May 25, 2003

‘Today as our machines approach human competence across the board, there is a growing maladjustment between the stone-age biology of man and his complex social role in the fast growing information age... this induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty,’ observes Finn Bowring

SO the improvement of the human species is a possibility which no human being is qualified to fulfil and its pursuit risks the very survival of that possibility itself. But what if the re-engineering of humanity were a necessity, rather than a mere possibility, as some of today’s cyber-enthusiasts maintain?

In the account offered by Kevin Warwick, humans will in the future be living in a world dominated by intelligent and self-replicating machines, a world ‘in which humans, if they still exist, will be subservient’. Theodore Kaczynski, the American ‘Unabomber’, similarly predicted in his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, that our tendency to delegate tasks to evermore sophisticated machines may eventually reach a point ‘at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently’. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

In his heretical essay, “Why the future doesn’t need us”, the respected computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, became the first prominent figure in the world of information technology to share these concerns, acknowledging ‘that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species’.

In the view of Hans Moravec, the mismatch between humane, natural and culturally acquired competencies and their technological environments is already apparent. ‘The world we inhabit is radically different, culturally and physically, from the one to which we adapted biologically.’

Today, as our machines approach human competence across the board, our stone-age biology and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched... As social roles become yet more complex, specialized, and far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to master, while providing fewer visceral rewards. The essential functioning of a technical society eludes the understanding of an increasing fraction of the population... The mismatch between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty.

For cyborg theorists such as Warwick, Kurzweil and Moravec, the solution to humane dwindling control over their environments and the prospect of eventual extinction is to use the technology we have spawned to enhance our powers of thought, reasoning, memory, longevity and action. As Alvin and Heidi Toffler counsel against the Kaczynski-inspired pessimism of Joy:

‘The very technologies they regard as most dangerous — robotics, genetics and nanotech — may very well help us expand the human brain’s capabilities and make it possible for us to use those technologies in completely new ways.’

What is desired by the cyborg enthusiasts is, in effect, the elimination or revision of those features of human existence which, being censored, repressed, harmed and alienated by modern social conditions, lead to disempowerment, frustration and suffering. The elimination of our capacity to suffer is not, however, a satisfactory answer to suffering — or at least not a human one. The human answer to suffering is relief from suffering, which must also suffer the precariousness of this relief and the knowledge of the burden that has been lightened.

Because the elimination of the human capacity to suffer would mean the creation of a post-human being, the goal and beneficiary of this solution cannot be humanity itself. The need for the cyborg, in other words, is not a human need, a need whose satisfaction would reaffirm the essence of humanity.

It is, rather, a technological imperative, for the true purpose of the re-engineering of the human being is the abolition of the obstacles presented by people to the reproduction of machines. As George Dyson candidly describes it, humans have today become ‘bottlenecks’ in the circulation and processing of knowledge and information:

Most of the time, despite the perception of being inundated with information, we will remain out of the loop. Human beings have only limited time and ability to communicate: you can watch television, check your e-mail, and talk on your cellular phone at the same time, but that’s the limit. We are now the bottleneck — able to absorb a limited amount of information while producing even less, from the point of view of machines.

From the point of view of machines, the pedestrian individual is a hindrance, an obstructive inconvenience which must be removed, as Virilio describes it, by the total mobilization and motorization of the person — by the transformation of the person into a prosthesis of the machine. “In the second half of the 21st century,” Kurzweil confidently predicts, “you’ll be able to read a book in a few seconds.”

Will this he an ability or an imperative, one wonders; will we be able to choose a more leisurely read (say a few minutes per book)? Kurzweil’s promise is in any case meaningless. His prescription for a post-human intelligence has no other aim than that of reconciling individuals to ‘the point of view of the machine’: reducing the human subject to quantifiable units of memory and processing power which can be speeded up, magnified, rendered more accurate, efficient, predictable and powerful, but which are incapable of furnishing a sense of purpose or meaning to their existence.

 

Subjectivity and forgetfulness

The necessity of the cyborg is nothing other than the technological imperative, sometimes resisted but increasingly treated as the acceptable price of progress, that humans be modified to function in a world, imagined, sought after or anticipated, which is devoid of human references — a world we can no longer call ‘home’.

