Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.
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A recent issue of ESPN The Magazine has an article on athletes with prosthetics and some commentary asking what really is the difference between various sorts of technological enhancement in sport. See ESPN - ESPN The Magazine - Let ‘Em Play and the photo gallery at ESPN - ESPN The Magazine - Photo Gallery.
Hat tip to Gregor Wolbring at ESPN Magazine focus on Athletes and Prosthetics « Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno, Synthetic bio, NBICS.
These looks interesting - new prosthetic hands that allows for greater control of fine motor skills. See New Prosthetic Hand Has Grip Function Almost Like A Natural Hand: Each Finger Moves Separately
Sentient Developments points to a special report in IEEE Spectrum on the current state of prosthetic arms. See IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: Prosthetic Arms with video here.
I’ve been wondering whether South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who runs with carbon-fibre prosthetic legs, would be competing at the Beijing Olympics ever since I saw a news article about him a year to eighteen months ago. It appears now that he won’t be there, even if he makes the qualifying times.
See: Pistorius’s unfair advantage keeps him out of Olympics | Athletics | Guardian Unlimited Sport
Hat tip to Andii over at Nouslife: Pistorius’s unfair advantage -the cyborg prosthete.
It’s an interesting question - how much enhancement should an athlete be allowed? Obviously, things like spectacles and contact lenses are allowed, as are various operations to fix/improve weak spots in a physique (e.g. replacing broken tendons) or corrective eye surgery. But something like taking performance-enhancing drugs or blood-doping isn’t. It seems like it’s going to get harder to differentiate between therapy/enhancement in sport as time goes on.
NPR ran a programme on Pistorius and enhancement in sport back in May last year. You can listen to it at: NPR : Prosthetics in Sports: Disability or Advantage?
The article Wired: The World’s Most Advanced Bionic Arm précises the work being done to create “an artificial human arm that acts, looks and feels to its user like his native arm, and to do it with astonishing speed by the end of 2009”.
I can hear the Six Million Dollar Man theme music in my head as I’m reading it.
Firstly, a (mini) colloquium on Media and Religious Authority on Tuesday, which included some of the Virtual Theology colloquium participants from a while back, along with Heidi Campbell. A good time to catch up with people, to meet Heidi in person for the first time, and to start to thrash out some ideas I’m interested in relating to various dimensions of religious authority in comic book and graphic novel genres.
More about it at:
Then Friday and Saturday I participated in the Metanexus/Tyndale-Carey sponsored conference New Perspectives in Science and Theology. Heidi (The Technologized Other: Considering the Posthuman and Prophetic Technorealism) and I (Image-bearing cyborgs?) were the opening speakers on Friday, and I got some good questions and comments after my talk (and over the weekend) that will help to shape a few areas that need tighter definition and reflection. And gave me some ideas for at least one other paper to write.
And that’s what I like about presenting at things like the two events this week. It gives you a chance to start a conversation about your work, and to make connections to other work that you haven’t made before. Doesn’t always make answering the questions being asked any easier though 
Books on the go at the moment.
New Perspectives In Science and Theology Conference will be held 27-28 July 2007 at the Bible College of New Zealand in Auckland. It’s being organized by TANSAA (Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa Auckland) and Tyndale-Carey Graduate School, and is a Metanexus initiative.
The conference speakers cover a range of specialties: Physics & Origins of life; Biology; Theology & Biblical Studies; Psychology; Media and Digital Technologies.
I’m presenting a paper entitled “Image-bearing cyborgs?â€, picking up some of the strands of hacking, hybridity and hope.
Click on the poster for more details.
A lot gets written about the ultra-hi-tech prosthetics (Greenflame · The World’s First Powered Ankle) and ‘cyborg’-implants (Greenflame · Mind Over Matter) but this (relatively) low-tech approach to finger replacements looks interesting. See: Gadget Lab - Mechanical Fingers Grant Grip: No Batteries Needed.
In another of those areas where traditional boundaries become contested, scientists are working on developing a synthetic blood substitute for medical emergencies. (BBC NEWS | UK | England | North Yorkshire | Scientists create ‘plastic’ blood)
I wonder how this ‘blood’ will be considered by those communities that attach a special significance to human blood.
