This week's lecture is going look at the importance of the body and life to our understanding of cyberculture. It is going to consider the materialist notion of life and intelligence. It is then going to look at current research into Artificial Life (AL), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Molecular Biology, Robotics and Cyborgs. As this is a cultural studies lecture it is also going to look at some of the some of the cautionary tales from ancient myth and science fiction that warn of the dangers of these kind of experiments.
The question 'what is life?' is one that has taxed many of the most profound thinkers in human history. Religious definitions have centred on the special qualities of living things. Christian thought, for example, regards human beings as being the specially blessed creation of God. Life is seen as having unique, and sacred properties that are not possess by inanimate ('not living') objects; natural things such as rocks or manmade artefacts such as doors. Thinkers in this tradition, who insist on life having some special quality, are referred to as 'vitalist'.
In contrast to vitalism, a western scientific philosophy has arisen that regards life as having the same physical and chemical qualities as inanimate objects. This is often called materialism. Cybernetics has built on the materialist view of life, and introduced some informationalists ideas to form a new definition of life. This lecture is going to look at some contemporary examples from computer and cybernetic research in an attempt to explore this cybernetic view of life.
Biochemists have noted for some time that the chemicals that make up the bodies of all life are constantly changing. The individual molecules that make up my body now will be exchanged with the outside world and others put in their place. However, despite these losses and gains the living body shows a marked continuity of structure and function. Despite the changes I am still me. Life is also capable of 'begetting' life. Human beings, for example, are able to have offspring that resemble themselves very closely. As we shall see later in the lecture this is as a result of the code found in the molecules of DNA that make up the human genome.
It has come to be recognised that living systems are ordered patterns, and they are capable of maintaining their order until they die. This makes living systems extremely special as they seem to contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics which says that over time there should be a rise in the level of disorder ( or entropy) in any system. This also means they are cybernetic according to Norbert Wiener original definition of a cybernetic system. But what makes these cybernetic system particularly special?
In Mark Ward's book, Virtual Organisms he describes research into the phenomena of Artificial Life. This is a computer study (for most part) based on designing programs that are self-replicating and capable of maintaining ordered patterns over time. According to Stephen Levy:
"Artificial life, or a-life, is devoted to the creation and study of lifelike organisms and systems built by humans. The stuff of this life is non-organic matter, and its essence is information: computers are the kilns from which these new organisms emerge. Just as medical scientists have managed to tinker with life's mechanisms in vitro, the biologists and computer scientists of a-life hope to create life in silico" Levy.
The most famous example, of AL research is the computer game- Conway's Game of Life. This is not a computer game in the conventional sense , but is a simulation based on a chequer board on which a series of generations are projected according the rules lay out below.
Overtime completely random selections will mutate into a series of stable and self-replicating systems which obey to basic rules of life, namely they are ordered systems and they are self-replicating.
Other research has also shown that software is capable of another trick of life namely the ability to evolve over time to adapt to new environmental circumstances.
It has been proposed that simple evolving software might be used to control switching problems in giant telecommunications systems where conventional techniques using databases have failed. Computer viruses are also examples of self-replicating, order-maintaining software. Their success, at the expense of the host computer suggests that such software should be treated with some caution when being used without supervision.
Alife research suggests that fundamental properties of life are not unique to carbon based life forms, such as humans. It is argued that life can be formed out of any material capable of maintaining an order. The gift of life, it is argued, is therefore not the solely the gift of some deity as many programmers are now capable of defining the rules for such an order. Interestingly, the idea of inorganic life is not new. Jewish legends, for example, feature the Golem, which is a statue or image that is given life. The myth developed during the Middle Ages, when legends arose of wise men who could instil life in clay effigies by the use of a magical formula. The best known of the Golem stories concerned a Rabbi Löw of 16th-century Prague, who was said to have created a Golem that he used as his servant. Golem were often very powerful, slaughtering the enemies of their masters. A number of contemporary commentators have observed that the magic formula of the Golem sounds a little bit like the software of a contemporary computerised robot.
