Cyborgisation Concepts: an essay.

In this piece I attempt to outline some of the key concepts in the Cyborgisation field. Hopefully this should provide a good introduction to anyone looking to delve more into the topic.

1. What is a Human Enhancement Technology (HET)?

I class a HET as any tool that dramatically improves the standard abilities of a human. Present day example range from smartphones to medical pacemakers. However, HETs can be classed as technologies thousands of years old, Ranisch & Sorgner (2014) go as far to explain that the first instance of a HET would be fire. Future technologies, which we’re primarily interested in, include wearable devices, bionic/prosthetic limbs and cognitive upgrading instruments.

2. Transhumanism and Posthumanism

As we enhance ourselves with technology, technology is, and is predicted to, become more and more augmented with our biological body. If we look at the transition from mobile technology, to wearable technologies, to potential future bionic technologies it is clear that the technology forms a larger and larger part in how we interact with the world. We need to concern ourselves with the question with when will humans in fact be post-human because of such a high level of technological augmentation.

Or put another way, when will humans have evolved into a new species because of our augmentation with technology? When will we have evolved into the Human 2.0 (Michalczak, 2012) and so no longer be Homo sapiens?

There are a great deal of terms used to describe disciplines devoted to studying the next stage of human evolution, a few have already been mentioned (Posthumanism, Human 2.0 etc) and there are subtle differences between each of these schools of thought. For a more detailed analysis of the disciplines Ferrando’s (2013) paper can be referred to where it is explained that Posthumanism simply considers the next stage of human evolution, however, Transhumanism explains how we get to a Posthumanistic position with the development of technology.

Personally I think Transhumanism is more important in this regard.

The paradigm of Transhumanism was introduced by Vita-More in her Transhuman Arts Manifesto (1984). Expanding upon the key principles explained in her manifesto (that of Transhumanism aiming to improve and extend life), Vita-more explains in 2002 that technology is a key tool that in a large part can replace biological functions as we advance. In light of this she proposes the notion of the Primo-posthuman (2002). The idea is a “theoretical and practical full body prosthetic, which has been developed to answer questions in cellular breakdown, disease and the finality of death”. This idea, of course, is still very much in development over ten years on, however, the theory behind it is very compelling. Below is a table extracted from Vita-More’s work highlighting potential differences between what we would call the biological body of the 20th century and the future body of the 21st:

Transhumanism has evolved somewhat since Vita-More’s 2002 work and its modern day meaning is explained in a short video by the British Institute of Posthuman Studies (2013); where even this institution uses trans/post affixes interchangeably.

This clip is unfortunately part of a failed Kickstarter.com campaign to create a series of short videos to explain transhumanism to the general public, however, this first clip does a great job of splitting down the transhumanism paradigm into three main ‘supers’. Each of these supers is specified to have ‘extraordinary transformational potential’. The three supers are explain below:

Super Longevity: in other words making humans immortal. Of course the prospect of biological immortality is tremendously controversial, however, Aubrey De Grey is cited here in the video as a key scientist (or gerontologist to be more specific) in this field who has points out that ageing is the largest killer of people in the world. Why would we not try and stop the largest killer of people in the world? De Grey (2004) reasons that it is immoral for us not to invest in anti-ageing technologies now and so make the choice of inevitable age related dying on behalf of the future.

Super Intelligence: with technological augmentation comes tremendously improved cognitive capabilities. This super will be expanded upon in a later section concerning Kurzweil’s theory of a Technological Singularity.

Super Wellbeing: this paradigm gained popular attention after David Pearce published The Hedonistic Manifesto in 1995. It is the opinion of this manifesto that the experience of pain is an archaic by-product of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The pathways of pain are explained to have evolved to suit our ancestors past and “their ugliness can be replaced by a new motivation system based entirely on gradients of well-being”. In other words are current nervous system can be replaced with an improved technological one.

