The Best Lit. Review You'll Ever Read. :) A History of Transhumanist Thinking and the Future of Machine/Human Consiousness.

The computer programs that humans use can be considered symbols in a complex alphabet, and the internet its language. This language is perpetuated by far over a billion people on Earth already, and an internet connection is all one needs to become a participating speaker. Humans are not the only speakers in this intricate language. Software applications known as web bots patrol the internet, performing tasks a human could never take on alone. Spimes will change the way we interact by applying information from the web into the physical world. Never in our past have humans created machines that function with such useful or destructive artificial intelligence, interacting with billions of people everyday. Web bots have revolutionized our commerce, politics, entertainment, theft, and online communication networks that compose the massive collection of different cultures exposed to the internet.

Everything we have ever associated with human behavior must be reconsidered and redefined within the context of bots. These bots analyze, create, collect, and distribute inconceivable amounts of data and respond to human or bot-produced stimuli, facilitating a vast array of desired outcomes by the people who use them. The untrained observer cannot distinguish between internet bots and other humans, and eventually the lines between human and computer program will become as inconspicuous as has the written word.

How will the new humans be defined in this interaction in cyberspace? My research focuses on the implications that cyberbots have on our concepts of individuality and anonymity of personhood stretch bring the imagination to a vision of transhumanism: a boundless accumulation of human creativity and knowledge that seems to assemble itself in the vast encyclopedia of the internet.

Nick Bostrom, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, and director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, wrote a descriptive paper, A History of Transhumanist Thought, that outlines the philosophical traditions leading up to ideas of human enhancement.
Enhancing human biology through technology is not something new, and Bostrom points out that philosphers such as Nietzsche believed that humans would overcome their very-mortal biological state and become something beyond human, as they already had developed technology even in that time that could extend human life far beyond average natural death. This is an important component for a pro-tranhumanism argument: death has always been the ultimate source of suffering, and we have always searched for ways to alleviate it. An idea that has been in opposition to transhumanist thinking is that there is a natural order, a gift from God that should not be disturbed, Bostrom writes. This is one of many origins of anti-transhumanism including the anti-technology based Luddites, others who fear military domination through technology, and Marxist thinkers concerned that high-tech machines will be used for domination over the working class by Capitalists. Bostrom calls these thinkers the "bioconservatives", who believe that human enhancement would create far too many problems than it would alleviate.
I cannot summarize everything in this article, but the important concepts to know are that history is packed with attempts to live longer (thus the development of modern medicine) and in the 21st century, as we create new technologies very rapidly, essentially two different schools of thought have arisen in response: those who oppose the idea of extreme biological enhancement and combination of human and computer, and those who believe it should be avoided for a variety of reasons. Of course, let us not forget the majority of the world's population that is not apart of this discussion, let alone aware of it at all.

From a technologically "conservative" standpoint, such as that of Francis Fukuyama, biotechnology is a problem. In his book, Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama says that "...the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human behavior and thereby move us into a posthuman stage of history". (pg.7) Getting closer to my research questions, Fukuyama addresses that biotechnology is not a series of tech advances that exist only in medicine. Indeed, the brain is increasingly affected by these advances, and the mind does not exist without the brain. The most important aspect about biotechnological breakthroughs is that they revolutionize the understandings and capabilities of the human brain, and thus the human mind. This means that our understanding of a mind's identity and personhood will be radically different as the brain becomes mapped and computer parts impose on our brains in order to enhance its natural capabilities. The areas of anthropology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and neuropharmacology and plenty of others will become more sophisticated. "All of these areas of scientific advance have potential political implications, because they enhance our knowledge of, and hence our ability to manipulate the source of all human behavior, the brain." (pg.19), Fukuyama writes. This sentence is somehting that both tranhumanists and those opposed to it will agree on. However, it is the way they percieve it, to be either more beneficial or more harmful to our species, that separates them.
Fukuyama is not alone in this view, many other respected thinkers such as George Annas, Lori Andrews, and Rosario Isasi, all bioethisits, have proposed that inheritable genetic modification be considered a crime and ask that legislation be put into place to stop it. (Bostrom,2005)