Technology Review: The World’s First Powered Ankle has an article on a new prosthetic ankle that functions in such a way as to add energy to walking, helping to reduce the effort required to use the prosthesis.
See also: MIT’s Robo Sapiens page and Greenflame » Robot avatars and other such things.
A while back Lindsay over at Random Murmurings pointed me towards the podcast of the ABC’s “All in the Mind” radio programme, and in particular this episode, All in the Mind - The Brain Computer Interface (2 December 2006). The episode looks at how technological developments, particularly in digital implants, might aid those with motor neurone disease and similar conditions.
The episode is especially interesting because includes excerpts from the paper co-authored by Nicholas Chisholm about his experience of locked-in syndrome and his observations on medical decision making and ethics from a position of complete lack of voice and power. It makes for very scary reading. The full text of the paper, co-authored with Grant Gillett of the Otago Bioethics Centre in Dunedin, is available at: The patient’s journey: Living with locked-in syndrome — Chisholm and Gillett 331 (7508): 94 — BMJ.
The issues presented connect closely those also raised by Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell in several of their publications where they argue that those who are being “helped” by technology are left out of the consultative loop, and become merely tools used by those promoting the technology. They also note that ethical guidelines are also often determined by those with little or no personal experience of the issues being faced, and again those with that experience are not consulted. See:
Michael Spezio (neuroscientist and Presbyterian minister) is another voice who is concerned that the optimism articulated by transhumanists and techno-progressives about solving issues of disease technologically with brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) fails to take into account those who are being “helped”. (Spezio, M. L. (2005). “Brain and Machine: Minding the Transhuman Future.” Dialog 44(4): 375-380. (Link))
In the BMI world, conversations proceed, press releases go out, stock losses are assessed, all without noticing the very real presence of humans in our midst who have taken our species’ first steps into BMI. Both advocates and opponents appear to already know the outcome of BMI, and in these imagined knowledge scapes, the research participants who are the true BMI explorers remain blurry figures, faceless and voiceless and powerless to make any contribution. (379)
He notes that,
While the questions are necessary, the form of speculative minding used to sketch possible answers serves largely to obscure rather than clarify the true benefits and harms likely to result from any recommended policy. Remaining wholly or mainly in imagined relation to imagined individuals with BMI means treating such individuals always as distant third persons, really as manipulable objects of one’s own story. No matter how strongly one professes concern for a person or group of people, if that concern emerges from and is elicited by wholly one-sided constructions of those people, the chauvinism of such one-sidedness will always overshadow the concern. (378)
Reducing things to “issues” or “problems” to be solved distances us from recognizing the flesh and blood human beings involved - “others” who have let become things rather than persons.
Various links related to convergent technologies (nano-, bio-, information technologies and cognitive science):
A good example of some of the current research that is leading towards “augmented intelligence”. Ultimately, the robotic system will pick up the human user’s intentions and then use its own artificial intelligence to achieve that goal. I like the non-invasive approach which differs from other approaches such as BrainGate. More at ScienceDaily: Researchers Demonstrate Direct Brain Control Of Humanoid Robot.
Mark over at Reflections… wanted some more details about last Friday’s talk. So here are some links to related things:
All these things contribute to the sense the traditional boundaries are being lost. Human life is now found in the borderlands between what used to be clearly separated categories in the world.
The Wired web site has a new interactive bionics feature that allows you to find out more about technology being used therapeutically within the human body. Everything from artificial knee joints through to neural implants of various sorts. Focus is upon mechanical, digital and nano technologies. See Wired - Interactive Bionics Tour.
In her article, “Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture”, sociologist Brenda Brasher continues the conversation about cyborgs and their role in society by arguing the metaphor of the cyborg may provide a useful avenue for critical and constructive engagement with technology and technoculture.
As technological incursions into daily life increase, the cyborg may become a key metaphor for those soon to comprise the pioneer generation of third millennium society. To the extent the cyborg accurately represents human selves as affected by techno-life and thus reliably orients us in the world we inhabit, this development could be deemed a positive one, albeit one that entails considerable ambiguity. As Haraway has noted, the cyborg is inherently pluralistic. Rather than employing the foundational Western dualistic strategy of identity that achieves definitional clarity through a hierarchical contrast of paired terms (male/ female, human/beast, self/other, white/black), the cyborg incorporates dualism within itself by insisting upon an integral identity between people and their material environment. Presuming an inseparable connection between the self and other, the cyborg offers a metaphoric platform upon which complex human identities might be developed whose connective links could stretch out like the World Wide Web itself to embrace and encompass the world. Because it directly faces and accepts the material components of human life, the cyborg as a root metaphor for contemporary human identity offers the capacity to encourage a responsible awareness of and interaction with the material world.
