By Michael S. Burdett

The swift development of expertise has ended in an explosion of speculative theories approximately what the way forward for humankind may perhaps appear like. those "technological futurisms" have arisen from major advances within the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and data know-how and are drawing starting to be scrutiny from the philosophical and theological groups. this article seeks to contextualize the growing to be literature at the cultural, philosophical and spiritual implications of technological progress by means of contemplating technological futurisms resembling transhumanism within the context of the lengthy historic culture of technological dreaming. Michael Burdett lines the latent spiritual assets of our modern technological mind's eye by means of visionary methods to know-how and the long run in seminal technological utopias and technology fiction and attracts on prior theological responses to the technological destiny with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul. Burdett’s argument arrives at a latest Christian reaction to transhumanism established round the subject matters of risk and promise by way of turning to the works of Richard Kearney, Eberhard Jüngel and Jürgen Moltmann. all through, the writer highlights issues of correspondence and divergence among technological futurisms and the Judeo-Christian figuring out of the future.

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The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. London: Penguin, 1999. Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. London: MIT Press, 2006. Pattison, George. Thinking about God in an Age of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Peters, Ted. God—the World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a Postmodern Era. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. ———. ” In H+/–: Transhumanism and Its Critics, edited by Gregory R. Hansell and William Grassie. Philadelphia: Metanexus Institute, 2011.

37 Specifically, Fedorov cites the unbrotherly attitude people have towards one another manifested in wars, working for profit at the expense of one’s fellow man and the general selfishness and individualism rampant during his time. It is the tension between fellow human beings that is most troublesome to Fedorov. The Philosophy of the Common Task is a treatise which presupposes this unbrotherly attitude—especially between the learned and the unlearned. ’38 Fedorov complains that the lofty transcendental writings of German philosophy—especially Kant—do not improve the actual conditions of the world for this philosophy cannot break free from the thinking mind to genuine action.

4 Both aspects of utopia Jameson speaks of are instructive for our consideration of technological utopianism here. This chapter considers technological utopias and creates a specific, but brief history of the technological imagination found in these technological utopias. It follows utopian visionary perspectives which consider technology and its influence on the future. In particular, it focuses on the more overt strand of utopias Jameson suggests above. But, it will become evident that these specific utopias become diffused across a greater cultural zeitgeist in unique social and political movements which are more reminiscent of the second strand of utopia.

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