Flawed Humans, or What Makes Technology Better than Humans: Historical Considerations on Humans as ‘Faulty Constructions’

It is said that to be human is to be flawed, limited, and finite; however, the meaning of ‘flawed’ has changed over time. The lecture argues that in the nineteenth century a new conceptual framework for human deficiency emerged that compares humans with technology. This concept became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and still determines discourses on technology today. Unlike philosophical and anthropological theories of man as a deficient creature (Herder, Gehlen), I do not assume that human beings are biologically deficient by ‘nature’; instead, I examine the cultural construction of faultiness in different contexts such as work, mobility, love, and decision-making.