Full reference: Brasher, Brenda E. “Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996): 809-830. (Available online here)
Could Christianity adopt the metaphor of the cyborg in such a way as to provide similar theological engagement. Certainly the cyborg’s materiality might provide the link to an incarnational engagement, as might the idea of Jesus Christ, both human and divine, as a type of cyborg. I like the idea of the inseparable connection between self and other. And perhaps the imago Dei captures a hybrid nature. See also Greenflame: Re-imagining Christ as Cyborg
A few years back Peter Lineham pointed me in the direction of the various series put out by Icon Books. Recently I’ve been reading the occasional book from their Postmodern Encounters series, including most recently Donna Haraway and GM Foods. All of the books in the series are fairly short and summarize a particular person’s interaction with a contemporary issue. In this case it examines the work of Donna Haraway on the new world of technonature, cyborgs, and the blurring of traditional boundaries between humans, animals, and plants, and between nature and machine (primarily using Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience). Good thought provoking stuff.
The author, George Myerson, has written another volume in a series, Heidegger, Habermas, and the Mobile Phone, which I hope to get hold of in the near future.
I’ve been skimming through cognitive scientist/philosopher Andy Clark’s book “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” over the past couple of days and came across this bit near the end of the book.
The drive toward biotechnological merger is deep within us—it is the direct expression of what is most characteristic of the human species. The task is to merge gracefully, to merge in ways that are virtuous, that bring us closer to one another, make us more tolerant, enhance understanding, celebrate embodiment, and encourage mutual respect. If we are to succeed in this important task, we must first understand ourselves and our complex relations with the technologies that surround us. We must recognize that, in a very deep sense, we were always hybrid beings, joint products of our biological nature and multilayered linguistic, cultural, and technological webs. Only then can we confront, without fear or prejudice, the specific demons in our cyborg closets. Only then can we actively structure the kinds of world, technology, and culture that will build the kinds of people we choose to be.
Clark’s ideas about the hybridity of human beings bears striking similarity to Philip Hefner’s metaphor of humans as ‘created co-creators’. For Clark, it is human beings existing in a symbiotic relationship between human and technology, whereas for Hefner it is the human being as the fusion of biological conditionedness and cultural freedom. Clark’s definition of a cyborg goes beyond the typical Star Trek or Bionic Woman visions:
For we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry.
And this is coupled with the drive to create (seen also in Hefner’s idea of the drive toward self-transcendence being part of nature) where Clark asserts:
By contrast it is our special character, as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt, annex, and exploit nonbiological props and scaffoldings. We have be designed, by Mother Nature, to exploit deep neural plasticity in order to become one with our best and most reliable tools. Minds like ours were made for mergers. Tools-R-Us, and always have been.
Clark’s approach is techno-optimistic, where the benefits of technology outweight the problems. However, he does dedicate a chapter to the perceived downsides of living in a world of where technology is ‘the air that we breathe’. This serves as a useful, albeit brief, starting point for such discussions.
Chapter 1 of the book is available at the OUP web site on the like above. Some interesting ideas, and I like how he clearly reaffirms the place of the body in a technological society.
Interesting interview I stumbled across today. Albert Borgmann and N. Katherine Hayles interview/dialogue
The claim that cyberspace liberates people from the accidents of gender, race, class, and bodily appearance is often made by advocates of electronically distributed education. But to conceal a problem is not to solve it. We have to learn to respect and encourage people as they actually exist. The “liberated” students or citizens of cyberspace, moreover, have to bleach out their presence to that of a person who is without gender, social background, and racial heritage. Otherwise they betray what is supposed to remain hidden. And it turns out that there are loudmouths and bullies in cyberspace as often as in reality. The fuzzed identities of cyberspace, moreover, lend themselves to their own kind of mischief. (Borgmann)
Related links:
Article here on the BrainGate, a device the integrates the human brain with computer systems.
