58. Cyborg Ethics (with Dr. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner)

Tent Talks

This is an episode from UMass Boston’s ‘Ethics in Action’ Podcast mini-series on brain-computer interfaces that I currently co-host with sociologist and bioethicist James Hughes. In this episode, we are joined by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Dr. Sorgner is a philosophy professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Director and Co-Founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), and Editor-in-Chief and Founder of the Journal of Posthuman Studies. Dr. Sorgner is well known for his work on transhumanism, Nietzsche, philosophy of music, and ethics of emerging technologies, and is the author of many books, including most recently We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism and Philosophy of Posthuman Art. In this episode, we discuss several aspects of Dr. Sorgner’s wide-ranging work, including Nietzschean philosophy and its connection to transhumanism, Sorgner’s concept of metahumanism and how it differs from transhumanism and posthumanism, his cyborg thesis, his critique of traditional utopianism, the differing data collection models in the U.S., China, and the EU, his critique of the EU’s GDPR privacy laws, and his proposal for government-managed anonymized medical data collection to enhance technological competitiveness and support universal healthcare, among other topics.