Guiding Question: ‘The machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary’ writes Haraway. In what ways have our relations to machines been theorised?
Hastings states that we are presently living in a ‘Cyborg Culture’ and the average mother and housewife are the ‘Cyborgs’ in society. She argues that for centuries, the machine has been an extension of the body and that machines enhance women’s relationships, especially with their children. It is stated that our lives have been mechanised sexually, with women no longer needing men to have children or achieve pleasure. Hastings overall argument is that our relations to machines has become so vast that we could not do simple tasks without using machines, especially when you read and answer the ‘Are you a Cyborg’ Questionnaire that would make virtually anyone sound like a ‘Cyborg’. Hastings believes that we are living in a Cyborg Culture and this will not change, unless we are prepared to ‘hunt, gather or grow your own food. Make your own clothes by hand. Read by candle light.’ This source would be useful in establishing a new theory about the relations between humans and machines, in that it supports the idea that the humans have become machines. This would go against the quote from Haraway by stating that machine/organism relations are necessary and are occurring at this very moment.
Cyborg 1.0 is a blog-type article whereby Warwick is outlining his plan to become ‘one with his computer’ by inserting chips into his left arm so that signals are transmitted from the chip to computers. It is stated that the aim of this experiment was to determine whether information could be transmitted to and from an implant and the experiment was successful. Warwick states, “For the nine days the implant was in place, I performed seemingly magical acts simply by walking in a particular direction”. Warwick comments on the previous studies that have linked people via chip implants and states that his team at Emory University in Atlanta is not the first group to link computers with the human body. The way in which our relations with machines have evolved is now so that we are interacting with machines to become machines ourselves. Warwick wants to become a machine and speaks of his excitement about ‘looking over the horizon into a new world – a world of cyborgs.’ Warwick asks the question what happens when humans merge with machines and answers by saying, ‘Maybe the machines will then become more important to us than another human life. Those who have become cyborgs will be one step ahead of humans.’ This discussion demonstrates that the way Warwick has theorised machine/organism relations is that we will become one and the ones who do not evolve into cyborgs will be looked down upon.
Heterotextuality and Digital Foreplay
This article comments on the way in which young people have connected themselves to mobile phones and text messaging in a particular way that they are becoming cyborgs. The way in which our relations to machines has been theorised by Cupples and Thompson is that the younger generations of our society view their cell phones as ‘essential and indispensible items, which meet a range of both practical and symbolic needs’ and that they cannot live without them. Teenagers have created their own ‘mobile subculture’ with their own etiquette, dialect, and tactics, in which mobile phones have become a prosthesis that the teenager can fall in love with. Teenager’s relations to machines have become so close that they feel lost without them. This contradicts Haraways argument when she states that ‘machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary’. She may be right in saying that they are unnecessary and Cupples and Thompson state that the older generations do not understand the relationship between the younger generations and technology, but the relationship is definitely not obsolete in that it has only become worse as time has progressed.
The Competence Between Humans and Machines
Luis outlines in his article that machines are superior to humans with the consequence being that machines will fully overtake workers as they can perform higher intellectual tasks. It is quoted that ‘because machines evolve and humans do not, man loses in the long run’. Luis describes our relations to machines as being inferior and has present for many decades, occurring after World War Two, where by the countries with the best machines won the war. Becoming inferior to the machines is of our own doing as we have become less intellectual, have lost our ability to think abstractly and to perform basic human behavioural tasks such as communication is in jeopardy as we are relying more and more on machines. Luis states, ‘Now they [Children] do not speak but TVs speak for them, they do not calculate, but computers think for them’. Luis establishes that humans have become so reliant upon machines that we cannot function without them and that the human body and mind are becoming superseded by machines. Luis puts out a warning for those who think that the future will be a ‘paradise for lazy men’ and states that machines will run our future even more so than they run it now.
Koch and Tononi discuss whether machines could be conscious, therefore being able to replace the human race. They believe that in another thirty years people will be able to be a ghost in a machine by uploading your mind – your thoughts, memories and personality – onto a computer. The great debate that is discussed throughout this article is whether consciousness could be artificially created (consciousness is what they believe to be the one thing standing in the way of machines becoming ‘humans’). The article concludes that consciousness does not require certain things we associate with being human, such as emotions, memory, self reflection, language, sensing the world and acting in it, therefore machines could be capable of being conscious. They end their article by asking what is the best way to build a conscious machine and they conclude with two strategies being either copying the mammalian brain or evolving a machine. Koch and Tononi believe that a machine could be conscious and therefore able to take over the human race. Our relations to machines have been theorised by Koch and Tononi in that they conclude that machines will one day take over the human race, once they figure out how to make a machine conscious.
References
Hastings, Pattie Belle, (2005) Cyborg Mommy. http://www.icehousedesign.com/cyborg_mommy/home.html (accessed 31 August 2010)
Warwick, Kevin (2000) ‘Cyborg 1.0’ Wired. Vol 8, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set= (accessed 31 August 2010)
Cupples, Julia & Lee Thompson (2010) ‘Heterotextuality and Digital Foreplay’ Feminist Media Studies. Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1-17
http://www.informaworld.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/smpp/content~content=a919196107~db=all
Luis, Helle (2004) ‘The Competence Between Humans and Machines’, Future Magazine. http://www.futuremagazine.net/competence.html (accessed 30 August 2010)
Koch, Christof & Giulio Tononi, (2008) ‘Can Machines be Conscious?’ Spectrum, IEEE, Vol. 45, No. 6, pp. 55-59.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4531463&tag=1
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