Using an array of hair-thin electrodes implanted in his brain, a 25-year-old quadriplegic man was able to operate a computer, open and close a prosthetic hand, and manipulate a robotic arm just by thinking about it, according to a new study. Such a brain-computer interface may one day help restore movement and communication to people paralyzed from spinal cord injuries, strokes, and disorders such as muscular dystrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
See Mind Over Matter — Wickelgren 2006 (712): 1 — ScienceNOW.
Article I missed when it came out a few months back, but directly connected to the thesis edits for next week.
See Science & Theology News - I, robot? Ethical considerations of cyborgs
Crittenden said cyborgs may provoke humanity to engage in what he calls “self-deselection†— the idea that in replacing parts of our bodies with mechanical devices we will essentially be replacing ourselves with another species. Our technologically based culture is the first step in the descent toward self-deselection, he said.
“Although many scholars see positive uses of the cyborg imagery,†he writes, “I argue that they downplay, or in many cases entirely ignore, the dangers. Dangers that, if they come to pass, are apocalyptic.â€
I’ve been looking at various ways in which people have appropriated Hefner’s metaphor of the ‘created co-creator’ and today I was following up a paper by Anne Kull (University of Tartu, Estonia) that drew parallels between the concept of the cyborg articulated by Donna Haraway and the dual-natures of Christ found in the Incarnation. Kull argues that Haraway’s cyborg and Hefner’s co-creator are parallel stories attempting to make sense of human being within technoculture.
Kull, Anne. “Cyborg Embodiment and the Incarnation.” Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3-4 (2001): 279-284.
From the editorial for that issue (by Ralph W. Klein),
Anne Kull considers the views of Donna Haraway regarding the relationship between human beings and nature in our technological age. Haraway believes human beings have become “cybernetic organisms,” or cyborgs, through the marriage of machine and life. The cyborg has as much affinity with technology as it does with the wilderness. Cyborgs are hybrid entities and have the potential to disrupt present dualisms that set the natural body in opposition to the technologically recrafted body. Nature is a co-creation among humans and non humans, machines, and other partners. The concept of the cyborg makes it possible to affirm our createdness with a new specificity, along with the creativeness of the rest of nature. Since the incarnation of Jesus is so contrary to common sense, it is useful for critical positioning and for destabilizing categories.
Some interesting ideas in there, and Kull uses the idea of the hybrid to link together a whole bunch of ideas that I’d like to tease out sometime. In her paper she concludes,
Deliberately posing as a hybrid creature, Jesus can show the arbitrariness and constructed nature of what is considered the norm(al)—and often, significantly, natural. The borderland of history and consciousness, where crossings are never safe and names never original, allows for differently articulated stories for humanity. (p.284)
While I was reading the paper I was thinking about this image which I’d seen a while back.
Wow. Maybe the commercial spinoff will be a TV you can change channels on without having to move any muscles. See Wired News: Brain Waves Make Robot Move
In a video demonstration in Tokyo, patterns of the changes in the brain taken by an MRI machine, like those used in hospitals, were relayed to a robotic hand.A person in the MRI machine made a fist, spread his fingers and then made a V sign. Several seconds later, the robotic hand made the same movements. Further research would be needed to decode more complex movements.
Picked up a copy of Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids by Sidney Perkowitz this week from the university bookshop. It looks quite interesting and I admit that once I saw the blurb on the back about science fiction movies - just after I’d edited some similar ideas in my introduction - I was keen to get it. From the back,
Robots, androids, and bionic people pervade popular culture, from classics like Frankenstein and R.U.R. to modern tales such as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Terminator, and A.I. Our fascination is obvious and the technology is quickly moving from books and films to real life.
…
Digital People examines the ways in which technology is inexorably driving us to a new and different level of humanity. As scientists draw on nanotechnology, molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and materials science, they are learning how to create beings that move, think, and look like people. Others are routinely using sophisticated surgical techniques to implant computer chips and drug-dispensing devices into our bodies, designing fully functional man-made body parts, and linking human brains with computers to make people healthier, smarter, and stronger.
