Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape: Part One: Embracing the Posthuman

The authors in this volume are rethinking one of the dominant metaphors of our time: the notion that digital information is disembodied. This urge to rethink stems from the quickening pace of an ongoing reconfiguration of almost all aspects of technical practice, as well as modes of communication and interaction, through smooth and unbroken articulation with intelligent machines: the transformation of the human into a new construction called the posthuman. N. Katherine Hayles has diagnosed 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. ¹

These developments have raised the specter—feared by many, celebrated by some—of the end of humanity. The fear that technological developments associated with computer technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and (more recently) nanotechnology will succeed in displacing humanity through an evolutionary process leading first to a cyborg/human assemblage, and ultimately to the extinction and replacement of the human altogether, has been with us at least since the writings of André Leroi-Gourhan in the 1960s. ² These ominous early speculations have been repeated in various forms throughout the intervening years and have been given added substance by authoritative figures such as Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, who titled his April 2000 Wired Magazine essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us: Our most powerful 21st century technologies —robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species." ³ Sounding a different note, Ray Kurzweil, an AI researcher and recipient of numerous awards (including the 1999 National Medal of Technology for his inventions in the area of text and speech recognition), has put a celebratory twist on this story with detailed timelines and imaginative narratives of how the posthuman transformation will take place over the next decades: by 2040, he predicts, fourth-generation robots will have human capabilities; and by 2099, human thinking and machine intelligence will have merged, with no meaningful distinction left between humans and computers. ⁴

Kurzweil's enthusiastic prognosis has been challenged by critics who do not hold that human intelligence can be modeled on or ultimately subsumed by machine intelligence. These objections have been of two main types. Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, for example, have argued that while computers might perform comparably to human intelligence in some limited areas, the essential qualities of human intelligence need not fear being equaled or overtaken in a posthuman future of the sort that concerns Joy. ⁵ Principal reasons for resisting the comparison and reduction of brains to computers have been the physical limitations on buildable computers—despite the enormous successes of the past two decades—and the differences in architecture between the human brain (conceived as a computer) and computing machines. This class of objection becomes even more pertinent as we approach the end of the "silicon era" when increases in processor power are predicted to...