The Red or the Blue Pill, reflections on a post human city.

In the science fiction film The Matrix ( Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999) the red pill would enable Neo (Keanu Reeves) to escape from a computer generated reality, the blue pill would enable him to stay, but have no knowledge that anything was awry. Of course, Neo swallows the red pill and abruptly finds himself in a liquid-filled pod, his body connected by tubes and cables to a vast mechanical tower containing identical pods. He discovers that his reality has been constructed by machines. A little bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and entering a fantasy realm and drinking the contents of a bottle which made her smaller. Substances almost always change the way you feel about yourself and the world and here in the Matrix as in Wonderland the environment plays a part in the way embodiment is considered. I want to talk about the contrasting environments in The Matrix and the Alice in Wonderland story for they present a vast contrast. One being the highly technological world of computer technologies, the other a changing, but familiar natural landscape filled with various animals. However, both these worlds are populated by shifting boundaries between the human and animal, order and chaos. The rabbit that Alice encounters is humanized to the extent that it is dressed in human clothing and sports a large mechanical pocket watch. The rabbit speaks and as such makes problematic the boundary between humans and animals. When Alice pulls back a curtain to reveal a small door that she cannot enter, we understand that architecture is designed for the body, in other words, buildings are to be traversed by bodies and as such must be accessible to individuals.
So what has this got to do with the post-human and the city?
Well, in order to answer this I want to talk briefly about the flaneur. The nineteenth century French poet, Charles Baudelaire characterized the flaneur as someone who strolls through the city in order to experience it. The flaneur was both observer and participant. Baudelaire imagined in the first instance that the flaneur was a dandy; if you need to picture a dandy, think of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, dressed in suit and vest, carrying an umbrella under his arm and a pocket watch in his hand. Notice the references here to the possibility of changing weather and an emphasis on time. This is like being self-aware whilst being fully immersed in ones surroundings, like Neo and Alice in their perspective surroundings. The flaneur had a particular fascination with street life; they also took of the role of critic in regards to the affect of the city on the individual. As urban observer the street photographer may be perceived as an extension the flaneur, who appeared to have detached aesthetic and attuned observation necessary to be critical of the environment around him(her). Of course it was in this way that the city itself became a spectacle.
So what is this spectacle that the city presents to us? Is it just the buildings, cafes, restaurants, retail shops, juxtaposition of the older and new buildings, the street lights and signs, the rubbish bins, tram lines, trams, overhead wires; the old statues and new paths and steps. Is it the people who move through these permanent structures or a combination of the two? Or is it nothing of what I’ve just stated; is it really just our imagining of the city as we traverse its spaces? And how are we moving through the city and the people who inhabit the city? Is it, as Guy Debord has said: The Commodity is spectacle.

I want to focus now on my latest photographic project - The Body and the City, which addressed absence and presence, the familiar and the unfamiliar, comfort and unease, special disorientation and spontaneous arrangement. It was about the everyday, the commonplace activity of interacting with the general public in an urban environment.  It grew out of my persistent vertigo whilst attempting to negotiate public spaces – the alienating crowds, the sense that I was an outsider to the general throng, which moved along seamlessly, or rather, as I perceived it as a machine. The people who inhabited Bourke Street in the city during the lunch time rush, were in my mind, mere automatons who walked to some internal beat I could not hear, who were inhabiting a world akin to a Matrix otherzone, attached to the umbilical cord that enabled them to breath and eat and which apparently satisfied their every need?

Although I had been an avid photographer for much of my life, purchasing a pocket sized digital camera enabled me to take photographs whilst I was in the city. I still felt a sense of non-integration into the masses, but being able to capture images was a way of engaging with certain energy. I found that I was returning to previous concerns ~ individuality, difference and facial expressions. But there was also an underlying concern about how some things appear ordered, whilst they are in fact quite disorderly. Somehow the framing arranged things I viewed to an extent that I, although not entirely devoid of anxiety, am able to traverse the city spaces in what I call the mode of the flaneur – I allow buildings to determine my meandering to follow the city and its people.