Anyway, what is interesting in another way about this book is how it’s published. If you go to the publisher’s web site you can order a paper copy, buy a PDF (they have paper + PDF combos), buy a PDF of a chapter, sample a PDF, and search or browse the full text of the book.
Your book, delivered how you want it. Cool.
A few articles out recently that pick up on the potential of nanotechnology for the purposes of human therapy and enhancement.
Popular Mechanics has an article Redefining The Human: The Upgradable You which covers a range of technological developments relating to nanotechnology among other things.
The forever techno-optimistic Ray Kurzweil has an article in the latest Science and Theology News - Trends hint at a golden era of nanotechnology. Kurzweil see technology as part of the process of evolution, and follows the line of thought that human beings are in effect “nature’s technology.”
Then again working through indirection, biological evolution used one of its creations to usher in the next stage of evolution, which was technology. The enabling factors for technology were a higher cognitive function with an opposable appendage, so we could manipulate and change the environment to reflect our models of what could be. The first stages of technology evolution — fire, the wheel, stone tools — only took a few tens of thousands of years.
Kurzweil cites the synthetic red blood cell research noted in the Popular Mechanics article too.
And lastly, there’s an older article at the British Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy that looks at nanotech from within a Judeo-Christian framework. See CBPP - Going all the way? - cybernetics and nanotechnology (Philippa Taylor, April 2004) (and the closely related PDF “From Fiction to Fact: Christian Perspectives on Future Developments in Bioethics: Nanotechnology and Cybernetics” CBPP briefing series: No. 3, Philippa Taylor, Summer 2003).
From this morning’s email a Damaris article on cyborgs. See Culture Watch - Downloads and upgrades: The Cyborg Future by Philippa Taylor (The Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy). This is a reprint of an article from the CBPP Newsletter (Issue 7, Winter 2005/6).
Couple of things of interest this week.
Firstly, Four Door Films have released the rough cut of their 90 minute documentary file “Building Gods” on Google Video. (See Building Gods Rough Cut - Google Video). Haven’t looked at it beyond the first few minutes but it looks like an interesting survey of perspectives on transhumanism. Includes interviews/engagement with Nick Bostrom (philosopher), Kevin Warwick (cyborg), Hugo De Garis (computer scientist), and Anne Foerst (theologian). I downloaded the iPod version and it came in at just over 300MB (ouch!). In the next few days I hope to work my way through it.
Also, I’ve been writing up stuff on different perceptions of technology (and definitions of technology) and in the course of that came back to the following paper. It’s one of the few I’ve seen which goes beyond identifying the gap between the ‘lay’ public’s attitude to technology (here biotechnology) and that of those who make the decisions about the technology. It includes the description of and engagement with some of the concerns raised by ordinary people that came out of individual and group interviews and discussion groups. See
Deane-Drummond, Celia, Robin Grove-White, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. “Genetically Modified Theology: The Religious Dimensions of Public Concerns About Agricultural Biotechnology.” Studies in Christian Ethics 14, no. 2 (2001): 23-41. (There’s a version online here (though with the footnotes removed).
The questions raised and unease expressed by the public
touch on deep issues concerning the nature of human personhood – indeed of human nature itself. It seems conceivable that the intensity of current controversies around genetically modified crops and foods arises in part from the fact that, in their regulation in the public domain, conflicting ontologies of the person are making themselves felt in the politics of every day life. If this is the case, then Christian theological understandings of the person may be of central analytical significance for helping throw light on what has been going on.
Brief article at Science & Theology News - A cyborg explores what it means to be human looking at whether things like cochlear implants threaten humanness and personhood. Includes comments from Michael Chorost (see Greenflame: Hi, I’m Bionic) and Anne Foerst (Greenflame: God In The Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity And God).
Radio documentary from Radio Netherlands that was broadcast in the “Windows on the World” slot on National Radio last night. There’s a Real Audio stream on the following page RNW: Man and machine, part 1. Here’s the blurb from that page,
From the myth of Pygmalion down to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to films such as Metropolis, Blade Runner and I Robot, we can see a rich vein of creativity sparked by our fascination and our horror at the idea of artificial life.
The latest issue of Dialag, a Lutheran theological journal, has a collection of articles on technology and the human being in it’s latest issue. And that issue is now their current sample issue - it wasn’t a week or two back when I was getting ready to interloan it - with PDFs of the articles available for a while. See - Blackwell Synergy: Dialog, Vol 44, Issue 4: Table of Contents.
