Cyborgism and Extropianism - Essay Example

 Cyborgism and Extropianism Have humans become cyber organisms, or cyborgs? What may we become in the future? This paper analyses these questions and the ramifications of cyborgism. We consider whether becoming cyborgs is a good thing, and whether cyborgism is inescapable. Will people who do not agree with the ideas behind achieving synthetic bodies become left behind and simply die while the rest of humanity evolves to continue to expand knowledge? This paper will also consider the related ideas of extropianism, which is an optimistic view of the future, expecting considerable advances in computational power, life extension, nanotechnology and the related technologies. We discuss how people may one day evolve to the point of uploading ourselves into an internet for an unlimited supply of information, leaving our bodies behind which age, deteriorate and can become infected or diseased. A cyborg is most simply defined as a human who has been enhanced by technology. This would mean virtually everyone alive today, since almost everyone has either had immunizations or worn glasses. When most people think of the word cyborg, though, images of the Six Dollar Man or the Terminator usually come to mind, where the human body is has been meshed with a robotic body. It seems that the state of being a cyborg is a matter of a spectrum of degrees, with everyone being atleast a minimal cyborg, and the future holding the potential of people existing as cyborgs in every radical sense of the word. In Marie O’Mahony’s book “Cyborg: the Man-Machine” (2002), there are many examples of how people may enhance themselves with electrical, mechanical and chemical means. O’Mahony describes the process of uploading a human brain into a computer; the striving for artificial intelligence; the way drugs, doping, and selective breeding are altering humans; and the frontiers of cloning and hybridisation. How will people use drugs and laboratory techniques to alter themselves in the future? These types of alterations to humans may be less acceptable than other ways people can become cyborgs because alterations of human genetic information is irreversible. The other reason people may find chemical enhancement of humans disturbing is because the whole process of altering genetic information is invisible. One way that technology is being used to alter human evolution is through selective breeding. Parents can now choose the sex of their unborn child; but in the future, they may be able to select for many other qualities. How far they can go with this depends on how much a person is a product of hereditary and how much of environment. With in vitro fertilization, parents can also choose an egg donor and sperm donor. It is possible to create baby factories where test tube clones are produced for specific purposes. Advances in biotechnology are happening fast enough that creating a designer baby with all the qualities a parent chooses is not very far off. On the other hand, other fields are progressing more slowly, such as the field of artificial intelligence. Why is this? Will thinking, self-replicating machines eventually be developed? The difficulty in developing artificial intelligence seems to come from the fact that human thinking involves something computers do not have, namely, self-awareness and consciousness. Since machines are stronger than people, and computers are able to out-calculate the human mind, one way to develop as a cyborg is through uploading. This process is effectively a brain transplant into a computer. This could presumably be achieved through nanotechnology, developing a computer at the atomic level. In this process it would be important to be able to determine what part of the self must not be eliminated in order for the self to still be able to function. Presumably, the slowness of developments in the field of artificial intelligence is another example of the fact that human nature is complex. This complexity of the balance of beings may also be a factor in health. Along with cures aimed at specific diseases, people may need more holistic treatments such as homeopathy and acupuncture, which treat the whole person. The issues that will confront genetically modified humans may be similar to what today confronts the introduction of genetically modified plants. There is a concern that genetically modified foods may change nature irrevocably. Cross-fertilisation with other plants may occur. Wildlife and humans that eat genetically modified foods may also have health effects. After introducing genetically altered plants and other organisms, the ecosystem may be changed in unpredictable ways. Like genetically modified foods, some countries may be more open to genetically modified humans, while other countries will presumably try to outlaw all activities associated with the idea. There is a sense in which even taking an aspirin is modifying the human body. This type of human modification has a history as long as the human story. So in a sense, humans have been cyborgs atleast to a low degree from the first prehistoric discovery of medicinal plants. There are many different motivations for chemical modification. Drugs are most widely taken in order to alleviate pain; but steroids and other chemicals such as EPO, or erythopoieten, and human growth hormone are often taken by athletes in order to become stronger. The U.S. military has tried to create the perfect soldier through the use of chemicals that lower fear and stress while promoting killing performance. The spectre of unleashing such psychopaths is as alarming as the possibility of the forced use of drugs for societal mind and behaviour control. With the improvement of drug technology will come increasingly tailored drugs for almost any thinkable outcome. But these drugs hold a special danger that they will be misused by individuals and societies, and that people may unknowingly be taking drugs. Although the type of human modification at stake may not be categorically much different than the ancient practices of extracting medicine from plants, it is the degree that the new drugs may be used and the speed at which new drugs are being developed and used that is a cause for