My photography is not surveillance, not dispassionate. Something IS identified, noticed, explained in the taking of the photo. It is about using the image of the other outside oneself to say something about human life, it is about a reflection of self; it is about coming to terms with the other, who is almost always distant, even though they might be inherently within us. We are both interior and exterior as self. An intimacy and connection is formed, briefly, fleetingly. My photographs reveal a concern with people as ornamentation ~ decorous to the landscape, as order and disorder, an arrangement within a fixed urban environment, part of the textural interplay between building surface and body as fluid architecture. More often than not my photographs are about people watching or waiting for the other.

Often I concentrate on the person I identify as the outsider, someone sitting alone or special in their particular orientation. I did this primarily because I wanted to reveal that the ambiguous city people were not just a homogeneous and almost unidentifiable mass, but they were individuals who formed part of this mass. Almost always I look for the juxtaposition of textures between building and body architecture - the interplay between image and text – the meanings that may be created.

Francesco Vitalli said of my installation: 

it evokes community and belonging, the relation between public and private spheres, inequality, justice and entitlements and reminds us of an anxiety felt before the masses, before the city as a field of signification and symbol of might and grandeur. Its colonial legacy, reminiscent of the empire of racial segregation on which it was built, the anxiety of the alienated individual, regimented, classified and catalogued, which is now exsanguinated. We are reminded of Giorgio Agamben’s (2007) work on exclusions, of the permanent state of exception under which subjectivities and identities are formed and in which the city as locus of capital, produces aggression and a state of insecurity. (2011)

So, I want to return here to the post-human. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first appearance of the term in Maurice Parmelee’s 1916 Poverty and Social Progress. In a section entitled 'Eugenic Measures and the Prevention of Poverty' he wrote:

But even though it is not possible, at present at any rate, to do much to improve the quality of the human stock by eugenic means, it is interesting and profitable to consider what would be the result if socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part . . . . [But] it is evident, in the first place, that it is inconceivable that human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by [the] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an animal no longer human, or for that matter mammalian, in its character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy, fear, etc. But even if such a post-human animal did come into existence, it is difficult to believe that it could carry on the necessary economic activities without using a certain amount of formal organization, compulsion, etc.

Although there are various ways to approach the concept of the post-human, I understand it to be a liminal being marked by its transformation by advanced technologies.  Indeed, positioned as it is in relation to technological development, the post-human is framed by ideas of mutation, evolution and the development of a species that transcends the human. Even so, it is useful to consider Parmelee’s notion, for we may ask: are we already no longer human? And, I ask this because the human that we thought we knew prior to certain technological advances is essentially different to the human we know today and what  I mean by this is that when ‘we’ traverse city spaces we no doubt encounter individuals who are almost cyborgian in their obvious connection to electronic interfaces. Ipods, Iphones, laptop computers, headphones, and mobile phones appear permanently fixed to people’s ears as they walk through the city streets fully immersed in virtual worlds of music and text. So what, if anything happens to the actual city in these interactions? Sure, it remains there fixed, immovable, as structures to be negotiated, but is it really there to these people who appear always to be somewhere else? Are buildings just remnants of past history, past events, past human activity that have little to do with the contemporary psyche? Are buildings just a backdrop to the real experience of the individual?  Is it in fact a simulated reality, like that presented in The Matrix?

Just an aside here ~ I always thought it interesting that people had difficulty understanding the concept of the Tardis in the science fiction television series Dr. Who. The Tardis – basically a phone box, looks smaller on the outside, but is much larger on the inside. I like to think of it like the human brain – looks small, but contains billions of neuronal connections, or like buildings, because from the outside we can never see the totality of the building, we generally see the entrance and very rarely look upwards to attempt to take in the whole structure, so when we actually get inside the building its many rooms and corridors appear much larger than we had expected.

How can a city respond to the people who inhabit it – who live, work and shop in the city?

Imagined in this way, that is, buildings as facade, which affronts or covers another space (either solid or empty), the cityscape is rendered like a stage, the curtains drawn and then, when opened reveal the spectacle of the play. Without the play and its actors and the action, the theatre and the stage are nothing more than potential space. Although one could argue that with the scenery in place, it might be considered a spectacle in itself, if the scenery was spectacular or magnificent! But again, imagination must play a part here in regards to whether or nothing something has potential to excite or engage, since spectacle must arrest us from our usual ways of seeing, transport us into the visual aesthetics as well as the unfolding action or event.