Fitting right into today’s writing efforts is this older (Jan 2005!) article about Markus Giesler who works in the area of high-tech consumer research. The article picks up on some of the themes from my own research, albeit from a business perspective.
“IPod and user form a cybernetic unit,” said Giesler. “We’re always talking about cyborgs in the context of cultural theory and sci-fi literature, but this is an excellent example that they’re out there in the marketplace…. I have seen the future, and it is called the cyborg consumer.”
From Wired News: My IPod, My Self by Leander Kahney (Wired News, 2005-01-28).
Clothes that clean themselves, help reduce allergic reactions and skin conditions, and are wired for the digital life style may be closer than we think. See Wired News: Cyborg Suits Strut the Catwalk.
Was writing up a section on immersion as one of the distinctive approaches to VR (one of the seven that Michael Heim identifies) and came across these articles. Love the VirtuaSphere (but not sure if I could carry off the Lycra body suit). The VR small and taste articles are also interesting but I think I’d need to see and try out the taste one. Anyway, here are the links:
Great article on one man’s quest to hear music again through his cochlear implant. I’d definitely agree that going beyond mere utility into extra research to improve the overall quality of life is worth it. I can’t imagine a world without music myself. See Wired 13.11: My Bionic Quest for Boléro.
Another recent article on introducing technologies, formerly associated with therapeutic, to assist the unimpaired in new ways. Another example of intentional cyborgism. See Wired News: Hearing Aids for the Unimpaired.
HearWear -Â The Future of Hearing, a new exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, shows off trendy deaf-tech prototypes like gadgets that can filter out annoying noises and memory glasses that replay the last few seconds of conversation — handy for wearers who might have missed someone’s name.
Article on the use of robots for the care of the elderly in Japan. One of the systems talked about here, the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL), is effectively an exoskeleton that augments the person’s muscle strength. In effect it creates another form of cyborg, not dissimilar to those seen in the cinema, video games and comic books.
See: STUFF : Japan looks to robots for elderly care.
A researcher at Japan’s University of Tsukuba, Sankai has developed a robotic suit designed to make it easier for elderly people with weak muscles to move around or for care-givers to lift them.The sleek, high-tech get-up looks like a white suit of armour. It straps onto a person’s arms, legs and back and is equipped with a computer, motors and sensors that detect electric nerve signals transmitted from the brain when a person tries to move his limbs.
When the sensors detect the nerve signals, the computer starts up the relevant motors to assist the person’s motions.
See also:
Nice piece here on a guy with a cochlear implant, Michael Chorost, and the positives of being cyborg. See: eastbayexpress.com | Culture | Hi, I’m Bionic | 2005-06-29
“When you become a cyborg, you’re no less human than you were before,” he says. “You’re differently human.”
He’s written a book, Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin : June 2, 2005). I’ve now added it to my wish list.
See the following related link: The peril and promise of mix-and-match biotech : Is a proliferation of human-animal mixtures good for either? by Matt Donnelly in Science & Theology News.
Article about Matt Nagle (25) who is a patient in a trial that seeks to prove brain-computer interfaces can return function to people paralyzed by injury or disease. Basically the device in the brain identifies the brain activity associated with moving limbs and responds electronically effecting a response in the world. See Wired 13.03: Mind Control.
Cyberkinetics, a Massachusetts company, has launched the first human trials of their new BrainGate neural interface. This won’t be for console cowboys trying to make their big cyberspace break, but for the physically disabled needing communication and activity.
Therapy, Enhancement and the Augmented Society
This is also another step forward in the ongoing process of figuring out how to use digital technology to augment human abilities. This is not the only research on how to make machines “listen” to nerve signals. And while the point of the research is (quite appropriately) figuring out ways to assist the disabled, the history of adaptive technology shows that augmentation for therapy usually leads to augmentation for enhancement.
My fieldtrips for my research often tend to be to the movies. Movies such as the Matrix trilogy, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Star Trek: Nemesis and today I, Robot serve as a source for thinking about human nature in relation to technology.
In her book on technoculture Lelia Green comments on the increasing number of contemporary narratives that are being told about machine-human interaction.
