human form, to be attracted by its outlines and contours. It is a natural reaction—although not necessarily a rational one—for us to be repelled by any substantial deviation from the standard model. That's why most of us cringe (at least inwardly) at the sight of a person with a disfigured face or missing limbs. It also explains why many people are repelled by the thought of replacing the natural human body with one of artificial design and creation.
And yet, why not? The body we were given by nature is the result of millions of years of meandering and directionless change. It is the product of a tortuous, cumbersome, slow and dumb process called evolution.
The human body was not designed for our optimum enjoyment and benefit; it got to be the way it is now basically by accident. Nature, given its leeway, would continue to blindly experiment with us. Following the random cues of genetic mutation, our bodies would slowly evolve, gradually becoming something different.
But we humans are highly intelligent creatures. We have reached the point where we can take the future development of our bodies into our own hands. Using our minds and the marvelous tools we are now making, we can produce a new form—or many new forms—for the body. We can design to suit our own purposes and preferences.
What form will you design for yourself? When you have become a self-programming and self-constituting posthuman, when you can throw away the mold and start anew, what kind of body will you choose to inhabit? And, by the way, how will your radically new physical form affect your experience of personal identity?
In the past, engineers developing new prototypes for aircraft, automobiles, or ocean liners would create scale models and then evaluate the performance of their concepts in wind tunnels or other testing media. Modern engineers find it easier, cheaper, and more effective to do the same type of testing in simulated environments. Using powerful computers and highly sophisticated software programs, they can learn precisely how their creations will perform under a variety of conditions.
As a way of experimenting with possible new designs for your posthuman body, you will likely do the same thing. Instead of going to the trouble of building your new body molecule by molecule and then determining whether it is satisfactory, you can create a simulation in a virtual reality environment and test it there. Of course, the exciting difference is that you will not be limited to observing the simulation as are today's engineers. Rather, you will be able to inhabit your virtual body and know firsthand how it will react, perform, and feel.
The next step is obvious. If the simulation is powerful enough, the experience of occupying the simulated body should be indistinguishable from conventional physical reality; it will be virtually the same—hence the name virtual reality. Then why not just live there? Assuming you can have all the experiences of the "real" world—plus many more that you could never have here—and that you will still be able to see and touch and interact with the people you love, why not just stay?
It seems likely that millions, if not billions, will make just that choice. Does this sound like science fiction? Perhaps so, but current trends in computing technology suggest that this could become a reality within as little as 20 or 30 years from now.
If one body is good, why not have two? If two is good, why not three or four or five? Why not five hundred or five million?
Certainly this concept stretches the bounds of credulity, but then that's what this website is all about: exploring the limits of where emerging—and rapidly advancing—technologies might take us.
Imagine for a moment inhabiting multiple bodies—not merely having a variety of bodies to choose from, like suits of clothes in a closet—but being in many different bodies at the same time. One of the bodies might be the one you were born with; others might be duplicates or clones; some could be substantially different, perhaps designed to fit a specific environment; a majority of them will probably be robot bodies or virtual bodies.
What will be your experience of personal identity when your consciousness is spread over many different substrates? Will you still be you? Will you choose to maintain, as much as possible, simultaneous awareness in all the bodies at once? Or will it be preferable to allow your bodies to function autonomously with an occasional, perhaps daily, synchronization of your experiences and realignment of your identity? STORY
What would happen if for any reason you were unable to communicate with or synchronize with some of your bodies for an extended period? Would they change into someone else? Would it still be possible to reintegrate them after much time has passed?
Marvelous questions are these. If Socrates or Shakespeare or Sartre were still around to examine them, they would doubtless be as fascinated with the possibilities as we are.
Maybe you could ask them. It is conceivable that in the future we will be able to simulate the personalities of people from the past—whether celebrities, historical figures, or loved ones—and relate directly with them. It is also possible that you might (with their permission, of course) choose to integrate one or more of these identities into your own.
You may also someday accept the invitation to become part of a meta-being by subsuming your identity (or maybe a copy of your identity) into theirs. Some have speculated that the long-term evolution of posthumans must follow this pathway into integrated immortal super-beings. MORE
Whatever happens, it is clear that the future will be much stranger—and far more wonderful—than we have heretofore imagined.
In our most imaginative fantasies, we cannot anticipate all the extraordinary possibilities of the future for us humans and whatever creatures come after us. The wildest speculations of today may be the facts of tomorrow, and our human potential is not only greater than we think but greater than we can think.
Edward Cornish, President of the World Future Society