We can see this ambition, most pertinently, in the text where the term was originally coined. ‘Cyborgs and Space’, written by two senior American research scientists and published in Astronautics in 1960, was a response to an invitation from NASA to consider ways of modifying human nature ‘to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it’.

In their account of ‘self-regulating man-machine systems’, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline rejected the path of genetic engineering in favour of ‘biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man’s existing modus vivendi’. They proposed instead psychotropic medicine to keep astronauts awake and alert for ‘weeks or even a few months’, prophylactic drugs which would be automatically injected in response to detected radiation, induced hypothermia to reduce energy needs during long journeys, the modification of cardiovascular functioning (either by drugs or electrical stimulation) to suit different environments, and the ‘sterilization of the gastrointestinal tract, plus intravenous or direct intragastric feeding’, to eliminate faecal waste.

‘An inverse fuel cell,’ they add, ‘capable of reducing Co2 to its components with removal of the carbon and recirculation of the oxygen, would eliminate the necessity for lung breathing.’ ‘Solving the many technological problems involved in manned space flight by adapting man to his environment, rather than vice versa,’ they concluded, ‘will not only mark a significant step forward in man’s scientific progress, but may well provide a new and larger dimension for man’s spirit as well.

Can the spirit of humanity be enlarged by its liberation from the natural needs, rhythms and magnitudes of the human body, from its intrinsic vitality, its capacity for self-animation, self-healing and survival? More importantly, what credence can we give to a scientific vision of humankind which does not understand itself, which denies its own rootedness in sensible and ambiguous world, which glorifies the negation of its own conditions of possibility?

To reconcile the human being with the imperatives of an inhuman environment is to make that being a functionary of its environment, and of refusal to change that environment or resist its allure in favour of a familiar, more human world. This refusal of scientists to return human beings, humble but uplifted, to the experienced world in which they truly dwell, is what aligns modern science with the adversaries of the human condition.

The origins of this betrayal lie, as Edmund Husserl wrote in the 1930s, in a scientific project which, by failing to account for its own existence, its groundedness in the vague and fluid typifications of sensory experience, mistakes the results of its formalized method — the idealized reduction of the world to exact, measurable and universally translatable essences — for the world itself:

In this way, the world of our experience is from the beginning interpreted by recourse to an ‘idealization’— but it is no longer seen that this idealization, which leads to the exact space of geometry, to the exact time of physics, to exact causal laws, and which makes us see the world of our experience as being thus determined in itself, is itself the result of a function of cognitive methods, a result based on the data of our immediate experience. This experience in its immediacy knows neither exact space nor objective time and causality.

This original experience, though self-evident and indubitable in its substance, is permeated by mystery and uncertainty, by the inexactitude of its object and by the impossibility of illuminating that inexactitude, of recovering lived experience, in a precise and objective way.

It is from this metaphysical breach at the heart of human existence that positivist science offers an escape, promising a means of understanding the world that no longer has to understand itself — an experience, exemplified in the being of the cyborg, devoid of the unspeakable doubt, the wonder, the incommunicable convictions, that are definitive of the human subject.

Mathematical science of nature is a technical marvel for the purpose of accomplishing inductions whose fruitfulness, probability, exactitude, and calculability could previously not even be suspected. As an accomplishment it is a triumph of the human spirit.

With regard to the rationality of its methods and theories, however it is a thoroughly relative science. It presupposes as data principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten.

The vision of the cyborg emanates from the belief, apparent as much in the physico-computational accounts of human consciousness as in the reduction of life to a universally translatable language of genes, ‘that the infinite totality of what is in general is intrinsically a rational all-encompassing unity that can be mastered, without anything left over, by a corresponding universal science’.

Today this orthodoxy not only permits those who aspire to re-engineer the human being to forget the subject who makes that aspiration possible. It also provides a programme, a manifesto, to make this state of amnesia constitutive of the post-human condition. We should therefore heed Merleau-Ponty’s warning, made before the biotech revolution had cast its fatal spell;

Thinking ‘operationally has become a sort of absolute artificialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines.

If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices... then, since man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.

 

Excerpted with permission from

Science, Seeds and Cyborgs: Biotechnology and the Misappropriation of Life

By Finn Bowring

Verso. Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi Tel: 021-5683026

Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk  Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 1-85984-687-4

338pp. Rs1,450

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