What Does It Mean to Be Human?

What does it mean to be human? What makes who we are? What drives us? Could it be the desire of becoming better, faster, and stronger, perhaps? All throughout history, humans have been known to have advanced in their respective eras through planning and their own advancements in technology. Technology is one of the many things that people in the 21st century debate about, whether it’s good or bad, or even neutral. Why do so many disagree with the idea of becoming better through the advances in technology? The main the topic of becoming something more, something post-human, revolves around the “luddites” (artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested technology by destroying it) believe we’re “playing God.” What does it even mean to play God? Technology has taken us very far indeed, but we haven’t made anything so uncanny that will surely match God himself. If anything, we’ve been doing exactly what’s in our nature: grow, expand, nurture ourselves, and evolve. We can only do as much as the environment allows us; we only make what we can with what we have. The advances in technology today are just our own way of reaching another step in our evolutionary cycle, and we shall continue to move forward. We shall reach another step in human evolution, whether it’s mentally or physically; we know that we’ll be holding technology’s hand for now and forever more, because as it is, we’ve become dependent of it. Should we fear our future endeavors within the technological age? I’m ready to move up to a new level in my evolution, whether I’m wired in circuitry, a cyborg, or fully mechanical; it’s time to let go of those fears, of those demons holding us back. Our limits are only set by our own standards, our own hands, so if we keep moving forward, then our limit is not what the kind of humans we’re now, but ‘transhumanism.’

I always imagined achieving what could be deemed as the impossible as a child: becoming something more, something great… To my surprise, I