Catching up on the latest Horizon over lunch (cosmology, love it!), I heard one of the scientists explain that physics is clever stuff because, as well as using it’s equations to predict how things will turn out in the future, you can also use them to look back and see how things must have been in the past.

Well, as above, so below, so to speak. Understanding human behavior can work both ways too, except we tend to look at the past to understand how things may play out in the future.

While we were at BristolCon, our local expert on Transhumanism, David Roden, was in Dublin at a conference on the future of humanity. The slides from his presentation and an overview of the argument are available here (I love the “Cylon evolution” picture).

David’s core argument is that it is very hard to understand how we will react to post-human beings until we actually encounter some and can interact with them. He has a point. After all, they can come in all shapes and sizes and levels of friendliness. We really don’t know what we’ll get (only that they will appear in the not too distant future).

But, as I tried to point out at the Steve Fuller event last week, we have been through periods of time in which not all humans were deemed human. The definition of fully “human” was pretty much restricted to “white, male, able-bodied, cis and straight”. That’s why I was excited to see this book review, covering What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present
by Joanna Bourke. It sounds like a good read, it may help us deal with the situation we have now, where social attitudes are only slowly catching up with science as to what “human” means, and it could provide useful pointers for the challenges to come when genetic tweaking of our offspring becomes commonplace.