How does technology change us. Well, on a very simple level, wearing head phones and listening to music whilst we are walking along, enables the individual to block out the usual sounds of the city, the persistent gabble of people talking, the sounds of passing traffic, road and building works, in favor of music we have chosen, rendering life (that which we see and experience) more akin to a film soundtrack where the visuals are accompanied by sweet classic strains or heavy metal. Thus making actual life more virtual, more cinematic! It’s a matter of, if you don’t like the current soundtrack -  then change it. We are psychologically modified by our use of technologies and by the manner in which technology enters our spaces. Think of the large screen at Federation Square, which has changed our view of inner city spaces. That ‘being there’ experience has been taken up by people who dress up to go to the Melbourne Cup, but actually watch the race on the big screen, rather than actually going to Flemington Racecourse. This behavior also occurs in regards to watching the AFL Grand Final, summer time tennis and cricket and the Anzac Parade. However, the screen is more than that, it is also a back-drop for actual performers, it enables them to augment their performance. Last summer the screen was used to display images and poetic texts – more than a cinema and more than a television, it has become an avenue for displaying our culture and creativity. Screens have crept into our cities. In some cities in the world posters are dynamic, not static.

Those already alienated by the metropolis as a space that caters only for those who desire commodities are further alienated by those who block themselves off from city people. These people cannot and do not interact on public transport and walk through the streets as ‘untouchables’ since they are wearing technological signifier that say in no uncertain terms: Don’t speak to me unless you are speaking through a technological interface – text me or mobile phone call me, if you are not a piece of music, a film or video clip then I have no interest in you. They prefer the non-human, because it enables them to remain distant from other human beings. Am I being too harsh?

These individuals already inhabit the matrix, but unlike the construct in the film of the same name, this matrix is one of their choosing, or is it? Is the technological space, as constructed reality any better or worse than actual reality and its constructs? Are we moving towards a time in which all city screens will be tailored to the individual, presented in such films as The Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002). Interactive screens and billboards herald a post human future in which 3D screens will interact with us by utilizing retinal scanners, iris recognition and databases of consumers' preferences to target our desires.

In the film, when the panicked John Anderton (Tom Cruise) races through a shopping mall, he is besieged by a flurry of interactive advertising. Screens, apparently sensing his predicament, make their pitches: Promoting the American Express blue card, a woman in a bathing suit beckons to Anderton and asks: 'Need to escape? Blue can take you.'Another says, 'John Anderton: you could use a Guinness right now'.

A spectacle requires spectators, but those who do not participate (in the sense that their intent all along was to be an observer, rather than player),do become overall, part of the spectacle, in fact, like actors in a play, the spectacle cannot be so unless it is witnessed as such.

How will science shape the human?

I watched with interest How will science shape what it means to be human on ABC2 last night, with various panelists from the fields of psychology, ethics, technology, physics, medicine and business.  Paul Davies was the only person to use the term 'post-human' but grappled with the notion and this might be, because in my mind at least, it is only by freezing a point in time - like now, that we can label the moment of change as something definitive, whereas in fact the humanimal has and always will be a potential to be something other than, or different to its present state of being.  Peter Singer thought it would be more fruitful to ask questions other than what it is to be human and that we might consider instead how future science might develop strategies to make us more ethical & less aggressive. One can only presume that he meant using genetic tampering to rid us of undesirable genetic traits and diseases, but he did not discuss whether this might be an ethical endeavor. The panelists did agree that future developments to physically and mentally enhance the human, would most likely be accessed by those who could afford it, creating a divide. The suggestion that access to enhancing medicines or technology would be equitable was just outrageous, since millions of people world wide live in poverty and that $1,000 fee to have your own personal genome sequenced for designer drugs, stem cells or gene modification to cure your current or future disease, would be out of reach for many people in the western world. I couldn't help but think of the film GATTACA whilst watching these well paid academics speak of a future in which science and technology will change our current notion of what it means to be human. On the point of desirable or undesirable human qualities, Liesl Capper-Beilby who has been developing 'conversational agents' (a computer system designed to converse with a human) for older or less mobile individuals, noted that if the conversational agent, as companion, was too amiable (that is, not aggressive enough) then individuals were less like to see the 'machine' as human and therefore not likely to interact with it. It seems that rightly or wrongly what made us human may have been our aggressive streak, our ability to fight for what we wanted and instigate change. She spoke of a future scenario in which those who were housebound or confined to a wheelchair could deploy virtual avatars to complete some of their social and business duties. However, I'm wondering if we are already, as Paul Virilio has said,the equivalent of the equipped disabled, since we rely so heavily on the internet and our communications technologies. Almost gone are the days when we would write a letter and go down to the post office to post it, or look forward eagerly to receiving correspondence in our letter box. Luckily, I don't fall into that category for I still have friends who send little things in the mail. Nostalgia is definitely human and I suppose that as the years go on there will be more nostalgia for the past?

