Category Archives: Quotes

“If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” – N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

“Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn’t it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?” – David Pearce

“We have human rights, civil rights, cyber rights, but where are human responsibilities, civil responsibilities, and cyber responsibilities?” – Kevin Kelly

“Technology isn’t what makes us ‘post-human’ or ‘transhuman’, as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.” – Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

“Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn’t been left to its own devices. A hundred years ago a certain Dior was dictating fashions in clothing. Today this sort of regulating has embraced all walks of life. If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn’t want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescoping breasts, angel’s wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step?” – Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

“The fashionable ideology that “artificial” lacks the inherent goodness of “natural” is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also “makes” things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself.

What we call “natural” is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the “nano” technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of “natural” versus “unnatural”, blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between “machine” and “organism”, “natural” and “unnatural”, “God-given” and “man-made”. Syd Mead – artist, futurist, illustrator, and conceptual designer

“We worry too much about a world where robots replace us. It seems like the bigger opportunity and solution to that problem is to use robots to make each and every one of us better at the work that we do.” Mitch Joel, Don’t Be Afraid of the Robots

“Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.” – John Cage, M: Writings ’67-’72