Cyborgs and science fiction form an area of popular culture which seems to have increased in importance as technology has become more integral to our cultures and our communities. This burgeoning interest in narratives about the future, and about parallel universes, may indicate a desire to understand and explore the present. In speculating about others we are also speculating about ourselves.
Furthermore she says,
Through films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix, our society tells itself stories about what it is to be human in a world where humans are increasingly influenced by, and dependent upon, technology and technocultures. Here the myths of loss and longing are played out in the context of technologically driven futures, where machines can feel feelings and have roles with more humanity in them than the �people� characters do.
I’d definitely put “I, Robot” in this category.
Issues to do with dehumanization, human-machine fusion, technological dependence, the essence of humaness, the relationships between the concepts of body, mind and soul, and the place of love all come out in this film. More so, I think, than did in the slower-paced and “deeper” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (though there are moments in that film that are equally provoking).
I enjoyed “I, Robot”, both as an intellectual vehicle for my research and as a story. The ending of the movie with it’s “what next?” questions leaves it open for continuing discussion. Hopefully, they don’t make a sequel.
Wired Magazine Issue 12.07 (July 2004) was themed around “Human Being 2.0″ with lots of interesting articles related to “I, Robot”.
Spent an hour and a half this afternoon watching the documentary Synthetic Pleasures (1996) by Iara Lee as part of my research and also to get some discussion questions for Monday’s lecture on being or becoming human in Western technoculture. Couldn’t get hold of a copy in NZ so ordered it in from overseas post-haste.
IMDB’s plot summary says
Conceived as an electronic road movie, this documentary investigates cutting edge technologies and their influence on our culture as we approach the 21st century. It takes off from the idea that mankind’s effort to tap the power of Nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging, an artificial reality. Virtual Reality, digital and biotechnology, plastic surgery and mood-altering drugs promise seemingly unlimited powers to our bodies, and our selves. This film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions.
That’s a fairly good summary. In places the movie drags a little and 8-9 years on it’s looking a little dated but there’s some really interesting material in there for discussion. What it means to be human, on the place/role of the body (consumer/consumed), on dreams of immortality and freedom from the flesh, as well as the bizarreness of people in general.
Read the rest of this entry »
Just finished reading Rocks of Ages : Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould as part of an ongoing project evaluating models of science and religion interaction. It was one of those books where after the preface and the next 8 pages you knew pretty much all you needed to know. Still 200+ pages later it’s done. If you want to read a book about how science and religion relate to separate things (facts vs. values), basically shouldn’t talk to each other and science has the last say, then this is the book for you. Still he painted the “two-worlds” argument with verve even if he reuses the old cliches like “science tells you about the age of rocks; religion tells you about the rock of ages” and “science tells you how the heavens go; religion tells you how to go to heaven”.
Knocked that off and I’m on to Elaine Graham’s Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture which looks far more promising. Flicking through her bibliography I noticed that she has cited not only a lot of the printed material I’ve been working with but also many of the electronic sources too. Sort of reassuring to know someone else has walked a similar path as well.
I also find it interesting that both Graham and Noreen Herzfeld (In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit in their respective engagements with theology and technology spend significant effort using cinema, television and literature as primary sources. In thinking about this last year I wrote
These contemporary narratives highlight what Lelia Green calls �the widespread fascination with the interface of biology and technology, and the potential for fusion between the two.� It is in these type of stories that society explores the boundaries of what it means to be human as well as trying to distill the essence of humanness. Questions about how to live and how to be human are addressed, as well as the hopes and fears of people who are increasingly dependent on technology and the cultures it creates. There is, she asserts, almost an enthrallment with the question of how much technology compromises the essentially human.
I’ve only dipped into Graham’s book but already the synapses are firing as I’ve skimmed through it.
Another observation is that a lot (most?) of the people writing in the areas overlapped by culture, technology, sociology and religion are women - Brenda Brasher, Margaret Wertheim, Susan J White, Anne Foerst, Noreen Herzfeld, Elaine Graham, Lelia Green, Jennifer Cobb, Nancey Murphy and Sherry Turkle to name just a few off my bookshelf.
Anyway, only another million books or so to go after this one so I’d better get cracking.
