I have been thinking for a while now that it's time for American pop culture to banish for good non-engineered biological humans from the future unless it's within a subspecies context. While we are in banishing mode, we might as well get rid of the popular assumption that visiting aliens are non-engineered entities.
Most people, including many UFO buffs, still assume that ET is a natural biological being like humans are today except millions or maybe billions of years more evolved than us. Apparently, from discussions, cloning is the limit of their breeding technology. Most people also assume that humans will not be engineered even hundreds of years from now. Part of misconception is the result of popular media such as Sci Fi television and movies.
In Star Trek The Next Generation for example, Geordi La Forge only had his visor interface going into his head. The visor itself was external. To be fair, I need to note that in a later Star Trek TNG movie, they internalized the visor technology. The point, however, is that cyborgs such as Geordi and Luke Skywalker (post amputated arm) remain the exception rather than the norm in film. We can see the tide turning with movies such as I Robot which depict a rapidly evolving future (Singularity?) where cyborgs are beginning to blend seamlessly but this is a representation of a transhuman future not a posthuman future.
Other shows such as Battlestar Galactica, although incorporating strong AI, still manages to keep humans and technology separate (that was until the Cylons and humans started have sexual relations.) The Matrix, while depicting cyborgs as the norm due to the Matrix energy harvest and breeding program, also does not depict a posthuman future. The closest movie I can recall that had the possibility of a posthuman future was the movie AI but even this movie may actually depict a dark future because in the end there are no humans post or otherwise mentioned, only benevolent AI.
The other part of the misconception of a posthuman future is that it's probably too difficult to visualize and even harder still to connect with on a human level. Posthumans may just be too alien for us to understand even in our imaginings of the future.
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2 comments:
Have you ever watched "Stargate SG-1"? There were a number of interesting H+ themes in this series...in particular a species called the Asgard whose members, rather than reproducing sexually, continuously "upload" themselves and then re-download themselves into new cloned bodies. The character members of this species are many thousands of years old (or at least, their minds are).
In response to Annec, I agree that there are examples of non-human characters who could represent what a posthuman future might be like such as in Star Gate SG1. The point I am trying to make, besides the assumption about visiting aliens, is that it's usually a non human character that presents this type of future with only very rare exception posthumans represented. The movie Lawnmower Man is the only example that comes to mind and not a very good one at that.
I would really like to see posthumans represented.
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