augmented
life and death as a cyborg
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- 予約注文
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- リリース予定日：2026年3月10日
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- ¥3,000
発行者による作品情報
A provocative rethinking of the intersection of death, technology, and disability, for a better life.
We are all cyborgs, relying on technology—whether it’s Alexa, a pacemaker, or a titanium knee—for our quotidian existence. In our deep connection to a technological world, from robots to augmented and virtual realities, metaverses, and gaming, Candi Cann sees an opportunity, and good reason, to question our ideas about accessibility and inclusion. In augmented, she asks us to reconsider traditional notions of biology and death.
Having relied on hearing aids from the age of four, Cann uses her experience to challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions about technologies and their role in life—and death. She also focuses on what it means that most of us are living longer with the intervention of medical technologies, and how a better understanding of our relationship to technology will grant us greater control as we age. Drawing on her life experience in Asia, the author explains how cultural and religious views of machines and artificial intelligence vary globally—in particular, how a Western fear of machines contrasts with an animistic worldview that can see machines as conduits of care for others, embedding spiritual possibilities.
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"Technological innovation creates systemic and long-lasting shifts across society, and while we may be skeptical" of AI and other cutting-edge innovations, "we can no longer afford to look the other way" when it comes to their cultural impacts, Baylor University religious studies professor Cann (Dying to Eat) argues in this thought-provoking study. Cann posits that everything from hearing aids and titanium knees to smartwatches qualifies as "augmentations" that make humans into part-machine "cyborgs." Drawing on her own travels, she theorizes that the West fears innovative technology due to cultural ideas about human exceptionalism, while East Asian countries embrace technological advancement because they respect robots as "soul-possible or soul-different." She surveys a range of current and possible future technologies for augmenting human life, along the way spotlighting how disability "has often been a driving force behind.... technological innovations." Cann's notion that technology often serves as an extension of the body is apt, but her optimism about those extensions can feel too easy. While she acknowledges that digital technologies like AI can serve to reinforce human bias, she doesn't touch on AI's mental health or environmental concerns. "Being part machine might, in fact, make us more human, not less," Cann asserts, but readers will be left wondering if that's necessarily a good thing. This doesn't always persuade, but it still offers intriguing fodder for debate.