One of the most famous people in tranhumanist thought is Ray Kurtzweil (http://www.kurzweilai.net/) . There are tons of articles on his website from a vast array of thinkers outlining the tranhumanist agenda. Kurzweil has consistently been apart of the discussion since as early as the 1960's. In an article posted on his website entitled, "Why We Can be Confident of a Turing Test Capability Within a Quarter Century", he describes the technologies that will bring machines closer to artificial intelligence and closer to human-like behavior. A computer's ability to understand, translate, and create language that passes a Turing Test (the proposed test to demonstrate computer intelligence) is one the the most hurdles to jump when it comes to creating artificial intelligence.

A.I then, will be the most revolutionary accomplishment that relates to my research. That is, the more sophisticated A.I gets, the more blurred the lines between human and computer consciousness become. Another key idea that Kurzweil discusses is that technology progresses exponentially instead of linearly. Elizabeth Eisenstein has described how different technological revolutions, such as the invention of the printing press, have completely shifted cultures into new realms of existence. Once a new technology is introduced, different frames of cultural consciousness are able to flourish. If technology is indeed increasing in its complexity, availability, and abundance at an exponential rate, then the future will consist of technological advances beyond our control , yet we would be completely integrated with it; we would become the machine and the machine would become us. In this article Kurzweil points out that computers can already in 1999 machines could guide missiles, play ping-pong, recognize faces, play chess, and a plethora of other things. That was ten years ago. In 2006, George the chatterbot was recognizing patterns in language and responding with remarkable accuracy. Computer software is marketed that can recognize human speech patterns and translate them into another language. Igor Aleksander, in his book World in my Mind, My Mind in the World, says that machines can be used to understand biological consciousness in an "uncluttered" way. He describes the virtual brain (which he claims will surely develop) as "a malleable vehicle with which to ask questions such as, under what conditions does it sustain being conscious and what is it to be unconscious but still functioning?" (Pg.1) This will have huge implications in the human brain, because it could reach the point of being unconsciousness technically, yet still "plugged-in" to a computer and thus still interacting in the web, the ultimate shift in a state of consciousness.

While researching the different approaches to my research, the future of the human identity and machine identity, every aspect of both, I have noticed that this is something that is extremely inter-disciplinary; in order to understand the implications that tech developments will have on human psychology, interaction, identity, and behavior, social scientists must have an understanding of new technologies, and those developing and programming transhuman-able technologies must understand the effects they will have on humanity. In my readings, there seems to be a gap between the social sciences studying this and the life and physical sciences developing new technology. One can find plenty of articles dealing with philosophy of this subject, however, there are few writers (that I have found) that discuss the implications of A.I, biotechnology, etc. and that are up-to-date with new inventions. I believe this is because new technologies develop so quickly.

In my research, I will focus on new tech developments as they happen, and use philosophical reasoning, and approaches from the social sciences as well as understanding how technologies function (to an extent :)) in organization and how that will affect human/machine identity concepts and abilities. I will not be doing ethnography, but rather, reading all of the relevant information, developing my own ideas, and integrating both into the digital ethnography research project. My research will probably be presented at the end of the project because it deals with questions about the future of humanity in regards to the technologies we present in the rest of the project, and other new technologies described by transhumanists and those opposed to transhumanism.

Cyber technology and the human identity: Warping human identity as the concepts of human and cyber robot begin to blur

There is no doubt that with the invention of the internet came a new way of predicting the future of human and machine. The idea of humans being mixed with technology (not a new concept) was not limited to the same tangible existence that humans have always had. I just recently read a ton of articles related to the topic of posthumanism, artificial intelligence, and cyber technology, and the effects on human/machine identity/consciousness/reality and I will have a concise literature review by tomorrow. One article, A History of Transhumanist Thought by Nick Bostrom, philosophy professor at Oxford University and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, summarizes much of the earliest ideas of human transcendence into a radically different species, the word first coined by Julian Huxley. Bostrom supports transhumanism and delivers the arguments of those opposed to the idea of a superhuman organism, mainly biological enhancement instead of merely treatment of certain ailments, although one should the difference between the two, if there are any reasonable ones.
Definitely explore Nick Bostrom's site, if you want to see some excellent philosophical arguments about the importance of transhumanist ideals.

