Disability: misconceptions around human augmentation

With all the useful technological improvements making everyday life easier for people with disabilities, there is certainly every reason to take a positive view. However, it is important to be careful that these precious aids do not end up relativising disability, or even making it invisible and preventing it from receiving the attention it deserves.

The undeniable contributions of technoscience

François Matheron is a French philosopher who suffered a stroke in November 2005. What saved him and allowed him to continue his intellectual work are the tools of modern technoscience. In his book, L’homme qui ne savait plus écrire, (The Man Who No Longer Knew How to Write) the philosopher declares:

« One day, I discovered the existence of machines that allow you to write with your voice, with no other intermediary: all you needed to do was talk, the machine did the rest. I dived into the world of speech recognition; I could write again without actually knowing how to write. I wrote “The Man Who No Longer Knew How to Write” with my device, the result was immediate [...] If I had lived in the time of Althusser, I wouldn’t have been able to write this text, nor any other: I therefore thank the gods, and my parents, for having allowed me to exist nowadays, that is, in a time unknown to Althusser and Benjamin: the times of IT, computers and related technology.»

There are many other technoscientific developments that provide assistance for various disabilities: smartphones for visual impairments, adaptive websites for mental impairments, software to compensate for “dys” impairments such as dyslexia, dysorthographia and dyspraxia. There is software to support children with autism in their development, using fun, educational applications. The boom in the use of digital information systems (the internet and all social and information networks) has had a significant impact in the lives of people who, until now, were physically and psychologically isolated, giving them more possibilities for their bodies and minds.

Beware of the fantasy of eradicating disability

These technological innovations have contributed to relativising the very concept of disability. However, the actual bodily fact of disability can be much less significant than the cultural, technoscientific and social context that generates its disabling effects or provides tools to offset them.

Medical progress is even showing off cases of recoveries that were previously impossible: blindness and deafness are no longer definitive identities in certain cases, but can be “cured” with nanochips, cochlear implants, etc. And we can already imagine that paraplegics may be able to walk again using special exoskeletons. Human augmentation is beginning to make disability disappear.

In the middle of this outpouring of discussion around scientific and technical progress, however, we still need to be wary of the fantasy of definitively eradicating disability by seeking to repair and enhance the body. In transhumanism, suffering, disease, disability and ageing are gradually described as useless and undesirable. In this view, such obsolescence of our species should be brought under control. But there is no real reflection on the human condition, no understanding of the richness that has always been provided to society by facing human vulnerability..

The risk of invisibility

The most serious aspect here seems to be the focus on something other than disability. Stories of technoscience repairing and augmenting bodies are a case of smoke and mirrors, as there are many kinds of disabilities, and those for which no augmentation is possible will be left behind. With their eyes shining from inspiring transhumanist stories, the public will be anaesthetised to the true difficulties of disability. Transhumanism may call for people to be augmented, but philosophy calls rather for a better understanding of humans.

People with disabilities are not suffering from a physical or mental problem, but above all, from a contamination of their sense of identity and a dramatic loss in self-confidence. In life, we are not psychologically isolated, rather, we live in intersubjectivity, i.e. permanently exchanging perspectives and ideas, with awareness of one another. This is the reality that must be addressed.

The greater our impairments, the more spatial and architectural structures can be decisive in preventing, reducing or aggravating them. But in all that, we are still too often focused on the technology, forgetting the importance of interpersonal accessibility.

The struggles described by any person with a disability who finds themselves at a conference or theatre where the lift is “temporarily” out of order should draw our attention to the dangers of tending to make disability invisible via universal technical accessibility. Because, as soon as technology is badly designed or flawed, disability returns with a vengeance in a social model that thought it had resolved the issue.

The fight to reduce disability is therefore in reality an interpersonal fight: through our attitude, each of us can have an impact on increasing or reducing someone’s disability. For this reason, we are calling for disability issues to be demedicalised and detechnicised.

Further reading: Bertrand Quentin, « Les invalidés. Nouvelles réflexions philosophiques sur le handicap », Edition érès, Prix Littré de l’Essai 2019.