I feel bad because for a whole week I didn’t read any of the library books. I only felt like reading them when I knew I would be able to sit down for at least two hours at a time. I finally got around to continue reading Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology by Daniel Dinello.
Right now I am done reading the first chapter "Technology is God." I found it really fascinating and scary that technology and religion could eventually be combined to form some sort of principle for enhancing life: eventually everyone will replace their organic bodies with artificially created ones, and leave their biological selves behind. I read about the “Extropians”, who are people who believe in enhancing life through “technological expansion,” as Dinello explainds. I guess being limited to living less than 100 years in the nature-given organic body is undesirable.
Why do people want to live forever?
This book is pretty heavy reading. I mean, it’s great, and eventually I might buy a copy for myself so I can re-read it if I need to. But it gets depressing because it makes me think about my own mortality. I am 25 and I still have so much to live for, but I know I’m not going to live forever. I’m even afraid of my life being cut short by a gun shot or a car crash. Will my parents still be alive in a time where hearts can rebuild themselves or an artificial brain can send signals to the body to stop the process of aging, or reverse it?
I am writing about these thoughts because I always believed that there is a life after death, an afterlife stage. But perhaps another form of afterlife is life after having a biological body. Afterlife could now mean becoming a robot, the human brain being put into a mechanical body. Is that “cyborganization”, or would this person still be a robot? Is humanity still there?
I will have to review my notes and read more of this book carefully, of course.
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