The Journal of Evolution and Technology is a great source for this subject as well. I found a great article written by Kurmo Konsa, Tartu University, Estonia, entitled: Artificialisation Of Culture: Challenges to and from Posthumanism.

Konsa focused on something very important to my own research focus, that is, How do computer-simulated environments and the addition of computer programs that can mock human consciousness and intelligence affect the future of human identity? Just as important, how will the progression of computer "intellectual" ability affect machine identity in cyberspace and the physical world? There are no doubts that these realities are merging with each other more fully with every new tech development. Ray Kurzweil, along with plenty of other scientists, describes this situation as an exponential growth, non-linear technological progress. (See Below) Konsa went into detail in this article by discussing the concept of culture in a globalizing world in which all cultures are intruded upon by others. That is, if one can even describe culture as a "thing" to describe, which would require a kind of observable separation from "other" cultures. This is becoming extremely difficult to do with globalization and many social scientists propose that it is not in the ever-changing spirit of anthropology to stick with previous paradigms confined to the physical environment of culture.
Konsa states that: "Along with scientific development, it has become irrelevant to distinguish between metaphysical nature and culture" (pg.6) because both are understood as form of information processes. He goes through the "bottom-up" approach to "artificial culture": trying to recreate culture by using computer simulation and "top-down" approaches which fist focus on larger cultural situations and describe them using the environments in which they are enacted. For my questions, the most important point of this article was that cyber culture will become something infinitely more variable and complex than anything that can be created in the physical world because of the nature of the web.

Ray Kurzweil, famous for his career-long support of transhumanism (eventually posthumanism), has plenty of articles explaining the exponential growth of technological invention and which technologies he believes will come to expand and when. On his website, http://www.kurzweilai.net/ there was one of many articles addressing the issue of consciousness in machines and the effect on both human and computer perceptions of reality. One such article, "Will it be Consciousness"? talks about the future of consciousness in machines assuming that the technology will allow for interaction between subject and environment as indistinguishable from human and vice versa. Assuming it will happen, the existence of seemingly human machines will have enormous implications; the effects of such a blurring of consciousnesses will be enormous. I will continue this discussion in a literature review later today, so stay tuned.

PBS Special on the Cyborg Revolution: This is part of 1 of 9. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=beyond+human+part

No Sense of Place/Youtube and You: Effect of electronic media on the understanding of self.

Wesch's description of his research in 2007 in the YouTube community of Vloggers points to a collective feeling of humanity and personhood, yet at the same time the act of vlogging can be understood as a "loose" tie to those one is communicating to. I say "to" because much of the time, importantly in this research, it is not that people are communicating "with" others, which suggests a more mutual form of interaction. Instead, this media allows for a feeling of shared human experience much like the feeling one gets when watching a reality television show or delving into the personal lives of celebrities. The exciting range of emotions that come with sharing deeply personal and private thoughts are attainable without having to risk loosing one's public "face", the way others see them and their actions.

I read chapter 2 of Joshua Meyrowitz's book "No Sense of Place", in which he discusses what he refers to as "medium" theory in the context of media environments and social changes. This theory is "a more historical and cross-cultural approach to communication technologies" (pg.16)
and understands the importance of the characteristics of a particular media itself rather than only focusing of information conveyed via certain media. I love his analogy between the study of the industrial revolution and the new electronic media now so pervasive in our everyday lives. Meyrowitz says: "Few who have studied the effects of the industrial revolution, for example, would claim that the only important things to study are the specific goods that the new machines produced".

This analogy is great because it looks at electronic communications media today and relates it to something that we still study in the social sciences using more of the "medium" theory. Social scientists must apply an integrative approach to understanding cultural and societal changes related to new digital media, just as they have for every major technological revolution that has taken a new place in history. In both of these readings it is argued that as new media are applied in the world, they don't just simply replace other mediums of communication, but they create something entirely different, which must be studied on those new terms of interaction, yet still understanding how they got there in the first place (a holistic description).

