On Becoming Technological
A nighmarish technological implant that can help us to become more human
Laura Di Summa – Lucas Introna
“Notturno metropolitano visto in sogno ‘ artwork Papero Rosso. Papero Rosso is represented by Galleria Bonioni Arte, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Becoming cyborgs
Behaviorism begins with the observation of the other in order to draw conclusions about her inner life. Behaviorism has been criticized largely because it omits the profoundly subjective nature of the life of consciousness. It is precisely this subjective ground of consciousness that we take as fundamental to our being ‘human’, rather than our being ‘machine’. The fact that our own existence always matters to us, or concerns us, transforms us from intelligent machines into human beings.
As human beings we are concerned to stand out, to the world facing us, as very particular unique beings rather than as simply another one of many. It does not matter how large our computer, or how sophisticated our neural network programs are, human intelligence is fundamentally tied to the human way of being. It is outside the domain or world of the machine or the artificial. This did not stop the technologists. For them all beings are fundamentally in the order of the machine.
The mind is increasingly a publically available digital mind that remembers where we might want to forget
Artificial intelligence (AI) was conceived of as just another way to insert supposed ‘human’ intelligence into the electro-mechanical world – for humans to become more fully the machines that they already are presumed to be. So started the quest of AI; the other reproduced as a machine (more perfect and available to us at our command).
The initial impact was euphoric, but this did not last. Because machines did not have a subjective life of consciousness (they did not exist) they did not have the horizon of intelligibility to discern the significant from the insignificant. They did not have the tacit know-how to make sense of the explicit knowledge in their databases. They merely functioned in idealised worlds created by the programmers in their laboratories. They became behaviourist caricatures, good for entertainment (think of Big Blue) but without the tacit know-how of even a new born baby. Nevertheless, the artificial is still with us – and we need it.
Our CCTV cameras augment our eyes. PDAs help us remember. Mobile phones enable us to communicate wherever we are. Video surveillance cameras are eyes pointing at other eyes without really moving as real eyes do. What is the nature of this non-human ‘seeing.’ It is a non-human eye with a humanitarian purpose, the purpose of taking care of us, keeping our towns safe. In the domain of the artificial our human capabilities and incapabilities are becoming more technical. We are becoming more and more cyborg – a human/machine hybrid – by the day. Our looking is now also a non-human looking, as is our memory, our communication, and so forth. Indeed one can question whether we can be who we are as politicians, business people, teachers, writers, policemen, etc. without our extended machine capability. Our way of being, our very existence, has become entangled with a technological world in which it has become difficult to say where we end and where our machines begin.
Consciousness, awareness and forgetting
First of all there is the question of definition, the fine line that divides consciousness and awareness. We might think that one implies or follows on from the other, but the problem of the consciousness is related to another problem, that of the unconscious. There is a whole dimension of ourselves that is impossible to perceive directly even though we may be aware of it through a cultural historical perspective, as reflected in our art, our writing and our ways of doing.
Consciousness is like a line that we are able to distinguish depending on whether or not it goes over or under our full awareness. But what is full awareness and do we really need, or want, to be aware of everything? We might want to argue that everybody would be better of, that it would be better for our society, if we were all fully aware. But have we considered what it might mean for us? As our lives are increasingly being ‘recorded’ in the digital world we are more and more confronted with our digital selves, and hence with our past. Celebrities find pictures of themselves on the web in situations they thought they had left behind and would want to forget – instead they remain in the perpetual now of our collective digital awareness.
Through this digital awareness our lives are also becoming increasingly transparent and available to others, and even to ourselves. We get categorised and sent mail because our buying habits are being recorded and analysed. We are forever recorded in the digital mind when we are online. Our activities are increasing visible through logs, websites, blogs, etc. Digital cameras and digital video capture us and these digital images may start to circulate in the digital awareness in ways that we no longer control.
As the mountain of ‘aware material’ increases, forgetting, no longer being aware of this or that matter or event, becomes more and more difficult. And forgetting is important to our human way of being. It is part of our survival that we can forget bad experiences and not remain crippled by them. We all make mistakes that we need to forget if we are to ‘move on.’ In the digital world forgetting is becoming more and more difficult to do. Our collective digital awareness no longer allows things to simply slip away into our unconscious being. The mind is increasingly a publically available digital mind that remembers where we might want to forget.
Two kinds of memory and two kinds of times
Our brain is a mobile memory much like a PDA. Such a claim agrees with the theory of Edelman, who describes memory as something that constantly checks itself, something capable of manipulating events, that connects things to multiple solutions, solutions that might be totally fake, solutions that might disappear in a short while.
