[ba-unrev-talk] _How We Became Posthuman_
I have not read this book, but I intend to. I picked up this reference
from the complexity-L list run by Don Mikulecky. (01)
An interview with N. Katherine Hayles on her books can be found at:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html (02)
Example:
Question:
"This email message, like most of the email found in the inbox of your
computer's email program, was written and sent by a person, and not by some
disembodied intelligent machine. However, these days, it's possible to
imagine that this message was machine-generated. In your books, Holding On
to Reality and How We Became Posthuman you both discuss how we got to this
point. Could you summarize briefly, as a place to begin?"
Response:
"In How We Became Posthuman, I tell three interrelated stories: how
information lost its body, that is, how it was conceptualized as an entity
that can flow between substrates but is not identical with its material
bases; how the cyborg emerged as a technological and cultural construction
in the post-World War II period; and the transformation from the human to
the posthuman. All three stories are relevant to seeing an email message
and not knowing if it was human or machine-generated. (03)
For now, however, let me concentrate on the transformation from the human
to the posthuman. Recent research programs in computer science, cognitive
sciences, artificial life and artificial intelligence have argued for a
view of the human so different from that which emerged from the
Enlightenment that it can appropriately be called "posthuman." Whereas the
human has traditionally been associated with consciousness, rationality,
free will, autonomous agency, and the right of the subject to possess
himself, the posthuman sees human behavior as the result of a number of
autonomous agents running their programs more or less independently of one
another. Complex behavior in this view is an emergent property that arises
when these programs, each fairly simple in itself, begin reacting with one
another. Consciousness, long regarded as the seat of identity, in this
model is relegated to an "epiphenomenon." Agency still exists, but it is
distributed and largely unconscious, or at least a-conscious. (04)
The effect of these changed views is to envision the human in terms that
make it much more like an intelligent machine, which allows the human to be
more easily spliced into distributed cognitive systems where part of the
intelligence resides in the human, part in a variety of intelligent
machines, and part in the interfaces through which they interact. At the
same time, intelligent agent programs are being developed using "emotional
computing" techniques that allow these artificial systems to respond to
unexpected situations in ways that more closely resemble human responses. (05)
The upshot, then, is that both artificial and human intelligences are being
reconceptualized in ways that facilitate their interactions with one
another. Although I have written this summary, it could easily have been
produced by such a system as the "Amalthaea" intelligent agent system being
developed at the MIT Media Lab by Patti Maes and Alexandros Moukos. Are you
sure I did write this message?" (06)