You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. Or, in another version of the famous "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing in his classic 1950 paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine. 1 One of the entities wants to help you guess correctly. His/herlits best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. The other entity wants to mislead you. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think. Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans xi xii I Prologue Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction. The proposition can be demonstrated, he suggested, by downloading human consciousness into a computer, and he imagined a scenario designed to show that this was in principle possible. The Moravec test, in may call it that, is the logical successor to the Turing test. Whereas the Turing test was designed to show that machines can perform the thinking previously considered to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind, the Moravec test was designed to show that machines can become the repository of human consciousness-that machines can, for all practical purposes, become human beings. You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you. In the progression from Turing to Moravec, the part of the Turing test that historically has been foregrounded is the distinction between thinking human and thinking machine. Often forgotten is the first example Turing offered of distinguishing between a man and a woman. If your failure to distinguish correctly between human and machine proves that machines can think, what does it prove if you fail to distinguish woman from man? Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines? What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg? In his thoughtful and perceptive intellectual biography of Turing, Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing's predilection was always to deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle.2 To a remarkable extent, Hodges says, Turing was blind to the distinction between saying and dOing. Turing fundamentally did not understand that "questions involving sex, society, politics or secrets would demonstrate how what it was possible for people to say might be limited not by puzzle-solving intelligence but by the restrictions on what might be done" (pp. 423-24). In a fine inSight, Hodges suggests that "the discrete state machine, communicating by teleprinter alone, was like an ideal for [Turing's] own life, in which he would be left alone in a room of his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument. It was the embodiment of a perfect J. S. Mill liberal, concentrating upon the free will and free speech of the individual" (p. 425). Turing's later embroilment with the police and court system over the question of his homosexuality played out, in a different key, the assumptions embodied in the Turing test. His conviction and the court -ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobiC society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens.

how to

N. KATHERINE HAYLES is professor of English atthe University of California, Los Angeles. She holds degrees in both chemistry and English. She is the author of The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) and Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990) and is the editor of Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (1991), the last published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1999 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1999 Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 3 4 5 ISBN (cloth): 0-226-32145-2 ISBN (paper): 0-226-32146-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics / N. Katherine Hayles. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 0-226-32145-2 (cloth: alk. paper). - ISBN: 0-226-32146-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) l. Artificial intelligence. 2. Cybernetics. 3. Computer science. 4. Virtual reality. 5. Virtual reality in literature. I. Title. Q335.H394 1999 003'.5---dc21 98-36459 CIP SThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for the Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Acknowledgments / ix Prologue / xi 1. Toward Embodied Virtuality / 1 2. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers / 25 Contents 3. Contesting for the Body ofInformation: The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics / 50 4. Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety / 84 5. From Hyphen to Splice: Cybernetic Syntax in Limho / 113 6. The Second Wave of Cybernetics: From Reflexivity to Self-Organization / 131 7. Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick / 160 8. The MaterialityofInformatics / 192 9. Narratives of Artificial Life / 222 10. The Semiotics of Virtuality: Mapping the Posthuman / 247 11. Conclusion: What Does It Mean to Be Posthuman? / 283 Notes / 293 Index /325 Prologue You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering

human post theory

Posthumanism[edit]

Main article: Posthumanism

In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive the human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questionshumanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman position recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, and understands the world through heterogeneous perspectives while seeking to maintain intellectual rigour and a dedication to objective observations. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.^[1]

Critical discourses surrounding posthumanism are not homogeneous, but in fact present a series of often contradictory ideas, and the term itself is contested, with one of the foremost authors associated with posthumanism, Manuel de Landa, decrying the term as "very silly."^[2] Covering the ideas of, for example, Robert Pepperell's The Posthuman Condition, and Hayles's How We Became Posthuman under a single term is distinctly problematic due to these contradictions.

The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the "cyborg" of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.^[3] Haraway's conception of the cyborg is an ironic take on traditional conceptions of the cyborg that inverts the traditional trope of the cyborg whose presence questions the salient line between humans and robots. Haraway's cyborg is in many ways the "beta" version of the posthuman, as her cyborg theory prompted the issue to be taken up in critical theory.^[4]

Following Haraway, Hayles, whose work grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanism - which separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a "shell" or vehicle for the mind - becomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because information technology puts the human bodyin question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious of information technological advancements while understanding information as "disembodied," that is, something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into it and human life practices.^[5]

Transhumanism[edit]

Main article: Transhumanism

Definition[edit]

According to transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."^[6]

Methods[edit]

Further information: Human enhancement

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism usingadvanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.^[6]

Posthuman future[edit]

As used in this article, "posthuman" does not necessarily refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species whospeciate from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist. However, the apocalyptic scenario appears to be a viewpoint shared among a minority of transhumanists such as Marvin Minsky^{[citation needed]} and Hans Moravec, who could be considered misanthropes, at least in regards to humanity in its current state. Alternatively, others such as Kevin Warwick argue for the likelihood that both humans and posthumans will continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities.^[7] Recently, scholars have begun to speculate that posthumanism provides an alternative analysis of apocalyptic cinema and fiction, often casting vampires, werewolves and even zombies as potential evolutions of the human form and being.^[8]

Many science fiction authors, such as Greg Egan, H.G Wells, Isaac Asimov, Bruce Sterling, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, Charles Stross, Neal Asher, Ken MacLeod and authors of the Orion's Arm Universe,^[9] have written works set in posthuman futures.

