Human because of technology (yet, myself because of me)

What we learn even from ancient Western culture is that humans are definitely human because of technology as what distinguishes them most. Thus, what we should ask ourselves as philosophers is not if we are human because of technology, but to what extent our human identity coincides with our technological capability and, if they do not coincide, to what extent the latter can exceed at least partly the former. As a case in point, I propose to use something extreme, i.e. our attempt to technologically defeat our death: several biotechnology companies and publications share the objective of not dying. The basic idea is to think of death not as a metaphysical issue, but as an engineering problem, which, precisely as an engineering problem, can be (technologically) solved. But, even though it is true that being human means having the constitutive drive to transcend one’s own being human, and that human technological capability is the most used to do it, the question is if we have alternative ways of transcending our own being human that may even be more valuable than our technological capability to engineer death. I will argue in the affirmative by proposing to think of our capability to face our death by being existentially responsible for it as essential for the definition of our identity. In other words, I will argue that human identity can exceed technological capability – which means that humans, both individually and socially, can, and even should, decide to what extent the former can exceed the latter, especially at a time when the primary objective of technology seems to be the defeat of ageing and death as the removal of time from human identity.