Escape Velocity 2017

Are humans more than the sum of their parts, or are they merely organic machines, as philosophers from antiquity on have suggested? Today, new innovations in science and technology provide new ways to interrogate this question, even as they continue to raise it. On the one hand, increasingly advanced prosthetics, neural interfaces (such as Elon Musk’s recently-announced Neuralink), and other enhancements allow us to go beyond the limitations of our human bodies. On the other hand, machine intelligence now rivals, and even supersedes, humans in everything from game-playing strategies to driving and facial recognition, suggesting that we’re moving closer to the holy grail of creating an artificial sentient being. These innovations pose the ultimate question: what does it mean to be human? More specifically, (how) do our physical bodies define us and shape our humanity, and how might we retain that humanity as we change, or even transcend, those bodies?