3. What is Cyborgisation?

With Transhumanism examined it is apparent that this process of human evolution into a new species will not simply happen over night. Technology augmentation will not get to the stage where we suddenly declare ourselves as ‘Posthuman’; that sounds rather ridiculous. What we need is a supplementary, fluid concept to help illustrate the processes of technology altering what we conceive as the socially constructed view of humanity. This essay is going to call this process Cyborgisation, the sliding scale between the Human and the Cyborg or “Cybernetic Organism” (cybernetic meaning mechanical processes supplementing biological functions); or the species that Humans will evolve into.

The term Cyborg was devised in 1960 by Clynes and Kline (1965) but is more adequately explained in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) as when “two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously problematic: 1.) That between animals and humans 2.) That between self controlled, self governing machines and organisms, especially human’s, models of autonomy”. The blurring of boundaries is extensively important to our needs here to help us understand how the construct of humanity is gradually being eroded over time. As we gradually augment more and more technology with ourselves, replacing biologically what already existed, we will gradually progress ourselves into a new species, which for all sakes and purposes we are calling Cyborg. To illustrate this sliding scale concept between species we can turn ourselves to an original idea presented below called the Human-Cyborg Continuum:

The diagram shows increasing augmentation of technology that goes hand in hand with increasing levels of enhancement. It must be noted that each of these stages are open to considerable debate, however, the general theme of the diagram shouldn’t be dampened because of this. A wearable device gives the same advantages as a smartphone, plus more, more of the time. Bionic limbs promise to provide better utilisation of the humanoid form and medical advances in nano-bots and other such technologies could lead to unfathomable improvements in life expectancies that humans could end up using these technologies for much longer periods of time in a productive lifetime. The final technological category of transcendence technologies promises to take the human mind to unimaginable levels of efficiency and perhaps even beyond the humanoid form; meaning humans are no longer restricted to biological process but more like the speed of light and the processing powers of super quantum computers.

4. Implications of Transcendence Technologies

The logical end point to the Human/Cyborg continuum is when the entire body can be replaced by uploading minds to a machine (Hauskeller, 2012). This idea has been in science fiction for some time gaining popular attention along with the growth of the Cyberpunk genre, with such early works in this genre including the book Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984). In Cyberpunk literature the human body is often referred to as the “meat” (Lupton, 2000) that can literally be cast aside once humans gain the ability to upload their minds into a computer or a so called “virtual world”. It is the full or partial process of a person going through the process of uploading their mind to a computer that this essay dubs Transcendence.

The concept of Transcendence has been described in philosophy for a long time as “a passage to a higher plane of existence” (Piedmont, 1999) this definition works very well because the implications of Transcendence are unfathomable. Dennet (1981) describes a possible story where Transcendence is conceivable, demonstrating its various conceivable consequences:

Step One: a brain is detached from a body but can still control the body from a distance.

Step Two: the body is destroyed.

Step Three: anew body is now connected to the brain. Everything functions as normal but now the person is in control of a new body.

Step Four: a copy of the brain is made, which is then uploaded to a computer and the original brain is then subsequently destroyed. The new body is now controlled by the computer brain.

With the above predicament we have to ask ourselves if the original person now even exists. Of course there are serious identity issues for a person who goes through a process of Transcendence. Let’s assume that the original brain was not destroyed in the above example, and then the consciousness in the computer (as well as the consciousness in the existing brain) will genuinely think it is the real person, but of course arguably the “real” person is still the brain. A solution to this sort of confusion in the future, could, hypothetically, be to keep the mind in a kind of ‘Digital Cryogenic’ (or Digital Freezing) where it doesn’t actually have the ability to think — it is just data — which then essentially leads to backed files of an individual’s whole persona. Pearson (quoted in Hyland 2014) proposes a truly incredible scenario if this were possible where “when you get run down by a bus, it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of your career. You just download your consciousness back into an android and go back to work on Monday having attended your funeral on the Sunday afternoon. That sort of thing. A form a digital immortality.”

