There seems to be a tension between two aspects of transhumanist philosophy: (i) Technology is, in Kurzweil’s words, “inevitable”; or, as Mike Treder recently said in an email to me, “it’s a virtual impossibility to prevent the development of molecular manufacturing (MM).” Thus, transhumanists appear to espouse something like Langdon Winner’s notion of “autonomous technology” with respect to the development of technology as a whole. On the other hand, though, (ii) transhumanists argue that the negative consequences of current and future technologies are tractable — technologies are, according to their view, more-or-less neutral objects. In other words, while the technological enterprise is out-of-human-control, the individual technologies are in-human-control.

The website specified above is for a paper I recently wrote criticizing transhumanism partly from an anthropological perspective. If you’re interested, read it. Oh, and lastly: Excellent post — I think transhumanism needs more historical perspective, which the Global Spiral edition did not provide (although Don Ihde’s paper was, in my opinion, brilliant as always).

Some of the relevant issues are rather far from my own expertise, but I can note that the corn example provides a fruitful point of articulation for several anthropological sub-fields and for connecting early 20th century anthropologies with early 21st century ones. Archaeologists and paleoethnobotanists have devoted massive amounts of work to corn domestication, of course, but there is also work on its relationship to social complexity, shifts in human health, and social change/collapse in parts of Native North America. (The archaeology of the “Mississippian” period in the Southerast, for instance.) Corn permeates every aspect of life among the Native peoples of the Southeastern U.S. with whom I work as an ethnographer and they themselves have had to recalibrate their heritage cultures with the ubiquity of corn products in the contemporary world (and the human diet). They, for instance, have ceremonies and food taboos associated with the “new” corn crop. How might one know if the corn syrup in the “maple” syrup on the breakfast table was made with last year’s corn crop (safe) or this years (unsafe until one is ceremonially purified)? (One cannot eat the new corn crop (marked by the local first harvest) until one goes through a communal ceremony.) How does one think about the ubiquity of corn when one’s people’s sacred narratives account for its revelation to your people at the beginning of time? What does GMO contamination mean for ancestral heirloom varieties that are at the center of one’s religious life? The corn conundrums are never ending and deserve further ethnography building on work already accomplished.

I find your argument for work across this broad field very compelling. Thanks.