Jul 15. 2021

E-tika podcast – Transhumanism

Season 2, Episode 3 – Transhumanism is a school of thought that has long since grown out of the obscure of academic cabinets. Today, we can consider it not only as a philosophical movement, but also as a stream of activism corresponding to specific goals, visions and procedures towards the development and improvement of human beings.

Transhumanism has many shades, but they are united by the effort to make our existence more bearable. To achieve this goal, it proposes to use various cultural, social, and especially technological tools, of which biotechnology, medical technology and artificial intelligence are probably the most inflected. In today’s episode you will learn:

  • Whether, according to transhumanists, moral improvement of man is also possible.
  • Why is it not a good idea to solve our emotional problems with biochemical accelerators.
  • From the point of view of transhumanism, what is the relationship between artificial intelligence and man.
  • Whether we should strive for life after life by technological means.

Our guest is Martin Farbák. Martin works as a doctoral student at the Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy at Comenius University in Bratislava. In his research he deals with current issues of transhumanism and its visions of biochemical improvement of man. His stimulus to study was his personal experience of working with mentally handicapped people and finding the answer to the question of what is human nature.

The podcast is in Slovak.

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You can read the English summary of the episode here.

About E-tika podcast

Digital and information technologies improve and simplify our lives. But they also raise new societal issues and challenges. We should discriminate between  the solutions that are technically possible and that are morally  good. Sometimes  we release a technology and only then we discover its effects on people and the society. But that may be too late. In the E-tika podcast we discuss with our guests the social and ethical dimensions of  digital technologies .

The E-tika podcast is produced by the multimedia center for contemporary culture, Nástupište 1-12, in cooperation with the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies. The project was supported from public funds by the “Fond na podporu umenia” fund.

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