Staying human in the 21st century : thinking beyond human enhancement technologies inside the body

The debate on human enhancement has focused so far on invasive biomedical technologies that work inside the body. To fully address the question of what does it mean to be human in the 21st century, we should also pay attention to a broad range of technologies that work outside the body, but still impact the bodily, mental, and social performance of human beings, and also raise all kinds of ethical issues. We should include in the debate, therefore, all kinds of ‘intimate technologies’, that is, technologies inside us (like cochlear implants or DBS), close to us (like EEG neuromodulation), between us (like social media), technologies that have a lot of information about us (huge databases), and technologies like us (for example, robots and smart environments).