Davide Sisto: I confini dell'umano
Philosophy

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The Boundaries of Human Nature

Technology, nature, species


ISBN: 9788815383341
publisher: il Mulino
year: 2023
pages: 200

 

Humans change, because humans are history. And we now have to decide what we want to become.
The technological revolution is making our world an extraordinary laboratory of the future, albeit one fraught with risks. For the first time, it is the very form of the human — its limits and boundaries — that is becoming the object of a transformation that shifts the evolutionary path of our species from the history of nature to the history of intelligence, making its next steps merely a result of our choices.
Davide Sisto recounts this turning point in a sharp and courageous book that proves right those who have said that “we are here because things have yet to happen,” and that all our past will soon be reduced “to no more than prehistory.”

From the first chapter
«Never before have Arthur C. Clarke’s three famous laws of prediction sounded as familiar as they do today. The author of the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) established them, in 1962, to define the limits within which to place developments in the future: “1) When a distinguished but senior scientist claims that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he claims that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong; 2) the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture just beyond them, into the impossible; 3) any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”»

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