Posthuman god[edit]

A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of a "posthuman god"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of human nature, might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly god-like by present-day human standards.^[6] This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a higher plane of existence—rather, it merely means that some posthuman beings may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that their behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination.^[10]

As humans drive forward into the future, they may just have their foot on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time.

Imagine it was an elevator, and the American Society of Elevator Attendants was offended by the idea of everyone simply pushing buttons to operate elevators without the paid help of any attendant. Would all of human society be better off right now with every elevator being operated by a paid attendant?

Or imagine that back in the day, trains were upgraded from coal-based steam engines to today’s diesel engines, and railroad unions fought and won to keep the position of coal-shovelers so that there’d be a job for people on trains doing absolutely nothing for the next 60 years. Believe it or not, that one actually happened.

Such thinking is not progress. It’s regress. Humans have the ideas of work and income so tied up in their minds, that even though they’ve now successfully reached the point where toil is no longer necessary to survive on Earth, they are demanding their toil not be lifted off their shoulders.

Humans are actually demanding that machines not do their work for them. Humans are creating work that does not need to be done, and perhaps worst of all, they are continuing extinction-endangering work like coal mining that should have been stopped decades ago for the good of the species.

Cutting the Cord

To put an end to all this nonsense, it seems in humanity’s best interests to finally sever the self-imposed connection between work and access to the common planetary resources required for life. For as long as humans must toil to live, they will toil for life.

Unemployment is not a disease. It’s the opposite. Employment is the malady and automation is the cure. It is the job of machines to handle as much work for humans as possible, so as to free them to pursue that which each and every individual human being most wishes to pursue. That pursuit may be work or it may be leisure. That pursuit may be knowledge or it may be play. That pursuit may be companionship or it may be solitude. Whatever it may be, the goal is happiness and the pursuit itself self-motivated, the journey its own reward.

So when those like Robert Reich say “There are still a lot of jobs” before suggesting mankind may not yet be ready for universal basic income, but soon most definitely will be, perhaps humans should ask if not having a basic income is actually part of the reason there are any jobs still left for humans. Perhaps it’s the insistence on the existence of jobs that creates jobs, whether they need to exist or not.

As humans drive forward into the future, they may just have their foot on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. If so, is this in the best interests of humanity? Why not instead stop pressing the brakes by adopting basic income immediately, so as to fully accelerate into an increasingly automated future of increasing abundance and victory over scarcity? That seems to make a lot more sense than perpetuating — and even artificially creating — scarcity.

But then again, these are simply the thoughts of a tourist, in observance of life on the third planet from an average yellow star in a somewhat ordinary spiral galaxy. Pay me little mind if you choose. I’m just passing through on the suggestion this place is incredibly entertaining in all its grand backwardness.

—-

Want to help? You can take this survey about basic income or sign this petition to the President and Congress for a basic income for all, or donate your time ormoney to Basic Income Action, a non-profit organization founded to transform basic income from idea to reality. You can also support articles like this by sharing them.

work and humanity

Here lies the greatest obstacle to human progress — the longstanding connection between work and income.

Nowhere is the above more clear than in two recent pieces of news: Google’s announcement that Boston Dynamics is up for sale, and Johnson & Johnson’s announcement that the Sedasys machine would be discontinued.

Atlas Shrugged Off by Google

You probably already saw it, as over ten million others did within days of it being posted to YouTube, but the demonstration video of the new version of Atlas from the robotics team at Boston Dynamics was a stunning display of engineering that shocked the world. Similar to the victory of the AI AlphaGo over world champion human Go player Lee Sedol just weeks later, it dumbfounded people with the realization of how quickly technology is advancing.

People naturally saw with their own eyes how close they are to having robots fully capable of doing physical tasks previously thought to be decades down the road, and the result was a discussion sprinkled with more than a bit of human panic based in entirely legitimate fears of income insecurity. This ended up being a discussion Google had no interest in, and so Boston Dynamics is now up for sale. To be fair, Google already wanted to sell BD, but leaked emails do show the concerns of negative PR as a direct result of advanced robotics:

In yet more emails wrongly published to wider Google employees, Courtney Hohne, a spokeswoman for Google X, wrote: “There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs ... We’re not going to comment on this video because there’s really not a lot we can add, and we don’t want to answer most of the questions it triggers.”

Google wants to advance technology but at the same time, it doesn’t want to answer the questions those advancements will raise. This appears to be a clear example of a major obstacle for human progress. It’s the same likely reason companies like McDonald’s haven’t dived in with both feet to greatly automate their operations and vastly reduce their labor forces. The technology exists, but they aren’t doing it. Why?

Perhaps it’s because as long as people need jobs as their sole source of income, companies have the potential of stepping onto a public relations landmine by automating their jobs out of existence, or being seen as responsible for others doing so. Eliminating jobs also means not only cutting employees, but demand itself.

