Posthuman

1. Transhuman or posthuman?
2. Transhumanist dreams: The Man-Machine
3. Cyborgs among us
4. The extended body
5. The Singularity
6. Thinking like humans
7. Get real

Recommended Readings/Viewings

• [none]

Additional resources on transhumanism and the Singularity

• h+ Magazine
• KurzweilAI.net
• Popper, Ben (2012) "Cyborg America: Inside the strange new world of basement biohackers," The Verge, August 8, 2012

Key concepts, people, etc

• Uncanny Valley
  The uneasy experience a person can have when they see something (such as a humanoid robot or a stylized rotoscoped animation) that seems almost human, but not
• Cyborg vs robot
  A robot is a machine; a cyborg is an organism that has been modified with machine additions, such as an artificial leg
• Body modding
  Changing your body for aesthetic or self-expression reasons (mainly), especially with new technology (such as prosthetic horns or implanted mood jewelry)
• Transhumanism
  The movement that looks to how we are changing from natural animals to a new form of being not confined to what our evolution under Natural Selection has made possible
• The Singularity
  A moment in the near future when artificial intelligence is "more powerful and complex" than any human intelligence - we can't accurately imagine what the outcomes of this moment will be

References

• Bakker, R. Scott (2014) "The Asimov Illusion"
• Perrigo, Billy and Tharin Pillay (2025) "‘Time Is Running Out’: New Open Letter Calls for Ban on Superintelligent AI Development"
• Colman, Flynn (2019) "We can’t just regulate — we must teach our AIs value"
• Carr, Nicholas (2010) The Shallows.  New York: Norton.
• Dyson, Freeman (1997) "Can science be ethical?" The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997.
• Dyson, Freeman (2007) "Our Biotech Future" The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007.
• Fomen, Herve-Victor (2018) "Can Artificial Intelligence become emotional?"
• Harari, Yuval Noah (2018) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. London: Jonathan Cape.
• Harari, Yuval Noah (2020) "The Politics of Consciousness" (Nov 22, 2022)
• Hawking, Stephen, et al. (2014) "Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?" The Independent, May 1, 2014.
• Hruska, Joel (2013) "Intel’s former chief architect: Moore’s law will be dead within a decade"
• Klein, Naomi (2023) "AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are"
• McKenzie, Sheena (2013) "Snake arms and crystal legs: Artificial limbs push boundaries of art" CNN April 25, 2013.
• Mueller, John Paul (2018) Artificial Intelligence for Dummies. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich (1885) Thus Spake Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1954.
• Robinson, Frank S. (2013) "The Human Future: Upgrade or Replacement?" The Humanist 27 June 2013.
• Tong, Ziya (2019) The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape our World. Allen Lane.
• Tyson, Neil deGrasse (2022) "Interview with Ray Kurzweil" (Nov 22, 2022)
• Žižek, Slovoj. (n.d) "No Sex, Please, We're Post-Human!"