British biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey spoke at Stanford University this week about the prospects for curing aging. His reasoned presentation proved a stark contrast to authors like James Hughes, Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association, who seek to prolong the life of worn-out political ideas.In Citizen Cyborg, Hughes argues that the anti-luddite community needs to embrace a “big tent” leftist agenda in order to convince the majority of people that using technology to go beyond human capacities is acceptable.He calls his idea “democratic transhumanism” and wastes half his book attempting to give new legitimacy to old socialist ideas such as massive redistribution of wealth and government-run health care. While the left is in desperate need of new ideas, adding a few novel twists to tired concepts doesn’t make the grade. That said, however, Citizen Cyborg isn’t a complete wash.Between bouts of Bush-bashing and distortions of classical liberal thinking, Hughes’s book contains a fairly detailed history of academic and non-academic thinking about a “posthuman” future. For instance, readers learn how the term “Cyborg” was coined (through NASA-sponsored research) and receive an extensive list of “who’s who” in both the pro-technology and bioluddite camps.Among the main bioluddite characters is Leon Kass,… Read full this story
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