Naturally there are huge risks surrounding a future with widespread Transcendence. The security issues surrounding having your actual thoughts saved in an external IT system are unimaginable. There would be the possibility that someone or something could tamper with your mind or simply delete it. Springer (2000) also presents the rather sinister prospect where when a mind is external to the body a person may not only be at risk of being tortured in the physical sense, but also in a mental sense. For example: rape victims are able to retreat into their minds to escape their physical torments, take the possible retreat of the mind out of the equation, so rape of the mind as well as body, and this leads to truly gruesome cruelties. On the other side of the coin, Transcended minds may be able to enjoy the best sex imaginable in cyberspace (Balsamo, 2000). Not only could a mind perhaps be stimulated in many more ways by a computer for pleasure; but a lover would also be able to completely immerse themselves in their partner’s thoughts and may even be able to merge consciousness entirely (Hyland, 2014). If merging consciousness was desirable that is…

Of course these ideas can seem extremely far-fetched, however, they may be closer than we first thought. Scanning a portion of a mouse brain to include all the synaptic details has been possible since 2010 (Medical News, 2010). Additionally, Berger (2013) and a team from the University of Los Angeles have recently proposed replacing a portion of the brain called the hippocampal (that deals with the recall and formation of long-term memories) with “micro- electronic systems that mimic the functions of the original biological circuitry”. The team have subsequently been successful with this method in laboratory settings (Koene, 2014). Essentially once the human brain has been reduced to data it then doesn’t seem that much of a stretch for this data to then be uploaded to a computer — a computer which would be powerful enough to emulate the brain is then expected to be built by 2017 (Hyland, 2014).

5. What is the Technological Singularity?

For the uninitiated, we have now come to the crux of this introduction.

In the 1960s Moore, one of the cofounders of IBM proposed a theory that every two years the maximum amount of power for a computer chip would double. This is an exponential rate of improvement and has held true ever since it was proposed. Today there is speculation as to whether Moore’s Law is a natural law describing the overall rate of technological advancement or whether it is restricted to computer chips, and even whether it will hold true in years to come. A graph concerning Moore’s law is below (Raval, 2014):

As can be seen by the inherent mathematical nature of an exponential curve there could come a point in time where the curve is essentially vertical with an unlimited amount of Technological Advancement in the smallest amount of time; at least to a human perspective (of course the line will never really be vertical from a mathematical viewpoint). This point in time is called the Technological Singularity. Prominent futurologist, Ray Kurzweil (2001), predicts the Technological Singularity will happen round about the year 2045. Kurzweil proposes that the overall rate of technological advancement is exponential, like Moore’s law. Therefore, he stipulates that “we won’t experience one hundred years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like twenty thousand years (at today’s rate)”. Kurzweil goes even further to explain that this rate of technological advancement will become so great that humans will no longer be able to keep up with it, so we will have to improve brain functionality by fusing with machines, and when this happens, we will have reached singularity.

There are of course many critics to Kurzweil’s theory. Modis (2001) calculated that we in fact reached the fastest rate of technological advancement in the 1990s. He reached this answer by explaining that complexity (which is stated to be strongly linked with evolution and so technological innovation) can be quantified in terms of key evolutionary turning points or ‘milestones’ (such as the evolution of DNA) and that each of the milestones fitted a logistic description (not an exponential description) and that forecasts fitted to these milestones create an overall logistic function for the Universe’s lifetime. Modis computes that we are about half way through the universes lifetime so the rate of complexity, and so the speed of evolution is starting to tail off. In other words, Modis argues that humanity has already reached its peak rate of advancement and the rate of which we make progress is now starting to decline, in direct conflict with Kurzweil, who predicts our rate of innovation is only going to increase.

Nevertheless, although Kurzweil might be incorrect in his prediction of the exact date of the proposed Singularity, we can assume that similar effects to a potential Singularity will be felt sometime in the future. Even if technology does not increase linearly we can expect it to continue advancing so we can at least expect to experience some of Kurzweil’s predicted technological advancements by 2145, one hundred years later than initially pinpointed, but this could potentially be in the lifetime of babies being born not to far from now. Don’t we owe it to humanity's future to prepare for the singularity? These technologies include, but of course are not limited to: cyborgisation (the merging of humans with technology), life extension (with the prospect of immortality) and artificial intelligence. Each of these technologies on their own, within a few decades, could develop into having massive repercussions for humanity; let alone if separate breakthroughs were made all at the same time.

