Allen Buchanan's Beyond Humanity

This year we have touched on the self and then focused on how technology could jeopardise our existence. Times are changing and so are we; Technology will keep changing us like it has always done throughout history, change does not necessarily mean take over, technology will advance as an extension of us to help us improve not to allow us to reach perfection. To better understand how we relate ourselves to the technology we have nowadays and the technology that we have been exposed to in the past, we first analyze the book “Beyond Humanity” by Allen Buchanan. In this book, Buchanan explain enficices the idea that technological improvements are not new to us, he says “... to enhance human beings is to expand their capabilities- to enable them to do what normal human beings have hitherto not been able to do. Understood in this way, enhancement is ubiquitous in human history.” (Buchanan 38). These enhancements have always played a great role on our biological changes. For example, literature as one of these enhancements allowed us to communicate information more efficiently, it allowed us to store more information than our brains ever could; this came at a cost, because we are able to write down information or communicate it easier, our
They use the idea that the mind is not limited to our brain, the mind extends beyond that, it is affected by our environment, the people we surround ourselves with, and the things we are exposed to. In their essay they use the example of Otto and Inga. Otto uses a notebook to write down and then remember important information that his mind is just not able to store, and Inga uses memory and has faster access to her information. The main point of this story is that Otto’s notebook serves as extension of his mind because he is not limited to just the brain but uses his surroundings (the notebook) to