The Night of Outward Thinking Overstrengthening of Human Capabilities through Science Late 20th to early 21st century

The Night of Outward Thinking Overstrengthening of Human Capabilities through Science Late 20th to early 21st century

The post-World War II world was underpinned by the conviction that science and technology would reduce human suffering and constraints. Medical advances pushed down the threat of infectious diseases, industrial technology enriched life, and information technology sped up intellectual work. During the Cold War, military and research were linked, and ideas with prediction, control, and communication at their core spread into society. Here, science became not just a tool, but the foundation on which nations and corporations designed their futures.

In this trend, the expansion of human capabilities changed qualitatively from assistance to enhancement. Muscle power was delegated to machines, senses were amplified by measuring devices, and memory and computation were transferred to computers. The prospect of accelerating growth in semiconductor density embedded the improvement of computing performance in society as a long-term trend, pushing the augmentation of human intellectual activity with external devices in a natural direction.

Eventually the question shifts not to the degree of enhancement but to the consequences of enhancement. When intelligence begins to be treated as a function generated and operated externally, rather than as a quality within the human being, intelligence can be separated from the human being. Even when humans think they are making decisions, important selection, recommendation, and optimization are done ahead of time on the part of the mechanism. What happens here is not an inversion of the relationship between human and machine, but a reorganization of human action through the externalization of intelligence.

A representative example of this turning point as an idea is Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. The book speaks of the possibility that anthropocentrism will be shaken and data and mechanisms will move to the center of decision-making in the process of humanity's goal of immortality, happiness, and divinity. It can be read as a warning that technological progress does not always translate directly into increased human dignity and freedom.

An important historical background at the time was the long-lasting atmosphere of technology as a good thing. The success story of high growth combined with the competitive pressures of the Cold War and the efficiency of the marketplace fixed the value of being fast, big, and accurate. The human side is optimized to match those values. Staggering, slowness, and ambiguity are considered inefficient, and the depth of emotion and experience is more easily treated as error. Herein lies the paradox: the more extreme the enhancement of intelligence, the more the conditions that have supported human nature are whittled away.

The over-enhancement of human capabilities by science asks not how far we can go, but what we can leave behind. The more intelligence is transferred externally, the more convenience is gained, but the tensions that have supported responsibility, the touch of meaning, and the finitude of life are diminished. What is needed is not to stop technology, but to verbalize its purpose and create a joint halt so that technology does not replace human purpose. Where do we place the conditions for humans to remain human? That is the biggest turning point that surfaced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.