self made

speaking of masks

THINK

Named for one time IBM Chairman Thomas Watson Sr, who trademarked the motivational exhortation THINK in 1935, the supercomputer Watson just won $77 147 on the popular American TV game show Jeopardy, beating two former Jeopardy champions in a best of three series.

IBM assembled a staff of fifteen and a team of PhD's and postgrads from eight universities who laboured for four years to build the game winning computer, which boasts 2880 brains.

Screened over two nights to a jaded American audience, and delivering Jeopardy's best (8.7) audience ratings since 2007, the super computer's win over Jeopardy's hapless human champions spawned headlines like IBM's Watson Dominates, Humanity in Jeopardy and a declaration from one of the vanquished that he welcomes our new masters.

On February 14 Jeopardy was the second most watched television program in America.

In a previous IBM publicity stunt another of its purpose-built supercomputers, Deep Blue, famously beat Chess world champion Gerry Kasparov two-one (with three drawn games) in a best of five chess tournament. "It was", Kasparov said of the army of IBM engineers tending to the chess computer "like playing a patient on life support".

Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch, but Deep Blue was dismantled afterward.

I was thinking. If humans beat a machine they look smart. If a machine wins, humans still look smart for inventing an engine that could. And in a classic win for public relations, and network television, everyone is happy.

Child of the future

For those interested in the image in the previous post by Steve Middleton, I've included this link to the relevant section of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Without Steve's title one might have easily read his image as a commentary on the struggle for power and control between the Arab world and the west or Islam and Christianity. Here, the cyborg (overman or ubermensch) representing the contemporary, armored soldier is literally the 'load bearing spirit' of an aging and perhaps disintegrating human replete with prosthesis. Flanked on either side with the lion of courage and the camel of awkwardness, the human/machine is seized in an impasse; deadlocked between its desire to be brave and its obvious encumbrance.

Regardless of Haraway's embrace of the cyborg as transgressive figure, one that subverts binaries, it still continues to represent masculinist control and domination. No amount of armoring is going to rid the solder of her fleshy body. And, on this note, although Nietzsche spoke about transcendence he was not talking about body denial. Indeed, be would not have applauded current theorists (Stelarc) who maintain the human body is obsolete. ‘I do not go your way, you despisers of the body! You are not bridges of the Superman!’ (Nietzsche, 1969:63).

I'm thinking that we need to jettison the cyborg as metaphor of heroism and invulnerability and instead see the prosthetic body for what it is, a technological husk that masks our fragility and dependence. After all, most hybrid, human/machine entities from science fiction films and television series have depicted humans as damaged. In The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) Colonial Steve Austin (Lee Majors), an astronaut with NASA lost the sight of one of his eyes and the use of his legs in an accident. They were replaced with bionics, which gave him greater strength, telescopic vision and the ability to run faster than the average person. The six million dollar man was intended to showcase actual development in bionics and was a contemporary version of the Superman figure of the 1930s.

It was Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that depicted the first proto-fascist cyborg in the form of Darth Vadar, who had a prosthetic hand and wore an armoured helmet and life-support suit because he was asthmatic. Darth Vadar, who was presented as a powerful dictator with spiritual underpinnings (he is, after all, Lord Darth Vader a Jedi Knight), is, in his all black attire suggestive of Adolf Hitler’s SchutzStaffel (SS) Storm Troopers who were armoured in a very psychologically intimidating way against the terrors that they inflicted prior to and during World War Two. Both Darth Vader and the SchutzStaffel represented the evil, dehumanised and dehumanising other, and the mechanical, ordered and disciplined body.

