The end or the beginning?
What if we don’t get along; humans and post humans, “Norms” and “Ems”, organics and cyborgs? What if they don’t like us, what if they treat us like we treat lesser beings? There would perhaps be an irony in us being treated the same way we have treated animals for so long.
It is therefore crucial for us to sustain relationships with future generations, whether it’s our 150 year old selves or cyborg post-humans. Donna Haraway touches on this in her lecture as the 2003-2004 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley: “From Cyborgs to Companion Species”:
Harraway also compassionately considers how we will (have to) interact with the very different, advanced, perhaps even unrecognisable versions of ourselves in her short and visionary book ‘Simians, cyborgs and women’, first published in 1991, which is well worth a read.
“Companion speciesism will be the ontological new feminism…There are several consequences to taking the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines, they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.”
Haraway, Donna. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge, 2013.
Haraway is an original, prescient and calming expert. Other far-fetched, philosophical forecasts for forty years into the future are frightening, uncertain yet all more likely than time travel. Perhaps this all-knowing collective consciousness of minds has already happened and happens cyclically, and it created us. What if AI cyborgs our creators?
Like it or not, this is happening and has been happening since way before the 1950s. It’s happening at a rate you can’t quite be shocked by, and most of it seems like technological advances. Additional, excellent further reading can be found in the 2008 book by Katherine Hayles, who provides many insightful, provoking rhetorical questions and useful conclusive comments:
“What do these (technological) developments mean for the posthuman? When the self is envisioned as grounded in presence, identified with originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence, the posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of selfconstruction and self-assurance while remaining ignorant of the actual dynamics of complex systems. But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It Signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.”
Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf
The end of humanity or the start or super-humanity, post-humanity. Maybe this has all happened before and we are simply living the Ems conception. They are our creators, our God(s). Descartes would be chuffed. This is, of course, not a new or unique idea, but it certainly got me thinking. While it is an interesting concept it certainly doesn’t provide a new or satisfactory answer as to the big questions like where we came from. A higher consciousness places us here to feel for it, as it had grown so bored of its super intelligence, our fallibilities, failings, hatred, love and everything in between simply entertain it? And we are on course to create our own super-consciousness and repeat and repeat? Where did it start? And where will it end?