Most importantly for my research is that by looking at the history of technological change, and thus media development, we can see that with each revolution comes drastic changes in communication and culture, and that the next media to come along is remarkably more complex than its predecessors, integrating them into a "database" of collective human knowledge (that was only for the the educated). Now, our media technology has so much surpassed everything we had before, that nearly anyone has access to all of our knowledge. This is not something that could about if we simply invented fresh new media tools and said "good day" the old ones. It IS something that comes from a collective, historical building of media technology that integrates what we knew before and morphs it all into something that fits our most recent developments.

"Ambient Intimacy" and Media as Interaction

I recently read an article by Clive Thomson in The Hareld Tribune with the headline "Web Ushers in Age of Ambient Intimacy". I thought it was a fantastic peek into the new cultures of online communication using new media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, both apart of a rapidly expanding universe of websites created almost solely for the purpose of documenting the things you want to share about yourself and those in your life, and sharing that information with the rest of that network, and not unreasonably the rest of the world. This kind of communication has created such a unique realm of emotions, that come with with sharing personal information and constantly enveloping oneself in the online lives of other users, that psychologists have given it (one aspect of these type of interactions) an appropriate term: Ambient Intimacy". I say it is appropriate, because it describes a feeling of closeness between people that may not ever meet in person and, as an interviewee says in his article, "It drags you out of your own head" when one feels the need to tell online friends how they are feeling at any moment, and this can conjure up emotions of intimacy with humanity in general, much like a person hallucinating on LSD can feel extremely insignificant, loved, understood, and intimate with the universe all at the same time.

Casey Man Kong Lum explains in "An Overview of Media Ecology" that this dynamic array of emotions that come with constantly saturating oneself with the personal thoughts of others comes from and is perpetuated by the environment of certain media and the media of a given environment. That is, the behavior of people in any environment is heavily influenced by the constraints of the media they are using, both in that there are technological boundaries and cultural boundaries that define our behavior and perceptions, and internet interaction is no exception to this rule. Internet media tools have been superimposed onto the web, created in the image of already existing social structures in the physical world, and they have also been created as an adaptation to their natural evolution after being integrated into the web. That is, it is obvious when looking at the kinds of media tools on the internet, such as Facebook, that they originally had some place in the pre-internet world, and functioned in that context, morphing into new forms and adapting to culture change as the years went by. It is also apparent that once these tools were put online, humanity naturally morphed to adapt to this new media and fulfill it's natural desires, and as always, changed these tools again to further their adaptation. And so, this is a way of understanding how media, which comes from a human need or desire and is made in some particular context/s, changes culture, which in turn changes the media again continuously. Something very important for us to understand is that an exponential growth of communication technology has occurred throughout human history, as Lum pointed out, and everything humans have developed in the past few decades has absolutely dwarfed every other media we have created in the thousands of years of human technological evolution.

Post Human Anthropology and the progression of cyber ethnography

Whitehead gives the details about an Ethnographic project he did, in which he and Jeff Fields created a MySpace project with visual art and music from a "band" they called Blood Jewel. This was the most unique account of ethnography that I have read and it was appropriate for introducing the Post Human anthropology that Whitehead writes about. Anthropology will certainly need to redefine the pre-internet ideas about culture, the "field", and ideas about the individual. Whitehead mentions on page 12 that the focus of their video, SpeedKilla, which portrays a mix of governmental violence from police, violence from Grand Theft Auto, and some from the individual shooter at Virginia Tech, was to convey a message about violence that is different from the frequent representation of individuals as the psychopaths. However, he wanted to show that these "fetish sexualities" laced with violence are not just "stemming solely from the psychopathy of individuals rather than the cultural milieu of the United Sates itself." Pg. 12

In my own ideas about the nature of ethnography, I had always assumed that the ethnography of today is something like Whitehead describes in his article, in which the ethnographer becomes the object of study as well, through their own experience, and understanding of a culture by sincerely becoming part of that culture. The "I am one of you" that Whitehead refers to is something very new to ethnography and it requires a sincere "becoming" of the people and interactions that the researcher studies. I think this is an approach that is necessary in order to look at the interactions between people online as well as offline because it forces the anthropologist to feel the motivations of others for themselves. Of course, this can only be true if the researcher actually is sincere about what they participate in and how they do it.