It might seem odd to mention a thousand year-old legend about Golem in the context of a lecture about contemporary cyberculture. However, legends, myths and creative fictions (in either book or film format) contribute to our cultural understanding of such phenomena, often in the form of worrying metaphors or symbols.
One of the most famous cautionary legends is Frankenstein's 'monster' which originated in a book by Mary Shelley . In this story dead flesh is brought back to life by Frankstein's experiments. As the critic Maurice Hindle notes:
As a cautionary tale warning of the dangers that can be cast into society by a presuming experimental science, Frankenstein is without equal (Shelley 1985 pg 7)
This book, which pre-dates contemporary surgical practice by nearly two hundred years, still acts as a warning to researchers and society. One of the significant aspects of Shelley's story is the way the monster is treated by human beings. This intelligent thinking entity is utterly rejected as an abomination and driven by this rejection to terrible acts. The monster also struggles without success to understand the nature of its being. The story ends with the destruction of both the monster and its creator.
Another strand of the vitalist argument has centred on the uniqueness of human life. In particular, on the human ability to reason and make intelligent decisions. One of the holy grails of computing is to make an intelligent machine that could successfully complete the Turing test (by convincing a human that it was an another intelligent human). This research area goes under the name of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the leading thinkers in this area at the moment is Marvin Minsky (see website details below).
Unlike a conventional program that uses pre-set algorithms (worked out by their programmers) to solve problems, AI programs are designed to learn. These programs make use of highly interconnected neural nets that function a little like the nerve cells of the human brain. Overtime, these computers develop models to understand their worlds and they exhibit behaviour that their programmers could not predict. At first these programs were rather unsuccessful. However recently an IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov at a game of chess. Enthusiasts for AI computing, such as Ray Kurtweil (see website below) claim that AI computers will soon be as smart as human beings. In his recent book,The Age of Spiritual Machines; How we will live, work and think in the new age of intelligent machines he actually sketches out a future in which organic human beings upload their minds to superior AI computers in order to enjoy better lives.
One of the philosophical challenges facing the designers of AI systems is the notion of consciousness. This is sense of self-awareness is thought by many philosophers to be the cornerstone of any definition of intelligence. A true Turing machine would have to know of its own existence as an entity and have a sense of self. Roger Penrose, a leading philosopher has argued that AI researchers are actually failing to address this non-computational element and casts doubt about the validity of AI research.
Research into the nature of AI consciousness has led to speculation about the nature of awareness within a network. The metaphor of a 'hive mind' has been taken up to describe a distributed intelligence that does not have a central conscious self. Hive minds have been described in social insects such as bees that aren't consider to be intelligent as individuals but who work together as agents so that the hive is highly intelligent and capable of learning about its environment.
The metaphor of the hive mind has also been applied to human interactions on the internet. A number of recent Internet artworks such as Jane Prophets's Swarm (see website below) have made use of this concept. Arguably, computer networks might develop a similar distributed intelligence that does not feature a single consciousness making entity.
It is important to note that AI and its programming artefacts are not confined to the laboratory of a few academic institutions. For example, when you go on-line to buy a product from an on-line retailer such as amazion.com you will see the output of 'hive-mind' and a complex program in the 'Your Favourite' list displayed.
In this example, the computer processes the details you have filled in on the on-line form provided. However, as well as organising the immediate despatch of your purchase, it also analyses your purchases against a historic database of yours, and everyone else’s, previous purchases. Using a program (such as the Alexa software - see Johnson 2001:121) the computer will respond to your purchase by providing you with an updated, personalised ‘Your Favourites’ list of products you might like to buy. It is worth noting here that the program does not ask you what you like (it is not search program); instead it tries to calculate what you might like based on the purchasing habits of its client base.
In this kind of interactivity the computer will carry out many actions at once, which are not localised to a particular routine; these actions are structured, but they not mechanistic; they are responsive, reasonably immediate, complex and the outcome is largely unpredictable by either the programmer or the user.
