The Transhumanist Movement

The fast development and proliferation of technology raises multiple and various questions that led to the reconsideration of the traditional concepts of human nature, dignity and freedom. By starting from the Transhumanist project, the present essay discusses the grade of freedom and privacy reduction that such technological progress involves. Nevertheless, the possibilities of surveillance and control over individuals. The first section of the article analyses the some of the risks implied in the Transhumanist movement focusing on its negative outcomes. The second section describes the current post-digital environmental situation with special attention to the issues concerning the risk of privacy and freedom loss. The successive section focuses

This morphological transformation is strongly promoted by a current new academic movement called “Transhumanism”. Transhumanism, as Nick Bostrom outlines in his article “Transhumanist Ethics” , is an international, intellectual, and fast-growing movement that advocates the voluntary use of technology to enhance human capacities. The extremely fast progress of technology and the consequences that result from it, raises several questions, often related to the problematic topic of defining the human essence. The questions of “what it means to be human” and “what human dignity is” have always been at the centre of philosophical speculations. The concept of human dignity forms indeed the foundation of our ideas about human rights. What it means to be human and the associated concept of human dignity are indeed central to any reconsideration of our traditional notions of nature and the human body. The transhumanist Nick Bostrom argues that it is not possible to give a fixed definition of the human essence because the meaning of being human is in constant flux seen as a “work in progress” . Given that, according to transhumanists, we cannot define any boundaries for what is supposed to be human and so we cannot transgress these boundaries and therefore cite human essence for rule against the human

Several government agencies are investing enormous resources in this field for surveillance, security and military purposes. In 2002, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology received $50 million federal grant to found the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) to conduct scientific researches into nanotechnology for needs of US soldiers. This kind of technological and scientific innovations are presented to citizens as necessary and indispensable developments, with the promise of revolutionary benefits for the entire population. Rather, my argument is that such projects enable “hyper-individualized control and commodification of life functions. (..) Control intensifies and spreads by means of informatizing corporeal systems and then linking those systems to larger networks for goals of capital accumulation, military intervention, or identity regulation.” Body-monitoring systems and products transform human bodies into “physiological data” or “lifestyle information” , which in turn can be read as points within interrelated social networks predisposed to control activities. The bodies are translated into data-networks with the possibility of analysing and controlling individual behaviour and generating profit. Nanotechnology developments offer resources for potential somatic