ABSTRACT
The topic of human enhancement has gained traction across media: including scientific journals, popular magazines, TED talks, or science fiction. Bioethical debates on the subject of enhancement have ended in a stalemate (Zemlicka), which is why we need new ways to approach it. This paper focuses on representations of biomedical and technological enhancements in contemporary culture because it assumes that cultural texts actively shape the discourse on human enhancement on a global level. It considers the depiction of enhancement in TED talks, which is a famous platform for the dissemination and popularization of scientific knowledge (Cassidy et al.). It argues that transhumanist TED talks (Bostrom; Kurzweil; Savulescu; Sosa; Vita-More) promote the augmentation of the human by creating a vigilance to wonder. Besides placing the transhumanist rhetoric in an American tradition of self-help, this vigilance to wonder also explains how transhumanists manage the transition from ‘yuck to wow’ (Harris), and it reveals the various ways in which persuasion is achieved via affective responses to images, videos, and statistics. At the same time, this analysis requires from us to remain vigilant towards such calls for ‘self-transcendence’ and their mixture of mystical feeling, scientific wonder, and confessional trust.
