Brad Allenby is at it again, and thank goodness for him and for his ability to prod people out of their cognitive comfort zones in a time of astonishing change.
He has posted an article on Slate in advance of a meeting planned for Thursday in Washington on the question, “Is Our Techno-Human Marriage in Need of Counseling?” The gathering is part of a collaboration by Slate, the New America Foundation and Arizona State University, where Allenby, a professor of engineering and ethics, teaches and thinks about the human path in this century and beyond.
In his Slate piece, Allenby largely draws on ideas he has conveyed in “The Techno-Human Condition,” a valuable book co-authored with his colleague Daniel Sarewitz. The Slate piece is part of a planned three-way virtual conversation that began earlier today with the blogging bioethicist Kyle Munkittrick proclaiming, “Gentlemen, start your exobrains,” as he took the first stab at defining issues arising with “the convergence of human beings and technology.” Coming next is a piece from Nicholas Agar, an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and author of Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement and other books.
Some of you may have watched (or read the transcript from) a mind-bending onstage conversation I had with Allenby earlier this year:
Wrigley Lecture Series – Andy Revkin and Braden Allenby from Sustainability @ ASU on Vimeo.
If you missed it, I encourage you to dive in. Here’s one of my favorite Allenby lines:
If you think about the world of the past, it was humans changing the world for their benefit. Now you have a situation where that arrow goes both ways. Humans may be changing the world, but we can also start to redesign ourselves in deliberate ways. [Full transcript.]
In the meantime, here’s a provocative extract from Allenby’s riff in Slate:
We’ve always had technologies that restructured society, culture, economies, and psychology—the steam engine did, railroads did, cars did, airplanes did, and search engines that increasingly substitute for memory do. But depending on how you count, we have five foundational technologies now—nanotech, biotech, robotics, information and communication tech, and applied cognitive science—all of which are not only evolving in interesting and unpredictable ways; they are actually accelerating in their evolution. Moreover, they’re doing that against the backdrop of a world in which systems we’ve always framed as “natural”—the climate, the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, biology and biodiversity, and others—are increasingly products of human intervention, intentional or not. We are terraforming everything, from our planet to one another … and it’s all connected, of course.
Critically for our purposes, the human being is more and more becoming a design space.