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Jacob Piccus Cyborgs: We are them and they are us In his short story Burning Chrome, William Gibson coined the term cyberspace to describe the electronic-consensus-hallucination users experience when they interface with technology involved in the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. The vast majority of people today interface directly with the internet to communicate with each other over various networks which, as time progresses, seem to appear more and more like natural systems, like galaxies comprised of starry dense concentrations of information. When Gibson envisioned technology as one day becoming mankinds extended electronic nervous system he could not have been closer to the truth. 1 Over the past several decades the field of trans-humanism has generated explosive interest among thinkers awe-struck with how quickly mankind has become interconnected with technology. Tech conferences like TED attract minds on the cutting edge of their respective fields in an effort to track the evolution of ideas now occurring at record speed. Many talks draw the attention of millions of online viewers who feel directly or indirectly a part of the most progressive period in human history. Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google and well known futurist, spoke on how technological devices are getting smaller, faster, and cheaper at an exponential rate, doubling their capacity, price performance, [and] bandwith, every year. To put that in perspective, Kurzweil contrasted the processing power of the computer he used as an MIT undergrad so large it took up a whole building, with the average cellphone today. Astonishingly, the phone in ones pocket today is a million times cheaper, a million times

William Gibson, Burning Chrome, .

smaller, [and] a thousand times more powerful than what Kurzweil had used during his stay at MIT; Thats a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar. 2 And this exponential trend shows no signs of slowing down; Kurzweil believes that as early as 2020, blood cell sized devices will literally be able to interface with the human body effectively transforming humans into cybernetic organisms. To many this surely seems more like science fiction than actual science; but Kurzweil is adamant about his predictions, and his views, while controversial are shared by many legitimate academics. Mentioning the term cyborg in casual conversation will invariably bring to most peoples minds the image of a humanoid machine, a hybrid being of entangled flesh and transistors, that scene from The Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger explains in his characteristic accent, Im a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. Science fiction writers are involved in a continual love affair with the idea of cyborgs and have consistently portrayed them as these embodied beings, which often look like real people despite being comprised in part or entirely of inorganic machinery. In addition to providing a wealth of entertainment value, this classic cyborg archetype has thoroughly permeated cultural ideology and in all likelihood inspired some of the research avenues currently being explored by those in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. While still crude by science fictions standards, endeavors such as DARPAs PETman program lend credence to the claim that a reallife cybernetic being might not remain a purely fictional idea forever.3 Given the rapid rate at which technology is currently being developed, one may even find it reasonable to assume that a cyborg of such likeness may indeed become manifest in the not too distant future.

Kurzweil, Ray. "The accelerating power of technology." Ted Talk. TED February 2005. http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html. 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0

If you scoff at the possibility of mankind either becoming or soon creating such a thing as a cyborg, consider the fact that a growing number of thinkers in todays academic community already insist such a transformation has occurred. Truth be told, their definition of what a cyborg actually is varies a bit from the form fit vanilla depiction we have courtesy of popular culture, but only slightly, and the implications to be ascertained from what one may deem the disembodied cyborg are profound. This paper draws inspiration from the ideas of Donna Harraway, Andy Clark, David Chalmers and several others, to contend that the notion of people today being strictly human is outdated. The social, economic, and religious framework which has in the past defined what it meant to be human is crumbling amidst radical technological transformation. The real world cyborg is no Cylon or terminator, but that thing we all are today, these unique beings birthed out of the perpetual feedback loop we have with our technology, out of the co evolutionary dance which occurs daily between human beings and their inventions. In 1960, Joseph C.R Lickliders paper on Man Computer Symbiosis foretold of a future in which the mutually beneficial relationship between technology and mankind would grant new generations novel ways of solving issues relating to mans needs and creative spirit. Licklider likened the coupling of Man and machine to that of a biological symbiosis whereby two dissimilar organisms live and cooperate together in close union. The resulting partnership he wrote enthusiastically, will think as no human brain has ever thought. 4 In an abstract sense, the cyborg is something of an enigma; though it functions as a unified being, at its core the cyborg appears a thing fundamentally comprised of opposites. In A Manifesto For Cyborgs, Donna Harraway notes that even the terms cybernetic and organism

Licklider, J.C.R. "Man-Computer Symbiosis." IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. (1960). http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html (accessed November 28, 2013).