Militaristic cyborgs in films such as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Testsuo (1989), Circuitry Man (1989), Cyborg (1989), Total Recall (1990, Terminator II (1991), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Eve of Destruction (1991) just to name a few, represented the greater use of medical prosthetics and computer technologies during the 1980s and 1990s and with this an acknowledgement of human frailty.

But returning here to Steve's image. Perhaps Zarasthustra as cyborg is the child that Nietzsche speaks of. It's a place of new beginnings, fragile and armored with so much technology upon which to draw, we advance headlong into something not yet imagined! Who are these individuals, capable of finding their creative abilities? They are "only the rarest and most lucky" capable of the "most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates its own glorification". (Nietzsche: Will to Power )

I cyborg...Kevin Warwick and Stelarc

Last year I read I, cyborg by Kevin Warwick, published by the University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago in 2002. I was interested in whether there were affinities between Warwick's project and some of Stelarc's. I am aware that there is much research to do here, but offer the following as some preliminary ideas.

In 1998 Professor Kevin Warwick, British scientist and Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, underwent an operation to have a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted into his forearm. This experiment allowed a computer to monitor Warwick as he moved through halls and offices of the Department of Cybernetics at the University, using a unique identifying signal emitted by the implanted chip. He could operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.

Warwick explains:

In Spring 1998, the building was being wired up so that at different points the central computer could detect the presence, at a certain time, or devices such as the radio-frequency identification device (RFID)...at the Cybernetics lab at Reading we had in our possession a relatively small radio-frequency identification device (RFID) in a small glass capsule, which, under certain circumstances, might be used as an implant. (63)

Strangely enough the program they intended to use was supposed to  'emit the code 666, which…is the mark of the beast from the 'Book of Revelation' in the Bible. For some reason, though, when 666 was tried nothing worked. The code for the implant was therefore changed to 161. (78)

After a local anaesthetic, the surgeon, George Boulos ‘...burrowed a hole...through the fascia, the outer layer of the skin, down to the muscle’ (80). The implant was pushed into then stitched into place, so that it wouldn’t migrate to another part of Warwick’s body. It enabled Warwick to open doors and switch on and off lights in the laboratory. After this experiment he decided to become more cybernetic by having his nervous system connected to a computer via electrodes implanted into the median nerve in his arm.

According to Warwick the only thing that had been done that was remotely similar to what they were doing was the work of the artist Eduardo Kac who  'barcoded his ankle and read himself into the Internet to symbolize the human race being captive to technology’ (76). He maintained

Stelarc uses a technique called functional electrical simulation (FES) by means of surface electrodes. The same method is used to improve the quality of life of spinal-cord injured subjects, so that they can live a more independent, everyday life. (107)

Indeed,

It was found that the external stimulation method using electrodes on the skin surface, as in Stelarc’s case, didn’t provide the necessary precision for stimulating the individual muscles to grip and hold objects. Implants are therefore required for the accuracy necessary to achieve the coordinated movements for grasp and lift (117).

He was of course referring to some of Stelarc's earlier work with his Third Hand and muscle stimulation performances.  Warwick concluded, in terms of his own project that ‘An FES system, externally connected, such as that used by Stelarc would not get us very far as it would only allow for muscle stimulation’ (122). He said the main difference between the 1998 implant and the new experiment,

...was the connection that would be made with the nervous system, most likely using the Utah array. The main body of the implant would be a radio transmitter/receiver to send the signals from my nervous system by radio to the computer and to receive signals sent, again by radio, from the computer and play them on to my nervous system via my arm. (131)

A micro electrode array consisting of 100 individual electrodes was implanted into his median nerve.This technique would provide highly selective recording and stimulation of sensory and/or motor neurons with the nerve fascicles. (183)

Peter Teddy, the neurosurgeon who undertook Warwick’s second implant made an incision approximately two inches long below Warwick’s wrist. He inserted a bodger which tunneled up Warwick’s inner arm through the incision. This enabled the micro electrode array, with attached wires to be inserted. This implant enabled Warwick to change the colors on a computer monitor by moving his fingers. By flexing and closing his hand, he was able to directly affect the movements of Peter Kyberd’s articulated, metallic hand, which they had also connected to the computer. Warwick said that they had witnessed the first experiment to prove that the array in his median nerve was capable of transferring the signals from his brain to a computer and then on to a robot. He also managed to move a Lego robot with signals converted from his median nerve into infra-red signals into the computer, control the movements of a wheelchair and achieve a ’…direct electronic connection between his ’nervous system in New York and the Madlab in Reading’, via the Kyberd hand. (257) He explains:

