Human(v)oids

A 2008 study by Stanford researchers ("I Am My Robot: The Impact of Robot-building and Robot Form on Operators") indicates that the design of a robot has a serious effect on peoples' attitudes toward the technology at their disposal. People assembled either a humanoid or car robot, they then used a robot that was built by either them or another group of people. The experiments had the following results: “Participants showed greater extension of their self-concept into the car robot and preferred the personality of the car robot over the humanoid robot. People showed greater self-extension into a robot and preferred the personality of the robot they assembled over a robot they believed to be assembled by another” (31). Despite what type of robot they built, “people rated the car as being friendlier and having more integrity, while the humanoid was more malicious. People operating the humanoid may have been suspicious or critical of the robot, perceiving it as an independent actor and a threat to their performance as compared to a directly-controlled object” (35). People also took more credit for tasks completed with less anthropomorphized robots. This research has a few implications for future technologies. In the case of medical technologies, it may be better to use less humanoid appearing forms of technology in medical procedures because it allows for a better sense of self-extension. In the case of military robots using humanoid robots could allow operators to dissociate themselves from their actions, since they see the humanoid bots as seemingly more independent. The lack of self-extension leads to a lessened sense of responsibility.

A recent Wired article by Brendan Koerner outlines some of implications of such military research: “Yet despite our love of science fiction, this coming trend in robo-aesthetics is a bad idea. By anthropomorphizing their products, robot designers may unwittingly be encouraging needless bloodshed. Because, as recent research shows, the more human a robot looks, the more likely the Homo sapiens at its controls may be tempted to make the droids go Rambo on their foes.”

Like most innovations there is however a flip-side:

That’s not to say that having humanoid bots is always bad. Self-extension among robot operators may be desirable in combat but not necessarily in other grave situations. In search-and-rescue operations, for example, one of the biggest problems is operator stress—people find it incredibly taxing to sift through rubble remotely, with the monotony broken only by the ghoulish discovery of corpses or body parts. Humanoid robots would be ideal for such tasks; they could help the operators feel less viscerally attached to the grim work at hand.

The results of this research are somewhat odd. On the one hand since humanoids are more like us you’d think one could imagine their self as the robot, thus making it easier to identify with their technological counterpart. Yet on the other hand, the robots are so lifelike that it only makes sense for people to perceive it as an entity unto itself. It’s also striking that people perceived the humanoids as malicious. You’d think that people would imagine the perfectly calculating machine as able to make the rational rather than ill-willed intention. Perhaps it is simply how mediatized the figure of the Robot or Cyborg has become to our collective imagination that we simply assume it cannot possess the proper ethical reasoning that actual humans can. Either way this research bears a heightened relevance as Robots become a more influential aspect of our day-to-day existence.

Kurzweil's Cult

Robert Geraci writes on the growing influence of the singularity movement:

Will robots become massively intelligent? Will human beings become highly intelligent cyborgs or upload our minds fully into machines and thereby live forever? Whether they are correct is probably less important than the fact that the faithful who believe they are has a growing membership. Singularity University had more than 1200 applications for its first nine-week graduate class in 2009 (40 students were accepted). Public policy leaders and corporate officers have attended executive classes and funding has come from major tech companies such as Google and Nokia. Press surrounding the university has been positive, including even an encouraging review from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which suggests that traditional universities have much to learn from SU’s curriculum.

What we see is the emergence of a genuine religious tradition. Is it new? Not exactly: faith in technology to produce transcendent human conditions is centuries old. But this manifestation, whether it be under the label of transhumanism, Singularitarianism, or (as I’ve called it) Apocalyptic AI, has a cultural cachet that goes far and allows it to separate itself from other religious visions.

Gazing Into the Infinite Neuroelectronic Void of the Matrix

While at first glance it may appear that Neuromancer is simply a fictional future dreamland that has no bearing in relation to the present, but upon further analysis it seems that Gibson is reacting to anxieties already manifesting themselves in the present. Gibson relates to the already occurring compression of time, place and culture and takes it to its logical extreme. The way that he depicts places, such as BAMA in the U.S. and the relationship between the various cities Case goes to shows the ways in which the world has become flattened. In chapter 7 he writes “Their room might have been the one on in Chiba where he’d first seen Armitage” (88). The differences between cities in an increasingly globalized world become more and more blurred. It’s only when you go outside that you notice differences based on climatic changes. Molly says in the same scene that if you go outside “You get agoraphobic” (88). 