The idea of AI computers has also raised a number of fears about non-human intelligence and science fiction is full of rogue, killer computers. In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey the computer, HAL9000, reasons that the humans crew will endanger the ship's mission and sets about killing them. In this chilling episode the computer is particularly dangerous because it is interfaced with the other ship systems. (Imagine what HAL9000 could have done if it was plugged into the Internet).
As I mentioned earlier, one of the great aims of the materialist science has been to demonstrate and then control the materiality of organic life. The essence of this study, which is known as biochemistry or molecular biology, has been to see life as being a huge assemblage of chemicals, whose form controls their function. Molecular biology recognises that the cell, the building block for organic life is an ordered arrangement. In fact, these chemicals are ordered not only in space but also in time as well. Foremost in the activities of cells are chemicals called proteins that form 3-D shapes. Proteins act as the building blocks for shaping the cell, the interface between the cell and the outside world, the messengers between cells, and the 'chemical engineers' re-arranging the internal chemistry of the cell. Molecular biology also recognises that cells are self-regulating cybernetic systems that maintain physical and chemical order over long periods of time. It was soon recognised that there must be an encoded control system guiding this order. The key code that regulates the functioning in the cell is kept in a series molecular structures called chromosomes, in a double-helical chemical called de-oxy ribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is the code of life.
Let's now return to Richard Wise's key observation about digitisation:
"The key concept and technology behind multimedia has been digitisation: the conversion of images and sound to numbers, making them amenable to manipulation by a computer." (Richard Wise pg 2)
When Crick and Watson elucidated of the structure of DNA in 1950s (see Watson 1999), they began a process that might result in the full digitalisation of organic life (and the making our bodies available for manipulation by computer). The first part of the digitisation was completed with the recent Human Genome Project (see website below). This was massive scientific undertaking sequenced the whole human genome (all the DNA in the human cell) so that it is now possible to see all the code that makes up human life. At the moment, scientists are moving from a read-only situation to a a full manipulation of life at a digital level. Tom Knight and Ron Weiss of MIT have begun to genetically engineer living E.coli into tiny robots ( see Knight and Weiss 2000). With other developments in molecular biology (such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep by scientist at the Roslin Institute- see website details below) this situation might rapidly develop into full blown manipulation. It is already possible to select the characteristics of a baby, such as eye colour and sex, before it is conceived. In the future it might be possible to dial-up a child from coded sequences or alter our own genetic code. This will raise all sorts of moral issues about who should have the power and rights to make these kinds of decisions.
This is a controversial area. The manipulation of life has already caused concern amongst the general public. In particular, there have been protests at the release of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in the wild. Cell stem research using human embryos has also given great cause for public concern. Pro-life groups have branded this kind of research as murder. Both experiments have been branded as Frankenstein's monsters by pressure groups. They see such practices as being 'unnatural';whatever that might mean.
The Human Genome Project gave birth to the computer study of bioinformatics. This deals with the manipulation of the vast amounts of data embedded in human DNA. However, it has also become a cause for concern in its own right as large corporations have been 'mining' the human genome project and ring-fencing parts of it results for exploitation. A number of companies like Celera Genomics ( see website details below) have been taking out patents on DNA sequences, claiming that they own it. This raises the question of who owns the body.
It is worth considering that human beings have been deliberately altering the chemical make-up of their bodies for a very long time. One of the oldest technologies developed in Western culture was brewing. It has been argued that this technology was originally developed to deal with polluted water. Ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is a metabolic poison, which kills off harmful bacteria. However, alcohol has also been drunk since earliest history for changing states of consciousness (and because it is addictive). In ancient Greek culture alcohol even had its own god.
It is often suggested that the use of such chemicals only has a short-term effect that is reversible However long term exposure to alcohol can radically alter the body (particularly liver function). In fact widespread exposure to drinking alcohol over many generations has even changed the genetic make-up of the population. In cultures that have brewed alcohol the gene for the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase is commonly found.
