Researchers Push Limits of Humanity
Even on a campus known for nerd hi-jinks, the three young men at the top of the stairs in MIT’s media lab look pretty weird.
Leonard Foner resembles a collision between an oversized kid and a Nintendo machine. A chunky eyepiece, apparently scavenged from a camcorder, protrudes from his left eye, supported by Terminator sunglasses. A black vest girdled with circuits and computer hardware wraps his upper body, and a hard drive nestles in the small of his back.
His buddy, Thad Starner, looks less menacing. He sports clear plastic safety goggles and carries his computer in a shoulder bag.
The third researcher, Brad Rhodes, looks too jolly to be scary. His kinky hair is trying to escape from under a cap that has an eyepiece dangling from its brim. He clutches a small keypad in his left hand, and his fingers twitch furiously as he takes notes on a miniature computer.
They belong to a group of grad students who have dubbed themselves the ‘borg. They are researching “wearables”: personal--very personal--computers small enough to fit into eyeglasses and hip pouches but powerful enough to access the world’s information. This technology looks clunky and a little intimidating today, but it promises to shrink, streamline and grow more inconspicuous.
The researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology envision a digital paradise: instant translation among the world’s tongues, the ability to monitor or even affect events anywhere in the world, a constant connection to global conversations in cyberspace.
But by transcending the limits that nature imposed on our all-too-human flesh, researchers at MIT and elsewhere find themselves poking at the edges of fundamental questions.
The answers may change forever what it means to be human.
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Powerful stuff, eh? Grand-cool visions of a Silicon Age. But is it science or fiction? The root of the question lies in both.
The term “cyborg,” for cybernetic organism, was proposed in the 1960s as a solution to the harsh environment of space. It would be much easier, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline believed, to adapt an astronaut’s body instead of protecting him from the vacuum. Breathing in space is cumbersome, they wrote. “One proposed solution in the not too distant future is relatively simple: Don’t breathe!”
But the idea of artificial humans goes back further. Back at least to the Middle Ages when the Golem, a clay creature brought to life by Jewish mysticism, defended the ghetto in Prague. And back to 1818, when Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.”
It took Hollywood to bring cyborgs into their own as modern bugaboos. RoboCop, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator,” the chilling Borg Collective on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a rakish collection of villains and flawed heroes gunning or pining for humanity.
In real life, cyborg can be applied to anyone with a body-enhancing add-on. Do you have a titanium alloy knee joint, a myoelectric arm, a pacemaker, breast implants, contact lenses, a polio vaccination? Technically, you’re a cyborg.
So perhaps the ‘borg at MIT are onto something. Perhaps their explorations using chunky, clunky electronics are a natural consequence of the increasingly common merging of technology and flesh. As the Borg Collective announce: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
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That’s the joke of the ‘borgs’ name: a double pun on cyborg and Star Trek. And they’ve taken the image of the fictional characters to heart.
In small pouches, they carry their processing chips, hard drives, wireless modems and batteries. They often have a miniature video monitor--sort of like a camcorder view screen--affixed to modified eyeglasses or suspended from a hat brim. Instead of a keyboard or a mouse, a hand-held keypad allows them to enter data almost as fast as someone can talk.
The wearable software can remind them of appointments, let them take notes and surf the Internet.
But the potential is much greater. While the hand-held electronic organizers of today can help schedule your life, those of the future may help you live it.
Soon, says ‘borg Brad Rhodes, the wearables will be able to recognize speech and faces. And software that he is developing, called a “remembrance agent,” will watch over you 24 hours a day, every day, supplying you with the information you need in any given situation.
Example: You recognize someone but can’t remember her name. Your wearable analyzes her face and scans a database of people you’ve met. The machine makes a match and displays the dossier on a tiny screen hanging in front of your eye or maybe whispers through tiny speakers in your ears. Now you know her name, occupation and any e-mail correspondence you may have had.
While you two talk, your wearable parses the chitchat, tapping into global databases via a wireless modem for data relevant to your conversation. As you talk about how hot it’s been lately, the agent sifts through newspaper clippings feeding you the latest news on, say, global warming.
“Let’s head to Union Square,” you propose, and the computer gives you directions, even pointing you toward a coffee shop that serves excellent pastries.
Over cappuccino and cannoli, you talk about Impressionist paintings, Japanese filmmaking, the backlash against existentialism and that weird Spice Girls fad a few years back, all thanks to data pulled up by your wearable. It gives you limitless memory and access to almost all knowledge.
Data without end. Amen.
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Wearables may be only an interim step. As disk drives and computer chips shrink and streamline, the next step may be to implant tiny computer parts under the skin or behind the ears. The electrical energy in your body could supply the power. Filings in your teeth could be the antennae for your Internet connection, which could pump the data to a heads-up display built into your eyeglasses.
“The line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred,” predicted Alvin Toffler in his 1981 book “The Third Wave.”