Technological advances are not presented as the saving grace of society, certain traditional hierarchies are exacerbated by society’s transformations. For example the forms of patriarchy endemic to the Middle East are played out in an even more open fashion, “In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications” (89). The technological advances can become just as much a tool of oppression and control as they are liberating. The relationship between emotions and rationality are also problematized. The characters that express the least emotion seem to be the least endearing and “tended to submerge their personalities” (96); for example the descriptions of Armitage’s “blankness” and smile “that meant as much as the twitch of some insect’s antenna” (97). Furthermore, the use and regulation of drugs is a constant issue, yet the novel is somewhat ambivalent about their moral status. It is evident however that they are used as an escape vessel in an increasingly complex world.

The novel speaks to the increasing fragmentation of lived experience. The word fragments is repeated to describe both physical/virtual objects and experiences over and over again throughout the book. Stylistically the novel is written in a fragmented form; I continually have to go back to look for the line break to realize that it has cut to a new scene. This is a disconcerting experience yet a more accurate depiction of the way in which people experience the world around them. This effect is also aided by the way in which long descriptions of visual or sensory stimuli are vividly characterized in juxtaposition to short and choppy dialogue. 

 There is an increasingly large gulf between the amount of perceived phenomenon in the world and the ability to relate to it with other people. Yet this aspect of experience is coupled with a world which is becoming increasingly homogeneous. Language barriers are breaking down, for example “he began to whisper to a Sanyo transceiver in a strange salad of Greek, French, Turkish, isolated fragments of English. The transceiver answered in French” (91). Through the aid of technology and the coercion of compression people are forced to assimilate their cultures into one another. Freeside represents a cultural melting pot, 

Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool (101).

It is the contradictory capital of the world. Everything exists simultaneously in this Rasta Mecca. Yet it also is able to take on a life of its own. While many aspects of what it means to be a human or cyborg are increasingly problematized it’s still possible for each person to retain a sense of self or individuality based on the peculiar or unique assemblage of parts or experiences they contain.

The Grammatron of Cybertexts

Grammatron is a hypertext created by Mark Amerika. Amerika views himself as a “cyborg-narrator creating a discourse network that serves as a distribution point for various lines of flight to pass through and manipulate data linked together by the collective-self.” Inspired by Post-Humanism, specifically the works of Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, Amerika argues that hypertexts function as “an alternative to the more rigid, authoritarian linearity of conventional book-contained text.” The experiential aspect of reading a hypertext, supercharges the way in which reading and writing always occurs in the middle of things, the reader/participant is not constrained to what is immediately before them, but is free to pursue a multiplicity of connections and linkages through clicking “their way into new writing or textual spaces (at this point we would expand the concept of writing to include all manner of text, graphics, moving pictures, sound, animation, 3-D modeling, etc.).” Reading and writing thus ought to be conceived as machinic, as part of a process of assemblage and composition. Books and discourse in general always-already occur within a network, a specific milieu. We do not possess language rather it is given to us indirectly.

Amerika is making a descriptive more than prescriptive statement about the nature of texts that cyberculture hypercharges. Amerika writes; “on the net, nobody knows how sexy you really are, how bad the dog gets whipped, how crude the sadistic brute can be, how ambiguous the thought patterns generally are, what race makes you salivate, what gender makes you cringe, what age you first got laid, in whose biology you are now swimming, in what hospital you gave birth, in what signal you now divest.” Amerika’s point is that we need to “rethink representation.” The fact that what virtual documentation is “always already fictionalized” means that we are “moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of immersive topographies that open up unknown narrative worlds composed of unstable identities, ambiguously located intentions, and surrogate lovers.”

While Amerika’s work may seem overly abstract, out of touch, or romanticized, its force as an analytic nonetheless contains an immense potential for political liberation. Activist, performance artist and critic Guillermo Gomez-Pena crosses borders physically, academically and virtually through his work on multiculturalism and Chicano Studies. Gomez’s notion of the Cyber-Aztec in his work “The New World Border” views cyberculture as a resistant space that fragments and frustrates traditional identity categories and forms of hegemonic thought. Gomez is highly indebted to Gibson and cyberpunk in general, “The New World Border” narrates a science-fiction “gringo-stroika” about the future of the U.S. Gomez does not just unwittingly celebrate border-crossing but uses his works to point to the paradox of identity politics and resistance in a postmodern economy. Resistance must simultaneously occur locally and dispersed while retaining its trans-cultural or global aims in order to ensure the desire for fluidity does not compromise the necessity of strategic essentialisms. Capital simultaneously deterritorializes rigid forms of identification with the nation-state or race while finding ways to commodify the dispersion of identities.