In the East, the making of stimulating tea infusion also has a very ancient history. Tea also contains chemicals that modify the chemical functioning of the body. Interestingly, members of tea-drinking cultures often do not have the gene for alcohol dehydrogenase and can get drunk very quickly.
The taking of other chemicals - whether they be chewed, smoked, snorted or injected - also has a long history. Some chemicals, have of course, become licit by being recognised by the society as being medically approved: for the relief of pain, the treating of disease or for general well-being. In modern western medicine we now see the use of synthetic chemicals to regulate fertility ( eg the contraceptive pill), chemicals to stimulate sexuality (viagra), and the use of Growth Hormones to treat abnormal growth in young children. None of these treatments involve the deliberate changing of the DNA of the individual concern. However, this has been considered by scientists in a line of research known as 'gene therapy'. This would involve re-writing the code of an individual, to 'correct' a genetic 'aberration'.
Biologists and Western medicine have also helped to shape the notion that the body is an array of sub-assemblies called organs that carry out specific functions (e.g. legs are for walking, the eyes are for seeing etc.). This idea lends itself to the notion that body parts are replaceable. Early attempts at spare-part surgery were limited to grafts, such as skin grafts where skin was taken from one part of the body and grafted on to another where the skin had been damaged. However, with advances in molecular understanding of the immune system blood transfusions and then organ transplants became possible. However, these are limited (by having to find an immunological match between donor and recipient). Therefore research scientists have been working on more radical alternatives to generate a ready supply of spare parts.
Xenotransplants are just one research area being explored at the moment. This involves using animals to provide parts to humans, for example pig-to-primate transplants. Recently "Baby Fae", a child born with a malformed heart survived for a short period of time using transplanted a baboon heart. Another line of research uses animals as factories to grow spare parts for humans. For example, in 1997 Dr Jay Vacanti grew a human cartilage in the shape of an ear on the back of a mouse. Both these areas of research are controversial and considered unethical by animal rights campaigners.
Some researcher are considering conducting using stem cell research. This would involve using specially programmed cells that could grow into any part of the body. This procedure might involve growing spare parts either in a laboratory or while attached to a person who has been injured.
Human beings have also changed their bodies for non-medical reasons. There has been a long history of cutting or modifying the appearance of the body. Circumcision, for example, has long been associated with marking tribal and religious groupings. Similarly, scarring and tattoos have been used to note manhood.
More recently these traditional cultural practices have been developed as body art ( see the Bead Ring website below). Piercing and tattooing are some of the commonly used ways that individuals have changed their body's appearance. Surgery has also used, utilising non-biological parts such as silicon breast in-plants. Perhaps the most extreme example of this body art is being conducted by the artist, Orlan, who is conducting a radical revision of the body using cosmetic surgery techniques ( see website details below)
In 1979 The Robotics Institute of America defined a robots as
:"A reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks".
The robotic arm, used to spray cars, is the classic implementation of this idea. The arm, using a series of motors and sensors can carry out repetitive actions that would be tiring and dangerous for a human being to do. These commonly deployed machines, however, are just the beginnings. Workers in their area are trying to produce 'artificial creatures' that display many of the functions of life such as spontaneity, autonomy and self-regulation. So far the results have been rather mixed.
Early robot designers at MIT based their work on AI and programmed their robots to make cognitive maps of their locations, so that they could 'understand' their environments. These robots turned out to be very slow, and unable to deal with changes. More recent work by researchers such as Rodney Brookes have devised much simpler robots that do not have a cognitive elements in their programs. Instead Brookes modelled their systems on insects, with a series of simple routines built one of tope of another. These robots have been amazingly successful at producing life-like results. Brookes argues that it is important that his robots are have the following features; situatedness and embodiment.
"A situated creature or robot is one that is embedded in the world, and which does not deal with abstract descriptions, but through its sensors with the here and now of the world, which directly influences the behaviour of the creature.
