{"id":94299,"date":"2019-07-31T11:04:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T18:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/years-and-years-transhumanist-character-bethany-shows-the-conundrum-of-merging-human-and-machine"},"modified":"2019-07-31T11:04:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T18:04:00","slug":"years-and-years-transhumanist-character-bethany-shows-the-conundrum-of-merging-human-and-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/years-and-years-transhumanist-character-bethany-shows-the-conundrum-of-merging-human-and-machine","title":{"rendered":"Years and Years\u2019 transhumanist character Bethany shows the conundrum of merging human and machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/years-and-years-transhumanist-character-bethany-shows-the-conundrum-of-merging-human-and-machine.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the premiere of the HBO\/BBC miniseries <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hbo.com\/years-and-years\"><em>Years and Years<\/em><\/a>, two parents are worried. Their teenage daughter Bethany has been hiding behind a 3D animated emoji mask and has scheduled a talk with them. Trying to figure out what they\u2019re up against, they sneak a peek at her internet searches. When they discover that she\u2019s been searching for information about being trans, they\u2019re relieved; they can handle a transgender child.<\/p>\n<p>Except when it comes time for their talk, Bethany tells her parents she\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/whatistranshumanism.org\/\">transhuman<\/a> and that she wants to \u201clive forever as information.\u201d The show represents <a href=\"https:\/\/humanityplus.org\/philosophy\/transhumanist-declaration\/\">transhumanist<\/a> technology and aspirations, many of which revolve around upgrading and digitizing the human body, as a movement that will bring positive, negative, and downright confusing implications, ultimately changing the human race. The real question is what exactly that means. Humans opened the Pandora\u2019s box of merging technology and biology a long time ago, and we\u2019re now speeding head-on into the consequences, despite not knowing what humanity will become.<\/p>\n<p>Bethany\u2019s \u201ccoming out\u201d scene hinges on the fact that the changes she desires are far more dangerous\u2014and, for her parents, far more difficult to stomach\u2014than gender reassignment. Bethany\u2019s excitement at escaping the mortal coil brims with typical teenage na\u00efvet\u00e9: \u201cTranshumans are not male or female, but better,\u201d she tells her parents. For Bethany, that means no longer being human. \u201cI will be data!\u201d she enthuses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the premiere of the HBO\/BBC miniseries Years and Years, two parents are worried. Their teenage daughter Bethany has been hiding behind a 3D animated emoji mask and has scheduled a talk with them. Trying to figure out what they\u2019re up against, they sneak a peek at her internet searches. When they discover that she\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,418,269,1501],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-internet","category-life-extension","category-transhumanism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}