Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids (review)

At an event called Digifest 2004 in Toronto, I watched uneasily as the keynote speaker, the self-proclaimed "cyborg Luddite" Steve Mann, delivered his talk while wearing eyeglasses that are a combination computer screen and projector. While Mann scanned his computer with one eye, the other acted as a human surveillance camera focused on the audience. The topic of Mann's speech was "existential computing," or, in Mann's terms, "computing that you can live with." He drove his techno-skeptical thesis home by playing with metal pipes and fittings throughout the speech, arguing that even these very basic objects are digital (binary) technology, and that we should get comfortable with the idea that we are, and maybe always have been, digital.

In my opinion, that conclusion is just a matter of taking a metaphor too seriously—much like saying, for example, that a picture of a pipe is not really a pipe. But it is this type of dogmatic "cybernetic" thinking that dominates Sidney Perkowitz's Digital People, a book that takes for granted the idea that all matter is composed of information. From this perspective, Perkowitz skirts some of the most difficult questions about the difference between human beings and "digital people."

Perkowitz asks: "What is our purpose in making artificial or hybrid beings? What are our ethical responsibilities toward them, and theirs toward us? Do we have anything to fear from intelligent and powerful nonhuman beings?" Any reader looking for an answer to these questions (which appear on page 201, toward the end of the last chapter) should steer clear of Digital People. This book is a condensed encyclopedic overview that quite usefully makes clear distinctions between automatons, robots, androids, cyborgs, and bionic humans. Along the way, Perkowitz draws liberally from the well of Greek mythology (Pygmalion), literature (from Frankenstein to I, Robot), Hollywood (from Metropolis to Terminator), and artificial-intelligence research (from Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical duck to Rodney Brooks's MIT robot, Cog). Digital People would be an excellent tool for sneaking a humanities lesson into an engineering class, or vice versa, but my guess is that it would fail to edify either camp. What's lacking is an earnest grappling with some of the hard questions mentioned above. Instead, the reader gets a celebration of human progress (a concept that deserves to be questioned in more than a parenthetical add-on).

My liberal use of parentheses in the paragraph above is perhaps the residue of my reaction to a crucial passage in Perkowitz's book. Regarding the question of whether or not machines can ever be conscious, Perkowitz notes that there is a philosophical stance and a scientific one; in his "(opinion, the answers will come from science, but the philosophical questions are invaluable in pinpointing the issues)" (p. 117). In this way, philosophy is parentheticized throughout the book. For example, on the question of possible adverse effects resulting from bionics, Perkowitz notes that there might be "unwanted psychological outcomes or, expressed more poetically, implantation might damage the human spirit" (p. 101, emphasis added). Perkowitz's attempt to be "poetic" is the closest he comes to being truly philosophical about what it means to be human, which might have led him to consider the possibility that human beings consist of something more than information that can easily be interfaced or replicated in a digital materiality for the sake of "scientific progress."

To be fair, Perkowitz does suggest, on the next-to-last page of his book, that "the very act of making digital people helps us form a clearer image of what we really are as humans." Given the choice, I would rather pursue this question by working with philosophers and psychologists than by spending half my life raising "synthetic children." In any case, I would posit that our underlying motivations to make digital people in the first place tells us more about ourselves than does the action involved in making them. With that in...