As I closed my hand, we could see the hand in Reading follow my own movements exactly, with a slight time delay due to the distance involved; when I opened my hand, the articulated hand followed suit…We had shown how signals from my brain could be transmitted around the world, via the Internet, to operate a piece of technology...with the visual feedback received, I could control the technology as desired.(258)

Other experiments included changing the colors on a necklace devised by his wife Irena. Eventually Irena and Kevin decided that they would like their nervous systems to be connected to one another via electrodes and a computer. Needles half a millimeter in diameter and just over three centimeters in length, made of a composite of platinum and iridium, were inserted into Irena’s median nerve. They achieved the first direct nervous system to nervous system communication in June 2002. Warwick describes the event in this way:

After a period where Iain adjusted the tolerances that were being measured by the computer, we reached the stage where, when Irena closed her hand, a green light flashed on to the screen, and when her hand was open, the light changed to red. So we now had signals traveling from Irena’s brain, via her nervous system and the electrode, to the PC, which changed the light when she moved her hand. At another bench in the lab we were able to send a signal from a different PC through the stimulator unit, via the interface card on the gauntlet, down to the array, on to my nervous system and up to my brain. (281)

The differences between Warwick’s project and Stelarc’s various project are manifold. Whereas Stelarc uses current developments in technology to modify the human body in an aesthetic way, Warwick is interested in how technology will upgrade the human. Influenced by Hans Moravic’s ideas about uploading the human brain into silicon, expressed in his book Mind Children (1988) Warwick said:

As a result of the experiments carried out I have no doubts in my own mind that, by direct brain implants, it will be possible to upgrade the intellectual capabilities of humans, by turning them into cyborgs. Extra memory, clip-on maths abilities and multi-dimensional processing would all appear to be there for the taking, as indeed are numerous extra-sensory powers...When linked to the network, a cyborg has the potential for an intelligence way beyond that of a stand-alone human. (295)

Stelarc’s Ear on Arm may be compared to Warwick’s Cyborg 2.0 project because both are concerned with technological augmentation of the human body in order to expand human communication. However the primary difference is that Stelarc's extra ear, a construct that was implanted under the skin is mostly human, cells and skin, whereas Warwick's implant was solely technological.  Although Stelarc intended the Ear on Arm to be capable of being connected to blue tooth, wireless technology, it remains an incomplete shell awaiting some form of electronic connection. Warwick and Stelarc are similar in their philosophy, since both believe that humanity needs to incorporate technology into the body in order to enhance its capabilities, or if not that, then so that technology won't surpass the human. 'There is no way I want to stay a mere human' says Warwick. Both may be considered transhumanist, since transhumanism proposes the idea of an augmented, enhanced human enacting a kind of Nietzschean prophecy of the superman, a human that not only embraces but encourages technological development to enable greater human capabilities and possibilities for permanent physical and mental enhancement. Founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce in 1998, the manifesto of transhumanism advocates:

The moral right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives. We seek personal growth beyond our current biological limitations.

On the World Transhumanists’ website, under the banner of The Better Humans Newsletter, an article declares that James Watson, the person who along with Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA in 1953, said, ‘Going for perfection was something I always thought you should do’ (Better humans Staff, 2002).  More recently the notion that technology could be used to create a more perfect, superior human being is echoed in Krishna R. Dronamraju’s statement:

Instead of merely developing technologies to correct or prevent genetic defects in human populations, one can go beyond such methods to higher goals of improving existing qualities such as intelligence, musical abilities and physical strength, etc. Furthermore, it may even be possible by applying redemptive technology to create whole new beings of ‘superior’ quality or add on new organs with multiple functions  (1998. Biological and Social Issues in Biotechnology Sharing, Aldershot, Brookfield, USA, England, Singapore, Sydney: Ashgate Publishers, p.153).

