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Technohumanism: Requiem for the Cyborg

Tim Lenoir

Stanford University

Since the mid-1980s when Donna Haraway published her “manifesto,”[1]the cyborgshave has been a featured actors in the field of cultural studies of contemporary technoscience. I want come to sing their the cyborg’s praises. I also come to bury it and and declare it’s time to move on.

FAlthough first defined in 1960 by scientists interested in adapting humans to space flight through control and redesign of physiological and psychological regulatory systems, the term “cyborg” has been applied with a great deal of flexibility since then. Nhas characterized what has been labeled as a cyborg, so that nearly any form of human-machine coupling and the engineered union of separate organic systems have has counted.One author or another has classified persons with implants, such as pacemakers, prostheses, and even immunization by vaccination, along with bioengineered transgenic organisms as cyborgs.From this perspective some would argue that we (humans) have always been cyborgs. Indeed, anthropologists such as André Leroi-Gourhan, among others, have argued that tool use, particularly tools of communication, such as speech and other cognitive technologies, has been the defining force of human evolution. Expanding on this view cognitive scientist Andy Clark defends the “extended mind” thesis that humans more than any other creature on the planet, deploy nonbiological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement our basic biological modes of processing; that our brains actively dovetail their problem-solving activities with a variety of nonbiological resources; and that these larger systems thus created evolve. Viewed in this light as thinking and reasoning beings whose minds and selves are spread across biological and nonbiological circuitry, we have always been human/technology symbionts, or in Clark’s phrase, natural-born cyborgs.[2]

Such usages can be so broad as to be meaningless. I prefer the suggestion by Chris Hables-Gray in his Cyborg Handbook: that within the broad field of human/machine co-evolution we should confine the use of cyborg to the relatively recent phenomenon, constituting a new—possibly the last—stage in human evolution, in which human/machine coevolution has been managed by cybernetics, , the science outlined by Norbert Weiner that interprets both machinic and organic processes as parts of informational systems.

In this (last) stage of evolution the transition is made to what many have called the “posthuman,” bridging the discontinuity between humans and machines.[3] N. Katherine Hayles has provided the most useful diagnosis of the posthuman condition in her pathbreaking volume, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. According to Hayles, the posthuman view holds that consciousness is not the effect of a gathered, unified entity but is rather a distributed phenomenon. It “configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” And most importantly, the posthuman condition understands the body as simply a prosthesis we have learned to use, capable of being extended or replaced by other technological prostheses as they develop. In essenceMost importantly, “in the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”[4]

The posthuman is manifest in the cyborg. For both Hayles and Haraway the critical figure of the cyborg is not just a referent to the inventions of technoscience. We are all cyborgs, with no choice but to live inside the material and imaginative apparatuses making us cyborgs. These critics use the cyborg as a figure for exploring the material, technological, and imaginative apparatuses that construct and ground our situations, shaping us as subjects. For Haraway the cyborg captures the ways in which “fact and fiction, rhetoric and technology, analysis and story-telling are all held together by a stronger weld than those who eschew taking narrative practice seriously in science—and in all other sorts of ‘hard’ explanations—will allow.”[5] Like Latour’s Janus-face, the cyborg has been a useful device for preventing us from falling prey to nature/technological determinism on the one hand and naïve social construction on the other. Haraway, who has a much deeper agenda, tells us she is engaged in an exercise of civics, aiming to unravel these layers of construction, mutate the narratives, and reshape the apparatuses for producing what counts as “us.” Haraway’s cyborg is a figure for exploring those inventions, whom they serve, and how they can be reconfigured. The aim of her project is to be in power-sensitive engagement with other materializations of the world.

For Hayles, the conjunction of technology and discourse in the cyborg is crucial. Were Hayles’the cyborg only a technological object, it could be confined to such technical fields as bionics, medical prostheses, and virtual reality. Were the cyborg only a product of discourse, it would be of interest to SciFi aficionados, without carrying wider cultural and political importance. Manifesting itself as both technological object and discursive formation, the cyborg partakes of the power of the imagination as well as the actuality of technology; it is both a product of technoscientific processes of production and a signifier for those processes themselves.