concern. The latest concern about how athletes are modifying their bodies comes from gene doping in order to increase production of hormones. According to O’Mahony (2002), gene doping vaccines “need only be administered once and are undetectable” (p. 78). How far can people change themselves with this type of technology? How would society develop ways to detect gene doping? With more advances in technology, a few different ways of enabling people to outlive their organs and tissues have emerged. One of these is xenoplantation, the process of growing human organs in animals. Stem-cell technology also holds the potential for people being able to grow their own body parts. Gene therapy is increasingly looked upon as the way to treat disease. But genetic engineering could create genetic information that could be used to discriminate against people in the style of eugenics. It is also still not clear how much of a person is determined by their genes and how much by environment. Genes are able to interact with other genes and the environment in complex ways that may defy attempts at genetic engineering or atleast complicate the implications. Some of the more radical implications of genetic engineering are cloning and creating hybrid beings. So far, attempts at cloning have produced abnormalities and fatalities at a high rate. A biotech company called Amrad has been granted a European Patent Office patent to use animal and human cells in embryos (O’Mahony, 2002, p. 86). This has caused some alarm that they will create chimeras of animals containing human body parts and genetic codes. According to Donna Hathaway (Gray, 1995, p. xi) there are four types of cyborgs and symbionts that currently coexist in the New World Order. These are typified by: Gaia, or the self-forming Earth; the enhanced warrior, such as the Terminator; the world’s first cyborg, a laboratory rat; and the microorganism Mixotricha paradoxa. According to Hathaway, these four entities share a common cyborg evolutionary history. These each illustrate the trans nature of life today. Gaia is the idea that Earth is a living cybernetic system. By analysing the disequilibrium of the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists have determined that it could only be a product of the life processes of organisms. The idea behind Gaia is that the Earth is an alive, self-regulating, homeostatic system, and the atmosphere is just an extension of this. This Earth, or Gaia, is dynamically creating an environment that is optimal for the spawning of other cyborgs. Enhanced warriors such as the Terminator form the basis of how information technology is increasingly being used to fight wars. The recent ability to watch a war through the televised action of smart bombs is one form of this type of cyborgism. What form this category of cyborgs will take in the future The word cyborg itself was coined in 1960 by Clynes and Kline in order to describe what was believed to be the future of people in space. Enhanced part-human part-machine astronauts were viewed as necessary in order to survive in extra-terrestrial environments. To this end, it was a laboratory rat who was the first to become a cyborg in the strict sense of being controlled by a cybernetic device. The first cyborg rat was implanted with an osmotic pump that would inject chemicals controlling homeostatic states of the rat. Mixotricha paradoxa is an illustration of how trans life on Earth fundamentally is. This microbe lives in a termites gut, and there is no demarcation of where one Mixotricha begins and where another ends. They exist in a type of symbiotic confederacy. The significance that this microbe holds in understanding the nature of humans is that our own beginnings probably mirrored this same symbiotic behaviour. The mitochondria cells in humans are believed to have evolved within other cells. These four types of cyborgs that exist today are an interesting way to analyse the beginnings of cyborgism as well as to catch a glimpse of the direction in which beings are evolving. We can see the way that whole environments are interacting in order to support life. We can see how life itself was interacting from the beginning in order to support itself and begin the path of evolution. And finally, we can see the beginnings of humanity’s attempts to combine technology with beings and how this new technology may be used or misused in war. The relationship between the body and technology is influenced by the process of remediation, a process in which a body becomes a medium. “Donna Haraway’s influential cyborg is the body as remediated by various contemporary technologies of representation” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 237). As an example of how the body functions as a medium, cosmetic surgery and bodybuilding both reconstruct the body to become more aligned with an image from media. The body remediates and is remediated. The reconstructed body remediates earlier bodies; when the reconstructed bodies are broadcast in media they are remediated as a new cultural ideal. Remediating your body by cosmetic surgery and bodybuilding changes the view of what a self is. This new remediated self is a new concept of self, as an artist devoted to remediation states: “ ‘it is no longer meaningful to see the body as a site for the psyche or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored and modified’ “ (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 240). The future of the human body may become, through this process of remediation, to be a structure which can much more easily transfer technological images back and forth between other media. In this way, the bodies of people of the future may become more highly connected to all types of new media, as well as more transient in structure, shifting in time and more responsive to their environments. People may one day identify themselves more closely with their virtual selves than with their actual bodies. With advances in virtual reality and three dimensional graphics, people may feel more enabled to occupy the point of view of other beings. This may lead to further changes in the way people view their connections to other beings and things in the world, as well as the