No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom

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Someone forgot the spandex on their mo-cap suit.

“There is no way I want to stay merely human.” – Kevin Warwick

“The disappearance of the body will not just result in the exit of ‘the meat,’ but also likely to go will be parts of our identity, our pleasures and desires.” – Mischa Peters

Amongst those interested in the intersections between human beings and technology, Kevin Warwick needs little introduction. A British pioneer in the field of robotics and cybernetics, Warwick has spent the last twenty-plus years pushing the boundaries of what it means to be ‘human.’ He has surgically implanted himself with various computer chips and transmitters, allowing him to achieve a variety of effects such as remote manipulation of simple machines such as lightswitches and doors by thought alone. More radically, he has with the cooperation of his similarly implanted spouse managed to electronically transmit physical sensations directly into another person’s nervous system. He hopes the result of the latter project will eventually lead to a form of technological telepathy, or “thought communication.”

Speaking bluntly, Warwick’s research leaves me scared shitless. This could be the atomic bomb of our era, except that where the bomb had the potential to destroy us physically, the technological advance Warwick heralds could lead to our cultural and experiential annihilation. I skirt the perilous edge of hyperbole with such statements, so bear with me a moment longer as I attempt to explain myself. Here is an excerpt from the FAQ on Warwick’s webpage (I’ll provide the link at the end of the blog):

“Will this technology [neural transmitters] change the way we communicate?

I feel so. At present our method of communication, speech, is very slow, serial and error prone. The potential to communicate by means of thought signals alone is a very exciting one. We will probably have to learn how to communicate well in this way though, in particular how to send ideas to one another. It is not clear if I think about an ice cream are my thoughts roughly the same as yours – we will have to learn about each other’s thoughts. Maybe it will be easier than we think, maybe not. Certainly speech is an old fashioned, out dated means of communication – it’s on its way out!”

Consider the implications of this statement. Already, due to the intercession of media, we live in a more globally homogenized society than ever before. While the eccentricities of regional spoken and textual communications are worn down by the memetic viruses of the internet and the cinema, we have at least the silent spaces in our skulls within which we are alone. In that moment between thought and expression we may have to shape what we wish to say to suit another, but the thought itself can remain as idiosyncratic or conformist as we are inclined. To learn another’s thoughts, to reshape the way we think has the potential to be the final death of difference.

As Mischa Peters aptly summarizes, most proponents of techno-organic hybridization “hope that the posthuman will eradicate some of the lesser traits of the human subject, such as dichotomizations, whether according to gender, race or class, or the infamous mind/body split.” Yet, when one considers how most cultures function in this world, the posthuman is less likely to be “queer, cyborg, metamazoan” than it is to be the ‘perfected’ Caucasian heterosexual. Homogeneity of this type is vastly more efficient than the panoply of ethnicities and orientations we have now. And of course, there’s a good chance might soon no longer care about the loss of such basic differences.

Cybernetic enhancements to human brain capacity and our perceptual mechanisms suggest the elimination of those cognitive limitations against which humanity has defined itself. Since the human brain contains something like 300 megabytes of information (roughly 0.0004% of my current hard drive storage), imagine how we might think with the storage and processing capability of a computer. Or rather, try. It is literally impossible for us to conceive of how something so many orders above us thinks; it would be less like a dog attempting to imagine how we think as it would be a dog trying to imagine how God thinks. Popular media that deals with the addition of computer storage to human brain tissue tends to shy away from these questions for this reason; in Johnny Mnemonic we see a dolphin raised to the level of a human genius, but human enhancements are limited to weaponization and data-transfer.

In her discussion of such basic ‘upgrades’ Peters quotes Elisabeth Grosz: “The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘container,’ the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges and contours are ‘osmotic’ – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange.” I have little fear of this purely physical experimentation (a la the Great Machine of Brian K. Vaughn’s Ex Machina), because it lacks the potential for direct alteration of our minds. But once the transmission equipment which makes it possible is within us, the door is irreversibly open.

Whether we are held down by our governments and implanted with GPS-trackers and thought monitoring devices, or become schools of likeminded fish who from birth have never had a chance to think alone, or indeed ascend to another plane of comprehension, I want none of it. I hope to be long dead, not lingering, when we come to Warwick’s evolution.

Warwick’s Webpage: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/
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[EDIT: I've just noticed that the class is going to be looking at Warwick's webpage in a few weeks. Regardless, I'm sure I'll have no shortage of other things to say about the man's work in light of the readings/screenings that week. Or I could just talk about Screamers that week instead.]

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I liked them better when they just squeaked.