Putting humans out of work should be a public relations win, not a loss...

Putting humans out of work should be a public relations win, not a loss, and so mankind needs to make sure no one left without a job, for any amount of time, is ever unable to meet their most basic needs. Everyone needs a non-negotiable guarantee of income security, so that the elimination of jobs breeds not fear, but excitement. The loss of a job should be seen as an opportunity for new real choices. And so some amount of basic income should be guaranteed to everyone — universally — as a starting point upon which all can earn additional income.

However, negative PR is just one obstacle along the road to full automation. Another obstacle is something originally devised to make sure employed humans had some amount of bargaining power, so as to not be walked all over by those who employed them, and that’s the forces of organized labor. In an unfortunate turn of events, that which once helped drive prosperity is beginning to hold it back. Organized labor is organizing to perpetuate the employment that tech labor is working to eliminate.

humanity power

I believe Richard Feynman was one of our greatest scientific minds. He had a very particular way of looking at the world thanks to his father, and it was to look at the world around him as if he were a Martian. Like a fish born into water, it’s hard to actually see water as being water, because it’s all a fish ever knows. And so as humans, it’s a good idea to try and step outside of our usual frame of mind, to see what it is we as humans think and do, from the perspective of a mind totally alien to our everyday environment. With that in mind, here’s what humans are doing right now, from the perspective of someone from far, far away...

What an interesting place and an interesting time it is for a visit. Earth’s most intelligent primates are busy creating technologies that allow them all to do less work, freeing themselves from millennia of senseless toil and drudgery. Strangely, however, they are using such technologies to force each other to work longer and harder. In one area called the United States, responsible for so much of the world’s technological innovation, at a time when productivity has never been higher, the number of hours spent working for others in exchange for the means to live is nowjust shy of 50 hours per week, where it was once 40 and soon supposed to be 20on its way to eventually approaching zero.

Humans are even performing work that doesn’t actually need to be done at all, even by a machine. One of the craziest examples of such completely unnecessary work is in Europe where an entire fake economic universe has been created under the label of “Potemkin companies“ like Candelia.

Candelia was doing well. Its revenue that week was outpacing expenses, even counting taxes and salaries... but in this case the entire business is fake. So are Candelia’s customers and suppliers, from the companies ordering the furniture to the trucking operators that make deliveries. Even the bank where Candelia gets its loans is not real. More than 100 Potemkin companies like Candelia are operating today in France, and there are thousands more across Europe... All these companies’ wares are imaginary.

Incredibly, human beings are waking up early in the mornings to drive to offices to perform imaginary business in imaginary markets involving imaginary customers using imaginary money to buy imaginary goods and services instead of simply enjoying their non-imaginary and most definitely real lives with each other.

Another example of humans coming up with excuses for more work, which may come as a surprise, is actually firefighting, which thanks to technology has been fighting fewer and fewer fires:

On highways, vehicle fires declined 64 percent from 1980 to 2013. Building fires fell 54 percent during that time. When they break out, sprinkler systems almost alwaysextinguish the flames before firefighters can turn on a hose. But oddly, as the number of fires has dropped, the ranks of firefighters have continued to grow — significantly. There are half as many fires as there were 30 years ago, but about 50 percent more people are paid to fight them.

How can this be? If there are far fewer fires, why are there far more firefighters? The short answer is because of something called labor unions, who at some point just up and stopped fighting to reduce hours worked. But why? The reason labor unions now fight so hard to keep humans laboring is because humans require each other to work in order to obtain the resources required to live happy lives, or even to live at all for that matter.

Here lies the greatest obstacle to human progress — the longstanding connection between work and income. As long as everything is owned and the only way to obtain access to that which is owned is through money, and the only way to obtain money is to be born with it or through doing the bidding of someone who owns enough to do the ordering around — what humans call a “job” — then jobs can’t be eliminated. As a worker, any attempt to eliminate jobs must be fought and as a business owner, the elimination of jobs must involve walking a fine line between greater efficiency and public outcry. The elimination of vast swathes of jobs must be avoided unless seen as absolutely necessary so as to avoid angering too many people who may also be customers.

faith in humans

My wife, Zoe, is transgender. She came out to us — the kids and me — last summer and then slowly spread her beautiful feminine wings with extended family, friends, and neighbors.

A little coming out here, a little coming out there — you know how it is.

It’s been a slow, often challenging process of telling people something so personal and scary, but pretty much everyone has been amazing.

She works at a large technology company, managing a team of software developers in a predominantly male office environment. She’s known many of her co-workers and employees for 15 or so years. They have called her “he” and “him” and “Mr.” for a very long time. How would they handle the change?

While we have laws in place in Ontario, Canada, to protect the rights of transgender employees, it does not shield them from awkwardness, quiet judgment, or loss of workplace friendships. Your workplace may not become outright hostile, but it can sometimes become a difficult place to go to every day because people only tolerate you rather than fully accept you.

The support was immediately apparent; she received about 75 incredibly kind responses from coworkers, both local and international.

She then took one week off, followed by a week where she worked solely from home. It was only last Monday when she finally went back to the office.