An embodied creature or robot is one that has a physical body and experiences the world, at least in part, directly through the influence of the world on that body. A more specialised type of embodiment occurs when the full extent of the creature is contained within that body." (Brookes 2002 pg 51)
The implication of Brookes' work is that intelligence requires a body. he body also gives, the entity purpose and potentials. Brookes and many others argue that the future of AI and robotics lies with a fusion between man and machines?
The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering various of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine.
The Rockland rat is one of the stars of a paper called "Cyborgs and Space," written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. This engineer/psychiatrist double act invented the term cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") to describe the vision of an "augmented man," better adapted than ordinary humans to the rigors of space travel. Clynes and Kline imagined a future astronaut whose heart would be controlled by injections of amphetamines and whose lungs would be replaced by a nuclear-powered "inverse fuel cell. The contemporary realisation of the cyborg is somewhat different. Human beings have been fitted with devices such as heart pace makers and insulin pumps. However, these devices are not under the immediate control of their human host and largely work on a chemical basis though, cochlea implants, that help treat certain types of deafness do interact directly with the human nervous system, converting sound to electronic machine signals and then to nerve signals.
A more integrated vision of man and machine, a true cyborg, has r ecently been realised by a Kevin Warwick in an experiment conducted over the Summer 2002. Warwick, who is a professor of cybernetics at University of Reading, had an electrical implant surgically placed into the median nerve of his wrist. With this implant he was able to communicate using his nervous system, for example, in one demonstration he drove a motorised wheel chair without using a joystick. In another experiment, Warwick connected his wrist implant up to the Internet, and he was able operate a robotic arm in Reading. This experiment raises the notion of a 'distributed' cyborg body.
The Borg Collective from the TV series Star Trek is another powerful fictional warning, in this case about the dangers of the cyborg and the hive mind. This alien species are imagined to have lost any respect for individuality and they seek to assimilate everything else into their collective. They communicate using a system a little bit like the Internet and have no concept of privacy or free-will.
Not all visions of the cyborg are apocalyptic, however. Donna Haraway has developed an enabling feminist vision of our relationship with technology, which she describes in her 'Cyborg Manifesto'. She sees this independence between organic life and technology as being a long-term and on-going phenomena. In a Wired interview she noted
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade."(Kunzru)
The performance artists, Stelarc, has even made the interaction between body and machine into a work of art
In one particularly worrying experiment conducted by Warwick's team electrical signals were fed into the implant so that he became a signal receiver. His arm responded to these instructions, just as if these signals were coming from his brain. Warwick is excited at this possibility, as it means that it should be possible to give movement back to paraplegics by jumping around the damage to their nervous systems. However, it also raises the possibility of having ones body and mind controlled by an external signal.
In his paper 'Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy' Jay David Bolter mentions the film, Strange Days, which has characters using a technology called 'the wire'. This imaginary technology records and plays back thoughts. The 'wire' represents the most extreme form of Virtual Reality, whereby the perceiver is unable to tell the difference between the perception and reality. In this situation, the idea of being a subject apart is broken down by the digitising and network technology. The self in the traditional sense ceases to exist. As yet, this is science fiction, however.
Once again we can turn to the myth-making power of fiction to sound a warning about the hazards of plugging the human mind into machines. The 1956 Science Fiction Classic The Forbidden Planet sounds a suitably cautionary note. This film tells the story of a visit by a space ship crew to a visionary scientist (Dr Morbius) who is investigating the remains of the Krell, an extinct species who once inhabited the planet Altair IV. The remains of the Krell appear to offer exciting possibilities to the visiting humans. Morbius has discovered that the Krell had developed technology that allowed them to make their thoughts into reality thanks to a brain-boosting device. The film has a dark Freudian twist, however. The invisible monster stalking Altair IV is actually a subconscious projection from the mind of Morbius. This is jealous nightmare has been empowered by the Krell's machinery. The film ends with the conclusion that the extinction of the Krell was brought about machinery unleashing their own unconscious.