That kind of technology, admittedly, is years away, but the implications are troubling. Hacking the body to install a computer that becomes part of you, that grants instant access to the sum of human knowledge. . . . Well, it sounds almost godlike.
“ ‘Godlike’ implies infinite comprehension,” says MIT’s Foner. “I don’t think we’re getting there.”
Hans Moravec, however, can’t wait. He’s the director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and in his 1988 book, “Mind Children,” he suggested that in just 50 years, people would be downloading their minds into infinitely better robot bodies. Imagine Homo Sapiens version 2.0, the post-biological human.
“I have faith in these computers,” he wrote. “You’re going to be more intelligent, you’ll be able to do much more, understand much more, go more places, not die--all those things.”
At MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and throughout America from Stanford in California to Columbia in New York, researchers are investigating everything from genetic engineering to advanced robotics. Companies such as Microsoft and Apple are hard at work looking for ways to insinuate more computer technology into our lives.
And while the students at MIT work on programming their external computers, researchers around the world are busy learning the language of our internal one.
The human genome project aims to map all 80,000 human genes in DNA by 2005. Once that’s done, the notion of “human” may change radically. As we take command of our evolutionary destiny, not only will we deconstruct the human software, we will be able to reconstruct it. Whether we use silicon or DNA, future humans might be crafted by technology.
Which is just fine, since “we’re not really biological creatures anymore,” says Moravec. “Most of what we pass on to our children is culture, libraries.” He pointed out that the thousands of genes on human DNA only add up to 2 billion bits of data, “and most hard drives have 10 times that today.”
Alan Marcus, a professor of history at Iowa State University in Ames, echoes the view of genes as small units of “code,” computer jargon for computer commands. Our genes program us to react in certain ways, as if they were small computer programs. And if so, why not plug new genes into an organism in a different order and get something entirely new? Why not program life like a computer? If you could do that, would there be any difference between the two?
“Once you’ve reduced living matter to bits, if you will, and once you think about programming living things just as you would program nonliving things, then that division doesn’t exist anymore,” Marcus says.
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Which means we may be standing at a crossroads. Whether we use biotechnology or circuit boards, the new human--almost from birth--could be crafted by technology on a scale not yet seen. Look for artificial organs, gene therapy, even low-level eugenics. A sea change in the definition of “human” may be upon us. MIT’s ‘borg are only tweaking the dictionary.
Since the 1600s, when French philosopher Rene Descartes concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” being human meant being an immaterial mind trapped in a very material body. This Renaissance sound bite split humanity into thought and matter, which some cyber-philosophers today call “meat.”
It is this split that seems to be behind much of the thinking of humans as complex machines, and it reduces the body to parts that can be replaced or even sold. Today, people commonly donate semen, ova and plasma for cash, deeds that would have been blasphemy 500 years ago. Organ transplants are common, and we carry organ donor cards in our wallets.
When we’re able to replace parts of our bodies at will, or to reprogram our genes, is it any wonder we don’t know what to make of our bodies? Should we just remake them since the clockwork meat that makes up the physical human is doomed to fail anyway?
“Why should a healthy mind die just because the body is not healthy?” asks filmmaker David Cronenberg in “Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century,” by Mary Deary. “There just seems to be something wrong with that.”
Cronenberg has directed some of the most horrifying films about the clash of body and technology, such as “The Fly” and “Crash.” His simple query may be at the root of the ‘borg, the genetic researchers and other body hackers.
“This is ultimately the refusal to accept finitude and the fear of death,” says Don Ihde, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “We don’t want to be mortal.”
And some things are impossible, he says--such as avoiding death.
“Most ‘cyborg’ stuff of the present is a makeshift prevention, not an improvement over the human body,” he says in an interview via e-mail. “Were a prosthetic arm shown to be stronger--able to . . . crush steel cups--would you choose to have yours amputated and have one? I doubt it.”
The desire to transcend the body, to shuffle off this mortal coil, is as old as faith. And, like the faith that billions place in God for ultimate resurrection in heaven, today’s cyber-utopians place their faith in technology as a force that can resurrect them as new forms: leather-clad angels soaring on hydraulic wings.
Still, for everything that technology and computers can do for us, there is something that can be done to us. With the reduction of the body to component parts, will we see less value placed on those who can’t, or won’t, be “upgraded”? For every utopia where invisible technology serves our every need, could there be slums dominated by roving bands of cyber-thugs harvesting human organs?
“For every vision of digital heaven,” warns Arthur Kroker, author of “Hacking the Future,” “there is an equal image of digital hell.”
So instead of the bright and shiny future promised by the ‘borg and other futurists, perhaps we should instead listen to Donna Haraway, author of “A Cyborg Manifesto.” She counseled us to create a society that neither demonizes technology nor surrenders to digital flights of fancy.
“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies,” she writes, and then adds: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
