Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Citizen Cyborg Makes Some Noise

Friend, colleague, comrade, socialist-feminist bioethicist, radical democrat, and techno-utopian James Hughes has a fabulous interview up on Neo Files with RU Sirius. Read it all, but here's a snippet or two:

Our growing freedom in our sexual and reproductive decision-making, and the slow progress in drug legalization, are closely related to the transhumanist value of bodily autonomy. A hundred years ago, Americans needed a prescription to use condoms, alcohol was illegal 80 years ago, and abortion was only legalized thirty years ago. [There are of course versions of the story of substance criminalization over the last American century that seem rather less rosy than this one, but the point is still well taken.--d] Increasingly this radicalization of individual liberty has become a part of international human rights discourse, with the spread, for instance, of the right to informed consent in medicine. Transhumanism seeks to push our understanding of medical rights beyond the right to refuse treatments to the right of access to safe, beneficial enhancement treatments.

Another closely related trend is the spread of liberal democracy within and among nations. We have a long way to go in the construction of democratic transnational institutions that can effectively address the threats to global security and inequality that threaten a safe, united transhuman future. But transhumanists take the long view. All the questions we have today in addressing the digital divide or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will become ever more pressing when we face the genetic enhancement divide and the proliferation of basement nano labs and AI research. It unfortunately looks like it will take some dramatic, even catastrophic, events to tip international opinion in favor of the kind of institutions we need, but the US subversion of the UN arms inspection process and other global institutions have made it increasingly clear that the unilateral alternatives are unattractive and counterproductive.


His most recent BetterHumans column is pretty darn good, too. James is very eager to take up the "transhumanist" label for himself and use it to carve out powerfully progressive social and political and cultural strategies, while I will remain deeply leery of the term myself until I'm much clearer about just what it finally actually seems to be settling into meaning. I mean, for now, there are some pretty breathtakingly right-wing temperaments who use that term to name themselves, too, and I simply can't see the connection between their "techno-radicalism" (which often seems like a disavowal of politics via corporate futurist hype) and James Hughes's and my own sense that technological development is a space of social struggle and will be emancipatory only if it is regulated to ensure that costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared. But, labels aside, his perspective is smart, committed, and endlessly provocative. Can't wait for his book to come out. Definitely check him out.

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