The conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics  is a traditional professional event organized by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering UWB. The 25th edition will take place in 2024. The conference is an opportunity for Ph.D. students to share not only the results of their creative and pedagogical activities but also to establish contact with their closest colleagues who share not only close technical problems but also the corresponding concerns. The conference is thus a unique opportunity to meet students, their supervisors, and the whole academic community.

Biological limits to human technological progress

Mgr. Lukáš Friedl, Ph.D. (ICArEHB)
Department of Anthropology
Faculty of Arts, University of West Bohemia

Abstract:
The accelerating technological progress of humankind gives the impression that we are breaking down even those boundaries that until recently seemed unbreakable. For example, advances in medicine are addressing a range of individual and population health problems, we are attempting more sustained breakthroughs into space and the settlement of other space objects, or we are exploring even the most extreme conditions of life on our planet. However, technology not only addresses ways of achieving things but also removes the limitations that arise from our biological nature, resulting from millions of years of evolution of the primate order and then the hominin order, our own lineage. In my talk, I will point out several limitations to human progress by human biology that will be technologically intractable, or if so, at the cost of significant impacts on the quality of life.

Short-bio:
Lukáš Friedl studied anthropology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of ZČU and subsequently obtained his PhD at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA. He is a head and assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Anthropology, ZČU. His research focuses mainly on paleoanthropology by studying the functional morphology of long bones of limbs of ancestral humans and recent humans. He is currently involved in two projects from South Africa (research on Homo naledi from the Rising Star site and fossil finds from the U.W. 105 cave site) and one from Sudan (subsistence strategies. Mesolithic populations from Jebel Sabaloka). He has also been researching the Middle and Early Palaeolithic transition in Europe, specifically the transition between the last Neanderthals and early European H. sapiens, through long-term archaeological research at the Lapa do Picareiro site in central Portugal.