Not only that <- - FROM HERE YOUR CONTENT!> Social Freezing shows: technology permeates our lives in a way that can scare us. Will we one day all be cyborgs? by Günter Hack

technology

The actor Richard Eden on the set of the series “Robocop” | © Reuters

Frozen oocytes, sponsored by the Mega Group. Gadgets that are coming closer to the body of their users, quantify their fitness and pass any motion at the Secret Service. The news from the presence of spread once again the musty smell of used future. Unlike their predecessors from the space age technology visions of the nineties have the unpleasant tendency to can be translated into reality. So we have the lunar base, do not get the spaceships and the mass-produced flying cars of the sixties science fiction today. But a proper cyberpunk dystopia in which deliver hackers, crackers, corrupt mega-corporations and megalomaniac secret the final battle for the last resource, it has just passed.

In this climate, the people met outside the circle of power each new innovation as a tool of an overpowering enemy. Technology for permanent irritation, spreading the fear of disgrace, even the terror, before you retire. This movement is dangerous, it forces its subjects in a subjects thinking in which there no longer exists the possibility of a liberating and self-determined use of technology only.

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A fearful retreat of the art is not an option. He must not take place: Even in the most vulgar cyberpunk scenario puts a realistic chance for a better future. Anyone can learn to deal with the irritation and unreasonable demands by new technological developments offensive in its own way.

is a writer and a doctorate in communication studies. He lives and works in Vienna

In addition to the Cyber ​​Punk Proto-Internet culture from the mid-eighties had yet another central figure offers. Cyborg. In the film, admitted Robocop on, on television, there was the Borg from Star Trek , in the art scene the performer Stelarc, at the University of the Cyborg Manifesto U.S. biologist Donna Haraway. Mounted to the plastic panels of Poptrash from Cyborg from, as a basic framework remains a concept left, which has a long tradition and with the can think and work well even today, and be it that the role of the cyborg is about dons only playful.

Donna Haraway responded with her feminist essay on the cyborgs on a template from the military-industrial complex of the United States. The psychologist Nathan S. Kline and his colleague Manfred E. Clynes had the essay Cyborgs and Space published in September 1960 in the Journal Astronautics . In it, they defined the term for the first time and proposed to make the human body with specific implants fit for life in outer space.

This new astronauts should be self-regulating human-machine systems, cybernetic organisms, cyborgs just in order to better focus on their tasks. As an example of one of the first true cyborg Clynes and Kline came forth an experimental rat that could be given for laboratory work with an osmotic pump drugs. They imagined, that people should be provided on implants with the proper performance enhancing substance at the right time.

Kline and Clynes saw from the right and Haraway from the left side of the political spectrum opportunities in the delimitation of human body through technology. Particularly heavily inspired by this movement of thought felt sure, libertarians like Roboticist Hans Moravec, the philosopher Max More, or mathematician Marvin Minsky, whose efforts can be summarized under the term transhumanism. Also they want to overcome the limits of the human individual through technical measures.

In the environment of transhumanism and the organization Alcor is situate, a nonprofit foundation that is striving since 1971 to freeze people who want to revive after her death by advanced medical methods of the future leave. Only $ 200,000 will cost the procedure, plus a $ 590 annual fee for the parking space in the parking garage body. Forget the eggs of Facebook employees. Why companies should not be frozen their genius founder? You could later times need to support the market price or back and again give presentations of important products, living time capsules, in a sense, incarnations of the vision of a large middle class that works without descendants.