David Silver, in Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: 1990-2000, describes the progression from early cyber ethnography interest to the paradigm in the year 2000. Silver says that at the early stages of public internet, there were plenty of pessimists to criticize the web as the end of the real, in-the-flesh, meaningful human relationship. There were others that saw it as a tool for more rich discussion, which is what it has become. As the communication tools that are used on the web get more integrating and elaborate, the more our individual selves, and even our cultures, become more dynamic both offline and on, and more split into different realms, when before they was a physical realm, and everything was tied to that in a very bounded way.

Chapter 10 from The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler: My take on Benkler's ideas here.

http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-10.htm

Above is the chapter (10) I am reflecting on, from The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, Yale.

Benkler has a sound argument here. He provides plenty of evidence in response to claims (today and years ago) that the internet will have a mostly negative effect on human social behavior. I especially appreciate the many studies done in the earlier days of internet, when it was not so clear as to how it would affect us, that hypothesized a decrease in local social interaction (family, friends, etc.) with increase in internet use. These were found to be wrong in the end about most of what they hypothesized, and instead we now find that the web has broadened the possibility of becoming a much more dynamic personality without sacrificing certain face-to-face reputations. It is mind-blowing to understand that, if preexisting social connections are not disappearing altogether but are instead dynamically modified, then there is a cultural phenomenon taking place via the web that might call for a need to modify the idea of Culture as well. The social sciences have categorized material and non-material components in culture, but until the invention of global media technology, the most complex non-material culture that could exist distributed less information since it's invention, than the internet can produce in only a brief moment.

I think Benkler was also trying to make an important point that the internet is not the first technology or means of social change to be scrutinized by pessimists. Every other technological and cultural revolution has been criticized as devolution of humanity and loss of certain "innate" traits that make our species special, usually by those unaccustomed to the new development (previous generation) and of course those who fear change for whatever reason; I think it is commonly due to fear of losing a belief system that is difficult to adapt to the new circumstances.
In regards to my own research which includes web bots, artificial intelligence, and the shift from an easily identified human presence to something as complex as a computer program, I feel that adaptation to internet technology is not a choice. It will not disappear from the Earth, and therefore it is crucial that we harness the internet and technology to come for the entirety of the species, in excelling our understanding of each other and our potential to become intelligent and morally adept within a world community.

Some important questions in reference to this article is about Benkler's idea of "Human Community": To Be Announced

A reflection on the article Virtual Ethnography by Christine Hines

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9525221/Hine?secret_password=qpbbu5ew2t4j408ir93

This entry is referring to the article above on Virtual Ethnography by Christine Hines.

Hines presents some very pragmatic ideas on how to approach ethnography in such a recent, uncharted environment as the internet. Although it seemed that much of her writing on the historical aspects of ethnography were a bit redundant, it was important that she built up a context for her ideas on how digital ethnographies should be conducted. One of the most difficult hurdles is in reexamining this new media on its own terms instead of referring to mental schemas we have already formed (pre-internet or by tradition), on how people should interact and what technology is useful. It would be more fruitful to understand that never has humankind seen such communication, and therefore human identity, relationships, and ideas etc. will too be like almost nothing we have seen before. The renaissance was a cultural and intellectual revolution, the industrial age was technological progress, but none of the revolutions before now have had All components of cultural and technological change so easily attainable, rapidly progressing, until the internet.

In digital ethnography I think it is extremely important to evaluate the reasons for which certain media are adapted and some are discarded. This could shed some light on HOW the cultures connected are changing and if and how there is a "superculture" emerging within the web since it is not constricted by space or time (unfathomable until just recently) It is also crucial to focus on how this web of information will affect future generations' overall knowledge about the world.

Hines' most important acknowledgment is that anthropology and any other field studying the internet, and arguably almost any other social construct that has been affected by this technology, must adapt the ethnography or study to fit into this intangible sphere of reality. I agree with Hines that a virtual ethnography will necessarily have to be extremely dynamic and multi-disciplinary in order to be accurate.

Final Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYU6UItthY