Engineered humans

In what follows, I shall focus on what may be defined as the engineering of humans from a philosophical perspective. More precisely, I shall reflect upon the way in which our language increasingly changes when we define our relationship with emerging technologies, specifically human digital twins, which, as our technological replica, can serve as privileged standpoints to try to understand the meaning of the shift from using distinguishable words to define humans and technologies (for instance, when we happen to talk about our health in terms of self-perception) to using indistinguishable words to define humans and technologies (for instance, when we happen to talk about our health in terms of human digital twins’ diagnoses and prognoses). The change of our language shows a kind of optimisation that is taken to the extreme, starting with the optimisation of human bodies’ performances: the more engineered humans are (in that they identify their purpose not with feeling good, for instance, but with preforming in faster and more profitable ways), the better they are (in that they measure themselves not against typically human values, such as feeling good, for instance, but against typically engineering values, such as efficiency). But a remarkable paradox emerges, whose meaning shall be the core of my philosophical reflection: the more humans work on optimising themselves, the more they (paradoxically) work on moving optimisation from themselves, i.e. their capabilities as autonomous humans (starting with self-perception), to technologies, i.e. ways of engineering, specifically automating, themselves.