Such a future period of innovation can be compared with the industrial revolution. From about 1760 to 1820 there were huge advancements in chemical manufacturing, iron production and a change from wood to coal fuels brought about steam power. Advances in such technologies, combined, influenced every aspect of human life; especially in Western countries like the United Kingdom We can already see how modern day technologies are changing modern day life with the invention of the Internet. This was a key breakthrough and subsequent application in the field of Computer Science, but what will happen when equally big breakthroughs are made in the fields of Nanotechnology, Neurology and Biotechnology? It can be quite accurately presumed that as a species we should be prepared for such eventualities, not only to take full advantage of them but also so we do not blindly stumble across them and suffer unforeseen consequences.

Linking the theory of the Technological Singularity back to the Human-Cyborg Continuum we imagine the same technologies being plotted onto an exponential curve with the end point being when the Technological Singularity could occur as this line appears near vertical.

In this respect instead of trying to predict the very end of the continuum, when the Technological Singularity is likely to occur, we can measure our progress towards this point in time with when we reach each of the technologies highlighted on the continuum. If there are points on the continuum that are key milestones, or obstacles, or even parts that humanity may move extremely quickly through this will be of utmost importance in predicting and providing checkpoints on our progress towards the Technological Singularity.

6. The Question of Science Fiction Inspiration

Another risk related to the end of the Human-Cyborg Continuum, and Transcendence technologies, is the consequences of people actually preferring to stay in cyberspace, where they can shape the world how they see fit, which is obviously juxtaposed to the reality of the real world.

The idea of a mind being lost inside a machine is the exact plot of the Tron: Legacy film. The plot consists of a CEO of a large technology company getting lost inside a computer for twenty years. What compels him to spend time in the computer in the first place is the very fact he can shape the world as he sees fit. He creates a truly dreamlike world and even creates friends to help him create his playground (until one of these friends turns against him subsequently locking him inside the computer that is) (Efthimiou, 2012).

There is no denying here that we are quoting directly here from science-fiction, and of course a reasonable question to ask is: does science fiction have any place in science factual discussion? It is the opinion of this essay that science fiction has an incredible important role to play in helping us to predict and understand possible futures. As Anon (2000) states: “studying science-fiction is just as important to the futurologist as prophecies are to the Anthropologist”. With this is mind, after humans have embedded our bodies with so much technology; some could even go as far as to call us superheroes. Interestingly Detective Comics (DC) has a popular comic book superhero character called ‘Cyborg’.

Considering all that has been discussed previously, it is not beyond the realms of imagination that when we have breakthroughs in biotechnologies we will not then be able to consider creating what we colloquially call superheroes. The human genome has been decoded so is it only a matter of time before we understand it completely and then move onto altering DNA. How long until we are able to create the likes of Captain America (someone optimised to the highest possible natural potentials), The Hulk (someone who can change their bio-physical form through emotional fluctuations) and Wolverine (someone with rapid healing capabilities and enhanced senses)? What then will happen when we have a subset of the population, which do then have the superhuman capabilities, and another subset that don’t? Such a large disparate society would have extreme implications.

These disparate implications, between the “haves” and “have-nots” is a key point explored in the X-Men films, where the majority of society is petrified by the advent of “mutants” who possess a whole multitude of superhuman powers (including controlling the weather, controlling metal and controlling human minds). In this fictitious scenario the mutants are born with these powers so they’re not invented, however, we can envisage a possible future where people could volunteer for these powers whilst others hold back. There are such current arguments at the moment surrounding the use of technologies for GM crops, to plastic surgery and abortions. Of course there will be even more polarised opinions on the creation of biological superpowers, with these opinions not getting rid of the fact that the prospects could still be technically feasible with someone in the world probably going to give themselves superpowers anyway (such is the plot in many comic books). However, in this scenario, unlike the ones just brought to light, this is a situation where one subset of the population has the ability to very easily extinct the others.

Arguably this situation has already come to fruition with the creation of the atomic bomb, albeit this power is not held by individuals, but by governments. What will then happen when an individual has the power to create his or her own atomic bomb? “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” (Oppenheimer, 1944) could be uttered around the world by potentially millions of people.

