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CNS Seminar on Science Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Future of the Human Species |
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April 27, 2009 |
The UCSB Center for Nanotechnology in Society invites you to attend its upcoming seminar featuring
Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University
"The Jetsons Fallacy: Science Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Future of the Human Species"
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Thursday, April 30
11 am - noon
Elings 1601
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Abstract:
Science fiction films and novels often present us with remarkably imaginative visions of the future. In this talk I argue that all the most popular and influential versions of such sci-fi visions – movies like Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, AI, Spiderman, and Iron Man – systematically mislead us in one important respect: they depict a future in which technology becomes very sophisticated, but most humans remain basically the same as they are today. This is unrealistic, I argue, because today’s major trends in biotechnology suggest that a very different kind of world actually awaits our children and grandchildren. Over the next half century, entire populations of humans will increasingly use pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, and genetic interventions to enhance their physical and mental capabilities. We are on the cusp of an era in which human beings will apply science and technology to the redesign of their own bodies and minds. In this sense, therefore, the actual creations of technoscience today are already exceeding the imaginative reach of the “futuristic” stories we tell ourselves. It is time for mainstream science fiction to take its head out of the sand and face up to the transmogrified future that probably awaits humankind.
------ Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History, is a specialist in twentieth-century Europe, with a particular interest in the social and cultural impacts of technological change. Bess has received fellowships or grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Institutes of Health / National Human Genome Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright research grants program, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Bess received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, and has been teaching at Vanderbilt ever since, where he has garnered several teaching awards. He is the author of three books: Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006); The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize (2004) of the American Society for Environmental History and an Honorable Mention (2004) from the Pinkney Prize committee of the Society for French Historical Studies; and Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945-1989 (1993).
He is currently writing a research monograph entitled Icarus 2.0: Technology, Ethics, and the Quest to Build a Better Human.
----------------------------------- For further information on the seminar, please contact Anna Davison (adavison@cns.ucsb.edu).
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Center for Nanotechnology in Society
UC Santa Barbara
www.cns.ucsb.edu
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Last Updated ( June 16, 2009 )
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