Your Posthumanism Is Boring Me

Posthumanity... will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.

That’s because augmentation - the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow - is intrinsic to what it means to be human. Thrown weapons expanded the range of our strength; control of fire allowed us to see in the dark; written words expanded the duration of our memories. If these all sound utterly primitive and unworthy of comment, try to imagine what it would have been like to be without them - and to find yourself competing against others equipped with them. The last hundred thousand years has been the slow history of the process of augmentation.

Jamais Cascio discusses why the posthuman future will always be in the future. It strikes me that a lot of technology is like this, not only the technology we fear, such as human augmentation, but the technology we eagerly anticipate as well. The iPad has been talked about in awed whispers for over a year, and now that it's here? Is it just me or is it a lot less exciting than it was a month ago. And in a few months? It will be your everyday. Just like the iPhone is now.