The Posthuman

I've been researching about what it is to be Post-human and the relationship between man and machine. I've read a few scholarly journals and chose a few good quotes from what i have read.

Wolf, Tom, “Mcluhan’s New World.” The Wilson Quarterly 28, No. 2 (2004) : 18-25.

Evolution used to be measured in units of at least100,000 years. But computer scientist DannyHillis wrote in Wired magazine that thanks to "telephony, computers,and CD-ROMs," today "evolution takes place in microseconds."

God was directing, in this very moment, the 20th century, the evolution of man into a noosphere – that was teilhard de Charding’s coinage, a noosphere – a unification of all nervous systems, all human souls through technology.

Teilhard de Charding died in 1955, when television had only recently come into widespread use and the microchip had not even been invented. Computers were huge machines, big as a suburban living room, that were not yet in assembly-line production. But he was already writing about “the extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of ‘etherised’ human consciousness and of “those astonishing electronic computers which enhance the ‘speed of thought’ and pave the way for a revolution in the spere of research.” This technology was creating a “nervous system for humanity,” he wrote, “a single, organized, unbroken membrane over the earth,” a “stupendous thinking machin.” “the age of civilization has ended, and that of one civilization” – he underlined “one civilization” – “is beginning.”

Hughes, James, Nick Bostrum, Jonathan Moreno, “Human vs Posthuman.” The Hastings Center Report 37, no. 5 (2007) : 4-7.

Having the opportunity to be come posthuman canbe good for us in much the same way that
it is good for an infant to have the op- portunityto matureinto an adult.

Hayles, Katherine N. “Refiguring the Posthuman.” Comparative Literature Studies 41, No. 3 (2004) : 311-316.

MarkPoster's"TheInformativeEmpire,"delivered as a keynote addressat the 2003 conference of the American Comparative Literature Association,coins the neologism"humachinet" to mark" an intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject/Objectbinary.

Poster's and Satos arguments converge in implying that information technologies are powerfully affecting contemporary subject formations, moving them away from autonomous individuals and toward posthuman collectivities of humans and intelligent machines.

It is too soon to say where these en- gagements will end. Perhaps the only clear conclusions are that the future of humans will increasingly be entangled with intelligent machines, and that embodiments will still matter in some sense, however virtual or cyborgian they become.

Posthumans are likely to be as complex and diverse, as historically and culturally specific as humans have been. What- ever the future, we can be sure that it will not be simple.