We might ask: Who would decide which human beings would be chosen to be more intelligent and physically stronger and why are these characteristics are so important as opposed to others such as the ability to be empathetic or kind, and to whom do we owe this philosophical legacy?

Cyborgs

Cyborgs everywhere, in the streets, on the trams, mobile phone in hand, head phones in their ears and iPod's close to their body. Vibrations of the hard-drive penetrate their flesh, sounds penetrate their mind. They're connected to their music, their friends and their fantasies. No longer just an instrument, technology is an extension of their body, their memory, their life. And everything else is closed out. You can't talk to them, they're absorbed in their own world. 'Excuse me', I say to the girl sitting next to me in the tram, 'Would you mind turning down your music because all I can hear is a high pitched repetitive sound? But she doesn't answer, she's sending a text with her thumbs moving at lightning speed, juggling the novel on her lap and listening to music. I tap her gently on the shoulder ~ 'Would you mind...', my voice trails, it's no use, she's cocooned, enveloped in an invisible protective shield. Things aren't so different I guess, I remember falling asleep most nights in the sixties, transistor radio on, headphones in my ears and twenty years later listening to cassette tapes on my Walkman. The world suddenly became cinematic, instead of a quiet ride on a tram along the Yarra River, I could accompany the scenes with the heroic and passionate sounds of Wagner or the pounding goth beat of Nine Inch Nails. Technology changes, but people don't. We all want our own private space, to think, to feel, to hear.

STEVEN MIDDLETON - Prototype micro-robot

Prototype micro-robot (still from animation): Steven Middleton 2009.

Prototype micro-robot (still from animation): Steven Middleton, 2009

In Kevin Kelly's book: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994) he describes an experimental capsule in which he is nurtured and protected by a complex amalgamation of the 'living and the manufactured'. He concludes: 'The realm of the born - - all that is nature -- and the realm of the made -- all that is humanly constructed -- are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered' (p.2). This allusion to vivisystems - (from L. vivus: alive), a melding of mechanical and natural systems is evoked in Steven Middleton's new design for a micro-robot that will be used in performance by Stelarc when it is eventually built.

Middleton's micro, six-legged autonomous insectoid robot, complete with jointed, movable tail is a hybrid scorpion/spider, without the deadly mandibles. Even so, it carries within its design a sense of both fear and wonder (we may be stung with the scorpion's tail), horror and disgust (insects rise from dead or decaying matter, which they invade), the abject and the 'clean and proper body' (Kristeva) (the ambiguity of the thing that violates borders, threatens our sense of order and disorder). In literature the insect is most definitely linked with pollution and leaky boundaries, indeed in Franz Kafka's short story 'Metamorphosis' the main protagonist gradually turns into what he considers to be a disgusting insect in which his humanity (whatever that is) was compromised.

The insect is decidedly other to the human, it's whole body is an exoskeleton. But for the human, technology itself has become an exoskeleton in that it provides a metaphorical armouring or illusion that it will render us better, more viable, more human?

The very fact that the robot is small enough to enter the body through one of its orifices (and here on the tongue it is dangerously close to the human throat) is threat enough! Since the tongue is a vital instrument in human speech and communication, a physical link is created between the robot's body and language and is metaphoric of the various bots that crawl the web. As search engines, these bots strip away code, search websites, interpret information and ultimately help us in our reactions with online communication. Like insects that scurry around in the night these little aids crawl the web without us being aware of them. They are in fact, out of control. According to Kevin Kelly 'The marvel of the 'hive mind' is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members' (p.16)

Middleton's image of the close proximity of the robot to an intimate part of the human body, suggests that we (as a species) may have to learn to accommodate other species in order to survive (communications technology being vital to productivity, social networking, information sharing). This recognition, alliance and incorporation of other species into the human is already evident in biomedical procedures in which the human body is enhanced by xenotransplants, creating a hybrid - human/not human (porcine derived products are used in replacing human body parts). The scale of the robot also alludes to a futurist notion of the design of nano-scale, nano- robots that will be introduced into the human body for targeted drug delivery, virus search or disease monitoring. For the moment at least, nano-robots are still in the research and development phase.

When I look at the image of the robot on the human tongue, the movement of the robot (in the animation) and the apparent passivity of the human I am reminded again of Donna Haraway's pronouncement in 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181: 'Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert'.

