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.
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.
Lots of great stuff here. Can you add links to your references so we can check them out?
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