self-concept of where the self begins and ends. The increasing use of technology is also creating a networked self-concept. Chatrooms and role-playing games such as multi-user domains (MUDs) give people opportunities to interact in cyberspace in ways that may become more common in the future. If these activities become more common and widespread, people may come to view themselves primarily as networked selves. Advances in the evolution of synthetic bodies may be seen to be tied to advances in new media. This new media consists of “the Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMS and DVD, and virtual reality…the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication…it also affects all types of media” (Manovich, 2001, p. 19). The principles of new media include numerical representation; modularity; automation; variability, or being able to exist in an infinite number of different versions; and transcoding, or to translate into a new format. Extropianism can be defined as an “evolving transhumanist philosophy of extropy” (More, 1998) or desire to increase extropy, which is the amount of a system’s intelligence, information and other structures, and the capacity for improvement in those qualities and structures. Transhumanists in general follow reason instead of an external religious authority, as humanists do. Transhumanists also advocate the evolution of humans to a transhuman or posthuman condition. M. More lists the extropian principles as: perpetual progress, or the improvement and expansion of intelligence and lifespan; self-transformation, through experimentation, augmentation, and other types of self-improvement; practical optimism, as opposed to religious faith or pessimism; intelligent technology, in order to transcend biological limits; open society, which favors freedoms and experimentation; self-direction, which favors individual freedoms; and rational thinking, as opposed to faith without questioning or dogma. These principles are meant to reflect the values that extropians hold in common. These principles and the processes and concepts of cyborgs are related to some aspects of postmodern feminism, which in turn has much to offer in the illumination of cyborg possibilities and consequences. Haraway has stated that “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous responsibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (1998, p. 154). New technologies transgress the boundaries of perceived dualisms such as the dualism of beings and machine. Other boundaries that can be transgressed in a cyborg world include male/female, self/other, etc. Haraway views these dualisms as a part of Western traditions that result in domination of women, animals, nature, etc. The cyborg way of thinking is therefore seen as an alternative way of being as well as an alternative new world order, or cyborg world in which women will potentially experience regeneration in a world without gender. A cyborg world opens up many possibilities, such as a “grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse…a cyborg world might be about… people not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines” (Haraway, 1998, p. 154). The relation between human and machine is constantly changing in a cyborg world where the lines between the dualisms of creator/creation and mind/body are blurred. The blurring of these lines will occur for instance whenever a machine replicates itself or produces its own computer code. There are also instances when machines may be used to help create people or computers are controlled directly by the minds of people. Many questions remain about how people will further evolve into cyborgs. How do right wing conservative people react to the idea of cyborgs? It is doubtful this segment of the population will accept cyborgism when there is so much resistance to stem cell research, one of the least radical concepts of becoming a cyborg. Will other people forge ahead anyway? Will the ethics be debated so that laws are made to prevent cyborgs? Or will people be able to use the technology to create cyborgs anyway? Will the people who resist becoming cyborgs eventually be left behind? If we alter humans to become cyborgs, will we also in the process create monsters like the Terminator or a race of machines that may threaten humanity? At what point do we face a danger that our technology may have slipped out of our control? All of these questions must be studied further if we are to have any control over our self-evolution and trans-evolution. In conclusion, many aspects of cyborgism are already taking place. This is often indisputably a good thing, especially where it helps disabled people carry out the same functions as everyone else or when children are immunized. Other more radical aspects of cyborgism are only around the corner, and may be impossible to stop occurring alongside with the advances of biotechnology and other types of technology. It will be necessary for people to understand the extent to what the possible ramifications are whenever nature is tinkered with; and to be ready to safeguard that which makes us human. With the exception of weaponry, the vast majority of machines and the science behind them have always been conceived of in order to make human life easier or more possible; although, these intensions are often far from what has actually transpired. The dropping of the atomic bombs and the destruction of the environment are examples that illustrate the messiness of technological implications. Therefore it is paramount to ensure that our machines and our technology always have their original intended outcome of helping humanity or atleast do not morph into something contrary to it. References Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: The MIT Press. Gray, C. H. (Ed.). (1995). The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). New York: Routledge. Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. London: The MIT Press. More, M. (1998). The Extropian Principles: A Transhumanist Declaration. Extropy Institute. Retrieved 12 May 2007 from http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm O’Mahony, M. (2002). Cyborg: The Man-Machine. New York City: Thames & Hudson Inc. Read More