We live in the age of the technological mood. In this technological mood problems show up as immediately requiring technical solutions. This technological mood frames the way we see, and make sense of the world
However, there is an important difference between our memory and that of the PDA. The best way to understand this is with regard to time. For the PDA time is a linear stream of events, with specific beginnings and specific ends. It is a matter of quantity. Time, to be machine time, must be quantified (when will the meeting be and how long will it take?). The PDA’s time – machine time – is also chronological; it ends when it breaks. For the machine there is no connection between an hour ago and later on today except in terms of chronology. Our human sense of time is very different. Our ‘here and now’ is full of the past and already full of the future. We find ourselves in the ‘now’ already with some level of awareness of where we have just been and already with some expectation of where we are heading. Our past, present and future blend into each other in such a way that we cannot say where the one ends and the other begins – it is not linear or chronological. Our time is different because we perceive it as a quality, an attribute; it is our feeling of being or non-being in our situation. Our memory has times and moments all mixed together. Our memory is an improbable collection of images; it does not simply record our activities, it lets us grow. But what happens if our lives are becoming increasingly defined by machine memories and machine time? When people make appointments with us in our digital diaries, enter our memory, without our mediation (as happens in groupware systems)? What happens when we are being conceived of as available (or not) in machine time but we actually live our busy lives in human memory and human time? Will machine time and memory transform our human time and human memory?
The technological mood and the post-human way of being
Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, famously claimed that “the essence of technology is nothing technological”. Technology is not merely an artifact or our relationship with this or that artifact; rather, the artifact – and our relationship with it – is already an outcome of a particular ‘technological’ way of seeing and conducting ourselves in and towards the world. We live in the age of the technological mood. In this technological mood problems show up as immediately requiring technical solutions. This technological mood frames the way we see, and make sense of the world. As the already technologically oriented human beings that we have become, we will tend to conceive of communication as a problem requiring a technological solution, hence the proliferation of communication devices.
Of course we communicate more but what is the nature of this communication? Technologically mediated communication reframes what communication is. Is communication becoming equivalent to being able to make a connection? Furthermore, once in place technology allows the world to ‘show up’ in particular ways. You are a different person to me with a mobile phone than without one. With a mobile phone you become revealed, or show up, as ‘contactable’, ‘within reach’ as it were. As we incorporate our technical devices into our everyday world we become more and more immersed in our technological mood. It seems more and more obvious that this is the way the world is and should be. As technology reframes the way we understand our activities and ourselves we become increasingly framed and set-up as technological beings. Indeed we could say that technology has become the a priori horizon of meaning that conditions the way the world is represented. Can we escape this technological mood? Do we want to? Have we not already become post-human?
But what is the relationship between the real and the virtual? I cannot kill you but I can delete you from the database – or can I?
Virtuality and Community
As our lives become digitized we enter a virtual domain. Virtuality allows for mimesis. With mimesis we can mime – ‘as if’ it was happening. Once you appear in the database, as a record, I can ask you questions; query you (virtually) without your involvement. I can change your status by simply updating your record, without your involvement. I can interact with you, get to know you, without your involvement. Many people know me through my website and my virtual wanderings in the digital space called the internet. I have two lives (maybe more) – an embodied situated life and a digital virtual life. Sometimes these ‘parallel’ lives support and confirm each other, sometimes they disturb and contradict each other.
As we become increasingly virtual (a virtual community and a virtual society) we need to reflect on what this means. Clearly it is not helpful to suggest that the virtual is ‘superficial and trivial’ and the situated embodied co-presence (often referred to as the ‘real’) is ‘solid and significant.’ For some their virtual lives are very significant because they share significant concerns (an illness) with their virtual partners; for others it may just be a form of escape, like chatting with a stranger. Nevertheless, we can no longer avoid being virtual. But what is the relationship between the real and the virtual? I cannot kill you but I can delete you from the database – or can I? As our life possibilities become enmeshed in the virtual world how should we treat these virtual strangers? Can we talk about them as mere representations when people’s identity becomes intimately tied to their virtual lives? When my ‘I’ becomes co-constituted through the virtual, the virtual becomes like the real. We have become a virtual/actual hybrid.
As technology becomes an increasing part of our make-up we need to rethink many of our categories – self/other, real/virtual, human/machine, and so forth. We can no longer treat the machine as the alien. The alien is now part of us.