For Hayles, Aas for Haraway, for Hayles cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. Hayles describes this figure as a marginal one, recalling Latour’s figure of Janus: “Standing at the threshold separating human from the posthuman the cyborg looks to the past as well as the future. It is precisely this double nature that allows cyborg stories to be imbricated within cultural narratives while still wrenching them in a new direction.”[6]

While the possibility of wrenching cultural narratives in new directions is exciting, I am wary of claiming too deep an impact for this kind of study. In practice Hayles’ work takes the form of fairly traditional literary analysis, privileging narratives over technological objects. What can this kind of criticism do to shape our possible posthuman future in desirable ways? Can we really, as Hayles and Haraway propose, engage this subject appropriately and effectively by exposing the narratives and discursive frameworks that sustain it?

Because Hayles would like to have the cyborg located in the world as well as in words, foremost on her agenda is the necessity of critiquing the dominant narrative handed down by the cybernetics tradition initiated by Shannon and Weaver but most fully articulated by Weiner and his heirs up to the present such as Kurzweil and Moravec: the view that information is disembodied. One of the central threads of discourse constructing the posthuman, according to Hayles, is the notion that information consists of a pattern independent of a specific material medium, capable of being rewritten into different substrates. Hayles shows how this notion grew in tandem with deep concerns about preserving the liberal humanist subject dear to the creators of the first wave of cybernetics. Cybernetics was envisioned by scientists and engineers such as Weiner, McCulloch and their colleagues at the Macy Conferences as a way to maximize human potential in a chaotic and unpredictable postwar world. They wanted to insure human beings a position of mastery and control removed from noise and chaos. The vision of the posthuman emerging from the work of Moravec, Minsky, and others, Hayles has argued, simply reinscribes the liberal humanist subject—conceived as a rational, self-regulating, free, and autonomous individual with clearly demarcated boundaries and a sense of agency linked with a belief in enlightened self interest. For those convinced that this view of the subject underpins a sense of manifest destiny to dominate and control nature—a view detrimental to women; to other, particularly non-western cultures; and to other life-forms—engaging the techniques through which the posthuman is emerging offers an opportunity to contend for a different vision. Rather than simply acquiescing in a view of the posthuman as an apocalyptic erasure of human subjectivity, the posthuman can be made to stand for a positive partnership among nature, humans, and intelligent machines.[7]

Hayles does not delve into the details of how that partnership between intelligent machines and humans might evolve. She has instead pointed to resources other than cybernetics for generating narrative alternatives to treating information as disembodied. Her main resources have been those of the so-called second generation cognitive sciences, the sciences of the embodied mind.[8] Rejecting Cartesian assumptions of a disembodied mind, Antonio Damasio,[9] Francisco Varela,[10] and other neuro- and cognitive scientists have shown that human consciousness is not localized in a set of neural connections in the brain alone, but highly dependent on the material substrate of the biological body, with emotion and other dimensions as supportive structure. Similarly, philosophers George Lakoff[11] and Mark Johnson[12] have argued that metaphors for embodied interactions with the world are the sources of higher level representations of language and thought. Carrying this idea further Hayles applauds Andy Clark’s notion of extended mind, where body boundaries are treated as fluidly intermingled with technological affordances, and she adopts Clark’s notion that we are cyborgs: “not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbiots”[13] Like Clark, Hayles argues that in the world of smart appliances it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins.

Haylesand other critics seek to preserve the “human” in the “posthuman” future by arguing that information—to be information at all—must be embodied, and specifically that it must be embodied in a human agent/interpreter (however one might want to construe “the human”). But here we encounter what seems to me another dilemma. For just as second generation cognitive scientists have emphasized the embodied mind, so second generation builders of artificial intelligence, robots, and autonomous agents for the last decade have recognized embodiment as crucial to the design of intelligent agents. In fact, they have already moved on from cybernetics to deploy the very cognitive science models that Hayles is using in her critique of their project.

