QUESTION: "The machine/organism relationships are obsolete/unnecessary" writes Haraway. In what ways have our relations to machines been theorised?
"Man-Computer Symbiosis" by J.C.R. Licklider
This paper is a link from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is suitable for scholarly research because it is from this credible source, it lists a considerable number of references and is in the form of a scientific report. As its title suggests, this paper explores the possibility of human and machine symbiosis. It outlines past theories that deem the gap between the organic and the mechanic bridgeable. Since the paper was written in 1960, some of its insights into the future refer to a time that has already passed. Nevertheless, it is useful because it presents the evolution of the relationship between humans and machines, beginning with their ontological separation, progressing with varying degrees of their combination and ending with their complete union. It depicts symbiosis as beneficial for two reasons. Firstly, because it gives the machine some formulating freedom, the whole unit would solve technical problems better. Secondly, symbiosis would allow machines to operate in “real time.” It elaborates on the possible functions and prerequisites of this anticipated symbiosis, and in the process, sheds light on the specific ways that humans and computers interact. This would be useful for this particular essay because a number of views on the machine/organism relationship are explored, especially their tight coupling.
"Intelligence and Representability" by Louis Armand
This article was taken from the website of CTHEORY, an online publication that describes itself as “an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology, and culture.” Its author is the Director of Intercultural Studies in Charles University, Prague, and has written books that are related to the topic that this article deals with. It is thus a valid online resource for a research essay. The article critically analyses the writings of Alan Turing, who proposed in 1950 that if human subject and a machine subject were unable to be distinguished through their textual responses, then the machine could be considered just as capable of thought. He argued this at a time when intelligence was understood to be the exclusive domain of humans. Armand draws the readers’ attention to the idea that human intelligence is partly defined by its recognisability, which means that computers that can display what is recognised by humans as intelligence, could be considered as possessing this trait. As a result, this article opens up the possibility that the distinctions between human and machine are blurred, thereby destabilising the very dichotomy of machine/organism. The article would be useful because, unlike the previous paper—which still assumes these categories in the hope of combining them—it exposes the fact that the maintenance of the binary opposition between organism and machine produces complex questions and debates surrounding the very concepts of “human,” “intelligence” and “machine.”
"When Machines Outsmart Humans" by Nick Bostrom
This article was written by the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and it was also published in a scholarly journal, namely, Futures. As such, it is suitable for academic use. The article tackles artificial intelligence as a possible reality in the future. It outlines the requirements for artificial intelligence and makes observations that attempt to determine the proximity of the realisation of artificial intelligence to the present day. However, what makes this article particularly useful is that it brings to light the range of human approaches to technology. For instance, it articulates the fear of creating a greater-than-human intelligence while admitting that artificial intelligence would profoundly accelerate progress in other areas. Also, it is notable that Bostrom makes the point that artificial intelligence would not simply be a tool as conventional machines are because it has the potential to operate independently. This fact leads us to question any theory that asserts that the nature of machines is purely instrumental, and compels us to relinquish some of our control over what we have created or initiated. An essay on the given topic would benefit from this article because it critically investigates the prospect of humans engaging with machines that can be regarded as equal, if not superior, to them.
This article was originally published in the Systems and Synthetic Biology journal, and online access was offered by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, an organisation based in America that is committed to expanding knowledge in the fields of molecular biology and genetics. Although the orientation of this paper is scientific, it gives insight into how “living” and “non-living” have been culturally understood. It reveals that although the idea of vitalism—the claim that the principles that regulate living beings are entirely distinct from those that regulate the non-living beings—has largely been abandoned, there still remains a culturally accepted boundary between them. The paper goes on to define organisms and machines, and discuss the four points of difference between these categories: composition, origin, development and purpose. Following this, entities that can be described as “artificial organisms,” such as synthesised cells, as well as “living machines,” like advanced robots, are considered from different scientific approaches. The article reveals that even those who refuse the theoretical conception of the cyborg cannot deny the existence of these hybrids, created in laboratories, which blur the line between organism and machine. The overall implication made by this article is that new theories about living and non-living matter must be generated in response to developments in synthetic biology. This effectively gives support to Haraway’s statement that relationships that presuppose a clear division between organisms and machines are “obsolete” because the categories themselves are becoming obsolete.
This essay was taken from the website of a woman who holds a PhD in literature, with gender issues as one of her specialisations. It was originally written for an academic conference in Germany, and cites other works from scholarly publications. The article is different from the previous ones because it does not directly deal with the differentiation of an organism and a machine; rather, it establishes that a person’s gender has an impact on his or her relationship with technology. Nestvold critiques the division that has traditionally been made between “men’s technologies” and “women’s technologies” and uses examples to show that feminism has generally been suspicious of technology in the past. She portrays Haraway’s cyborg as a movement towards a feminist discourse that does not render technological advancement as promoting gender inequality or reinforcing restrictive boundaries. Cyberspace is presented as a technology can free people from the gender roles assigned by their sexed bodies, suggesting that one can create a “self” outside the physical, organic body. She also acknowledges, however, that there are very real limits to the liberating potential of cyberspace, which includes the social unacceptability of gender passing and the fact that there are more men than women using participating in online networks in the first place. All points considered, this source would be useful when crafting a response to the given topic because it introduces the idea that the way humans relate to machines is not uniform but contingent and dependent on gender.
Bibliographical Form:
J.C.R. Licklider. “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, (March 1960) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html (accessed 1 September 2010).
Louis Armand. “Intelligence and Representability”, CTheory, (16 November 2005) http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=496 (accessed 4 September 2010).
Nick Bostrom. “When Machines Outsmart Humans”, (2000) <http://www.nickbostrom.com/2050/outsmart.html (accessed 6 September 2010).
Anna Deplazes & Markus Huppenbauer. “Synthetic Organisms and Living Machines: Positioning the products of synthetic biology at the borderline between living and non-living matter”, (10 October 2009) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759422/ (accessed 6 September 2010).
Ruth Nestvold. “’Male’ Technology, Feminist Dystopias and the Promise of Cyberspace”, (July 2001) http://www.ruthnestvold.com/cyberspace.htm (accessed 7 September 2010).
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