7. Culture Engineering

In terms of preparing people outside of technology, who do not read (incredibly important) pieces of work such as this, and who do not consider the possibility represented in contemporary science fiction, it is important to focus on the field of culture engineering. This is an umbrella term for the implementation of marketing, politics and philosophy in terms of altering society’s view on HETs (Wood, 2014). This is extremely key, as the culture of humanity will determine what technologies will be developed and also whether they are adopted. If the culture of humanity is not accepting of HETs when they become widely available then scenarios where a great deal of opposition is presented in view of HETs, a disparate society is likely to develop with some people having HETs and some people not; with governmental policy severely lacking in policing HETs are all highly likely scenarios. This is why it is very important for us to understand people’s perceptions towards HETs at the moment and what methods of culture engineering are most effective.

In a practical sense the cultural opinions of technology will also determine from a business standpoint what products are successful and which ones aren’t. A great example of this is the recent failed launch of the Google Glass wearable technology. Although Google Glass does present some huge advantages over existing mobile phones consumers have been largely resistant to adopt the technology. Consumers have highlighted privacy concerns as their major worry and un-comfortableness whilst using it. If Google had carried out adequate research in regards to people’s opinions towards wearing a camera and computer in front of their eyes then they could have addressed these various problems highlighted head on in their product development. A major concern about Google Glass when it was released was that people did not like the fact they didn’t know when someone was recording them or not. People have gone so far as calling this ‘creepy’ (Pogue, 2014) and even banning the device in some places (Gray, 2014). A simple work around in retrospect would have been to add a small LED light to show when the product was recording. Why such a simple feature was never added that really could have potentially saved the product’s launch is laughable and really shows why understanding consumer reactions to new technological products is so important.

Furthermore, the majority of the world’s most powerful nations are democratic, meaning they are ‘governments of the people’. By definition this then means that governmental policy reflects the general consensus of the country’s population, in this case we are particularly interested with the population’s opinions towards HETs and then governmental policy concerning this. The most relevant case study in respect to showing how culture and governments have influenced a technologies advancement and adoption is the development of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) in the 1970s and since. At the time of this pioneering research there was a great deal of opposition, especially from religious groups, who deemed that the development of IVF was morally wrong. If it weren’t for the culture present in Britain at the time and governmental opinion allowing for the funding to be available and the research from potentially being banned, then IVF would not have come been realised when it was. Additionally, if culture was different, then IVF would not be as widespread with nearly 50,000 IVF procedures being carried out in the UK in 2011 alone (HFEA, 2011).

Of course there is the argument that “necessity is the mother invention” (no pun intended) for couples who are unable to have children but there are plenty of other examples of governments getting in the way of technological advancement for good or bad reasons. These include: drones for commercial use and warfare uses, biological genomic sequencing software being banned by the US’s FDA (Seife, 2013) and opposition to Google in the EU. However, with an increasingly globalised society banning a technology in one country can lead to influxes of tech tourism to another. Prime examples of this are fertility tourism with couples from countries resistant to IVF travelling to countries that aren’t and drone tourism with Amazon now developing drone technology in Canada instead of the US (Pilkington, 2015). It is clear that if governmental policy is not up to date with the culture of people then people will still find workarounds. This means that from a governmental perspective, avenues of research going into the topic of ever increasing technological advancement will be of the utmost importance.

8. A Warning on Future Technologies

The UN held their first ever debate on the risks of artificial intelligence in May 2014 and it can be argued that even more high profile debates need to occur in regards to the implications of future innovations. If people such as Richard Seymour (2011, cited in Scott, 2011) are to be believed, the first thousand year old has already been born. Never-mind robots gaining intelligence what if people stopped dying? What are the implications in regards to managing the world’s population? It is the opinion of this essay that we are currently hugely uninformed as to the answers of such questions and that there can be little which is more important than gaining some reliable answers to such queries.

The worst-case scenario is that certain technologies are created in the future which we wish had never been discovered — let alone widely available for the general population. Bill Joy (the founder of Sun microsystems) wrote a seminal essay in Wired magazine, in 2000, considering this subject. In this essay Joy coins the term Knowledge-Enabled Mass Destruction (KMD) relating to the future’s potential catastrophes in contrast to today’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). He describes the fact that Nuclear Weapons, although they have the power to destroy the world, are in reality, only available to a select few and so relatively low risk. This is in contrast to the future where powerful technologies will be available to everyone and so the risk of a worldwide catastrophe regrettably increases. We need look no further than today’s pro-active hacking organization “Anonymous” to see how formidable today’s technology has become at the hands of a small collection of experts carrying out their own personal agendas.