In agreement with the views of Damasio, Lakoff and Johnson, Rodney Brooks has made situatedness and embodiment the two fundamental principles of his construction of humanoid robots.[14] But while Brooks agrees that humanoid intelligence must evolve through embodied interaction with the environment and other creatures, he sees nothing mystical about carbon-based matter. Brooks writes, “My own beliefs say that we are machines, and from that I conclude that there is no reason, in principle, that it is not possible to build a machine from silicon and steel that has both genuine emotions and consciousness.”[15] This statement hints at the powerful technical advances in computing over the past decade, along with rich new ideas about the nature of computation, and amazing progress in both biotechnology and nanotechnology. Brooks’ view, not only representing those of AI scientists and engineers but also rapidly becoming the view we all silently share, fuses perspectives from computing, communications technology, biotechnology, and nanotech into a powerful new technoscience. In this view, there are only assemblages of machines, whether in the domain of consciousness, intelligence, or other biological and material systems; and these constructions are all to be understood as different forms of computation. According to this view, the world is a collection of machines—indeed, a computer.[16]

To emphasize: second generation AI researchers such as Brooks are all in accord on the question of our posthuman future: it is happening. Yet Hayles’ cyborg critique, waged through discourse analysis rather than technological practice and based on cybernetic models a decade out of date, is, to paraphrase a recent reflection by Bruno Latour, “running out of steam.”[17] At the same time, there are huge and pressing questions and concerns arising out of contemporary AI work that call out for investigation and perhaps intervention. For instance, opinions differ about the technical goals to be achieved, the means for reaching them, and the place of humans in a future heavily populated with intelligent agents. Not everyone on the frontlines of robotics research shares Moravec’s optimism about mapping neural structures with sufficient completeness and migrating consciousness to other media, such as silicon. Danny Hillis, designer of the world’s fastest computer, the Connection Machine, believes that we may never be able to understand and map natural intelligence into a wiring diagram. Nevertheless, for Hillis this ultimate limitation does not imply that we cannot engineer an artificial intelligence eventually superior to human intelligence. Hillis argues that intelligence is really an emergent phenomenon, a complex behavior that self-organizes as a consequence of billions of tiny local interactions. This conception of intelligence leads Hillis to predict, “We will not engineer an artificial intelligence; rather, we will set up the right conditions under which an intelligence can emerge. The greatest achievement of our technology may well be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering—that allow us to create more than we can understand.”[18] From this perspective the future direction in question is not elimination of the human but co-evolution with artificial agents.

In this (last) stage of evolution the transition is made to what many have called the posthuman, bridging the discontinuity between humans and machines.[19] N. Katherine Hayles has provided the most useful diagnosis of this condition in her pathbreaking volume, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.[20]

For both Hayles and Haraway the figure of the cyborg is not just a referent to the inventions of technoscience. We are all cyborgs having no choice but to live inside the material and imaginative apparatuses making us cyborgs. They deploy the cyborg as a figure and a site for exploring the material, technological, and imaginative apparatuses that construct and ground our situations, and shape us as subjects. For Haraway the figure of the cyborg captures the ways in which “fact and fiction, rhetoric and technology, analysis and story-telling are all held together by a stronger weld than those who eschew taking narrative practice seriously in science—and in all other sorts of ‘hard’ explanations—will allow.”[21] Haraway tells us she is engaged in an exercise of civics, aiming to unravel these layers of construction, mutate the narratives, and engage the apparatuses for producing what counts as “us.” The cyborg is a figure for exploring those inventions, whom they serve, and how they can be reconfigured. The aim of her project is to be in power-sensitive engagement with other, admittedly not impartial, versions and materializations of the world.

Katherine Hayles is similarly motivated in her exploration of the posthuman. Like Haraway, for Hayles cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. The conjunction of technology and discourse is crucial. Were the cyborg only a product of discourse, it would be of interest to SciFi aficionados, but would not carry wider cultural and political importance. Were it only a technological practice, the cyborg could be confined to such technical fields as bionics, medical prostheses, and virtual reality. Manifesting itself as both technological object and discursive formation the cyborg partakes of the power of the imagination as well as the actuality of technology; it is both a product of technoscientific processes of production and a signifier for those processes themselves. Hayles argues that “Standing at the threshold separating human from the posthuman the cyborg looks to the past as well as the future. It is precisely this double nature that allows cyborg stories to be imbricated within cultural narratives while still wrenching them in a new direction.”[22]