are contradictory; The Cyborg she writes, is a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.5 What makes such seemingly incommensurable concepts work together, she argues, is the constant, near instantaneous feedback loop between humans interfaced with machine. Douglas Englebart and Bill English crafted the first mouse out of wood in 1965 and since then the interface between man and information systems has only become more fluid.6 The touch screen and voice recognition capabilities of todays smart phones are obvious examples of an evolution toward what Marshall McLuhan believed would ultimately transform technology into extensions of ourselves. 7 Such a visionary statement beckons reference to the modern smartphone, which just a century or so in the past would surely have been labeled as nothing less than a magic wand, a piece of witchcraft allowing for near telepathic communication between individuals thousands of miles away. In 1964, McLuhan coined the phrase, the medium is the message, which suggests that when humans interface with a technological device to receive some sort of message, the device takes precedence over the raw data being sent because it is the device rather than the data with which the user is truly interacting. When two people converse with each other using their Iphones, it feels like a real conversation only because the interface is so effective at maintaining a real-time feedback loop between users and devices. The fact of the matter is that the phones rather than the people are doing the actual communicatingthe breaking down of each users voice into transmissible lines of computer code to be sent wirelessly back and forth in real time. Each phone is functioning as a medium for each user, as an extension of his or her consciousness. Todays real world cyborg is thus best defined as a biological entity which

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Harraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs. 207. Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999. 7 McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media; the extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

interacts symbiotically with one or more of these information processing systems, passing, in one way, shape or form, his or her consciousness through it accordingly. Whether or not the mind is a thing limited to that which is purely flesh and blood is a philosophical debate of particular importance when discussing the cyborg. According to Andy Clark, who coauthored the Extended Mind Thesis with David Chalmers, the human mind today is comprised of the complex matrix of brain, body and technology all of which work in unison by means of various feedback loops. 8 Clark writes that the popular image of a cyborg as a heavily electronically penetrated human body is a warped view which has arisen out an ancient western prejudice he describes as societys obsession with our skin bags. 9 Harraway similarly sees communication technologies and biotechnologies as crucial tools quite literally recrafting our bodies, transforming our identities, and changing very ways in which we think and live our lives.10 Both the aforementioned academics describe todays cyborg as being disembodied, or wireless if you will; for these cybernetic beings, technology serves as a means to augment natural processes related to sensory and cognitive function, consequently extending their reach far beyond what has before been possible. In Clarks more recent book, Natural Born Cyborgs, he argues cognitive hybridization is a natural part of what it means to be human, and that we have been designed by mother nature to exploit deep neural plasticity to become one with our best and most reliable tools. Clark writes we are...forever ready to merge our mental activities with the operations of pen, paper, and electronics. 11 Since technology has quite literally infiltrated the environment in which we
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Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural-born cyborgs: minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 26, 9 Clark, 28. 10 Harraway,205 11 Clark, 6, 7

live, our adaptive tendency as human beings is to augment this technology to suit our growing needs. In the same way that writing first allowed ancient man to impart a portion of his consciousness onto a non-living piece of papyrus, perhaps to better remember an idea during a future date, modern information technology has provided the means for a widespread outsourcing of human cognition to machines. The calculator comes to mind as one such instrument which has all but caused humans to relinquish the mental functions of basic arithmetic to an adjunct, inorganic machine which does this thinking at a much faster speed. Search engines have similarly replaced the once tedious task of manually sorting through mountains of data by performing this job efficiently and in a matter of seconds. And word processing programs represent the technologically evolved ancestor of paper, a visual playground in which thoughts can be organized, edited and pieced together without fear of forgetting them. Ever since humans invented speech and counting, a co evolutionary feedback loop has been at play destining mankinds tools and culture to become as much determiners of our nature as products of it.12 Technology itself is changing the human experience as the result of its hijacking our natural environment. Harraway argues that just as culture changed following evolutions revelation that man lacks biological differentiation from animals, a mixing of categories will occur culturally when we realize technology has evolved from us and us from technology. Harraway sees communication sciences and modern biologies as products of the translation of the world into a problem of coding. 13 We have today not only developed technology which interfaces with our own sense organs to reveal previously hidden aspects of our reality, but we have created these new aspects as well. For example, we broadcast artificial
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Clark, 86. Harraway 207

bursts of sunshine,14 or wireless signals through the air and detect them with antennas. While the caveman of the past transcribed his thoughts and visions onto the rock walls within which he dwelled, the cyborg of today records and transmits his consciousness in the form of wireless clouds of data which can be accessed around the globe. Bibliography (other than in class sources) Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural-born cyborgs: minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 26, McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media; the extensions of man . New York: McGraw-Hill. Licklider, J.C.R. "Man-Computer Symbiosis." IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. (1960). http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html (accessed November 28, 2013). Kurzweil, Ray. "The accelerating power of technology." Ted Talk. TED February 2005. http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.html. Clarke, Chalmers The Extended Mind Thesis http://consc.net/papers/extended.html

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Harraway