What we don’t want to happen is for humanity to walk into a self-made trap that we cannot escape from. A key theory behind this rather dystopian statement is that of Gradual Replacement. Joy describes the scenario where we allow, and facilitate, machines to make more and more decisions for us as time goes on until we don’t make any decisions at all. For example: at the moment we ask machines the most efficient directions when we want to drive somewhere. When self- driving cars become prominent they will simply take us to our destination. Then the next stage is for machines to recommend and predict where we should go at a certain time. Then due to advanced algorithms, machines will simply take us where we mathematically want to be at such a point in time without us even bothering to make sure if the machine has made a correct decision or not. When such a scenario occurs, we have gradually replaced all the human decision making processes with machine decisions. Following this line of thought to its inevitable conclusion we will then reach a stage where we would have to ask ourselves: what is then left for humans to do? It can be argued that giving our decisions away to machines takes computational power away from our minds to focus on other things, however, what will happen when we invent machines to make decisions for every decision we ever have to make? What will our minds then be left to focus on?

9. Why is this Important?

Bringing this essay back round to perhaps more mainstream avenues of inquiry we can see that by inventing and applying various technologies, without prior consideration, could have profound consequences for a global society that we just cannot predict. A difficult conundrum to consider is: should we say enough is enough in some respects and refuse, as a species to innovate less, in a certain areas of technology? This could plausibly alleviate some potential future risks. In fact De Grey (and Vijg 2014) explains that a key hurdle in achieving his goal of unlimited life extension is not necessarily science at all, but ‘excessive industry regulation’ as a key obstacle to overcome. Should we impose more regulation on De Grey’s work and other such related technologies if we class them as “high risk”?

This line of action may have positive impacts, of course, but it may also have many negative affects. After all, how do we choose which technologies to regulate? Genetically modifying humans could potentially stop millions of people from developing life threatening diseases (from cures for Cancer to Alzheimer’s) are we going to condemn these ill people to death because we are uncomfortable with certain implications of understanding some areas of science in greater detail? So many of today’s technologies are also extensively interrelated meaning that stopping one technology will then have knock on effects on others. For example: if it was decided to restrict investment in computer science because it was felt that AI was just too dangerous a thing to invent, such an action could then have negative implications on other disciplines like biology that uses computer Science technologies to model various experiments.

There is also the question as to whether we can to go through the motions of evolution or whether we want to take control of our destiny — the fact that we are investing in these technologies already and are even asking these questions surely shows us that humanity wants to have as much say in our future as possible (Baylis and Robert, 2004). Lastly, Oppenheimer (quoted in Joy, 2004), one of the key people behind the development of the hydrogen bomb, was quoted in 1945 as stating that “it is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which it gives, is a thing of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are willing to take the consequences”.

10. Conclusion

In summary, this introduction has set the stage to explore the answers to such questions behind the risks of future technology being a doubled edged sword. This is because it is felt that the repercussions of the invention of technologies, on the world’s population, has currently not been fully researched with a great deal of important facts remaining hidden.

These questions relate strongly to finding out the thoughts of the general population. This is because, at the end of the day, it is up to governments, which in turn are elected by the people (in the majority of the most scientifically advanced societies in the world) who will decide whether certain scientific research should go ahead or not. By measuring public opinion to such technologies now, can help inform governments on future policy that represents their population and in turn how businesses can strategize the future in regards to their potential future customer’s needs and wishes. This will also be extensively important to businesses, as it will provide key information in regards to public perception of future technological products that may currently be in the pipeline in large R&D centres around the world. Lastly, through attempting to answer, some, if not all these questions, a model of predicting when a Technological Singularity could take place using the Human-Cyborg Continuum should be analysed. Arguably one can only prepare how to cope with an event with a rough indication of when the event may actually happen.

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