Steven Middleton's work may be found at:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~stevem/

ETHICS OF AUTONOMOUS 'LETHAL' ROBOTS

Last night I watched with interest Rodney's Robot Revolution screened on ABC1 TV. It outlined the extensive work being undertaken in the field of robotics by Australian-born roboticist Professor Rodney Brooks. The featured robots expressed endearing humanoid body shapes and facial responses, however, the most disturbing aspect of the work for me was progress by roboticist's towards the construction of autonomous 'lethal' robots that blindly follow programmed responses (killing) whilst on the battlefield. Theoretically soldiers also learn to blindly follow orders, because to do otherwise would jeopardise the whole mission. How then is an autonomous 'lethal' robot different to a soldier trained to kill his/her enemy?
According to Ronald C. Arkin, one of the differences is that 'due to the propensity of soldiers to tolerate and commit illegal acts under wartime conditions, that ultimately autonomous systems can outperform humans ethically in the battlefield'. (See link to his article below). John Wiseman, drawing extensively from Ron Arkin's writing encapsulates a number of reasons why autonomous systems might perform more ethically than their human counterparts. He lists the following as reasons why (See his article listed below):

1.The ability to act conservatively: i.e., they do not need to protect themselves in cases of low certainty of target identification. UxVs do not need to have self-preservation as a foremost drive, if at all. They can be used in a self-sacrificing manner if needed and appropriate without reservation by a commanding officer,
2.The eventual development and use of a broad range of robotic sensors better equipped for battlefield observations than humans’ currently possess.
3.They can be designed without emotions that cloud their judgment or result in anger and frustration with ongoing battlefield events. In addition, “Fear and hysteria are always latent in combat, often real, and they press us toward fearful measures and criminal behavior” [Walzer 77, p. 251]. Autonomous agents need not suffer similarly.
4.Avoidance of the human psychological problem of “scenario fulfillment” is possible, a factor believed partly contributing to the downing of an Iranian Airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988 [Sagan 91]. This phenomena leads to distortion or neglect of contradictory information in stressful situations, where humans use new incoming information in ways that only fit their pre-existing belief patterns, a form of premature cognitive closure. Robots need not be vulnerable to such patterns of behavior.
5.They can integrate more information from more sources far faster before responding with lethal force than a human possibly could in real-time. This can arise from multiple remote sensors and intelligence (including human) sources, as part of the Army’s network-centric warfare concept and the concurrent development of the Global Information Grid.
6.When working in a team of combined human soldiers and autonomous systems, they have the potential capability of independently and objectively monitoring ethical behavior in the battlefield by all parties and reporting infractions that might be observed. This presence alone might possibly lead to a reduction in human ethical infractions.

Science fiction films (such as Alien Resurrection, AI: Artificial Intelligence & Bicentennial Man) have shown that machines and alien others often behave more ethically than their human counterparts.

Although autonomous 'lethal' robots are speculative at this stage, recent advances, including armed robots (very much like bomb disposal robots with semi-automatic weapons attached) and drones (unmanned airplanes) are already deployed in the theater of war.

The ethics surrounding use of autonomous 'lethal' cyborgs that can't die, against human beings who are obviously vulnerable to attack was a question raised in Rodney's Robot Revolution, as was the question surrounding who would be responsible (the robot's certainly wouldn't be) if a mission went horribly wrong? It is not only machines that become out of our control, but we tend to project our fears about 'things out of our control' onto machines!

Obviously replacing human beings with cyborgs is one way of avoiding trauma and death experienced by soldiers on the battlefield. Indeed, if all battles were undertaken solely by the use of unmanned or inhuman machines, then it might be an equal state of play, but what if one side was human and the other machine?

Are we moving towards a Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) future, which depicted humanity fighting a loosing battle against computer-controlled machines? More important for me is the fact that as Arkin says: 'The threshold of entry into warfare may be lowered as we will now be risking machines and fewer human soldiers – this could violate the Jus ad Bellum (Justice of War or Laws of War) conditions of just warfare'.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc%20AD=ADA493429&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online-publications/ArkinMoshkinaISTAS.pdfhttp://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/02/ethics_in_lethal_robots.html
Ethics of autonomous 'lethal' robots
Armed robots on patrol