Induction

Movement 1:
You are here!

Movement 2:
Cyborgs Can't be Educated

Movement 3:
I Don't Want to be a Computer!

Movement 4:
A Cyborg Humanist's Vision

Movement 5:
Flash from a Cyborg Classrooom

Computing and its associated technologies engender strong emotions. Few people feel neutral. The equipment and systems have become endowed with personalities and names and are subject to fictionalized representations such as HAL in "2001." So many movies and stories depict the computer that wrests control from its makers or operators to turn evil or violent. Where are the computers (with female identities) who take control in order to use their higher intelligence to bring world peace? What is there in these fictional representations that express our fears (and wonders) about the machines that sit on all our desks and laps connecting us to one another and to worlds of information and resources? Invariably the theme is that they take over, that we lose control, that we’ve created a monster. Mary Shelley articulated this classic insight in 1818 long before there were computers. However, today the monster is sitting on our laps. It is our companion, our PAL. For some, if not all, the monster is us, cyborgs, cybernetic-organisms, machine-animal hybrids.

The shift that has taken place since Dr. Frankenstein sewed together his monster is that fiction has become reality–the monster is no longer of our imagination. It is not paranoia that grips us when we imagine PAL taking over the world, the merger has already been approved. I used to hold that AI (artificial intelligence) was impossible, at least if by intelligence we mean "human intelligence." My reasoning was that computers don’t have bodies. I believe that conception (thought) is based on metaphor which, in turn, is largely based on sentience, on being a living body. Thus, a machine (on its own) cannot possibly think (as we think) because they do not have bodies. But the border separating animals (humans) and machines (computers) has been transgressed. We share our bodies with computers. We/they are cyborgs. Computers were originally designed as an analog to human neurology. The heart of the matter, I believe, is that when we face the rise of technology we see, we know, however unconsciously, the collapse of the distinctions on which the West (if not the whole human enterprise) has won the world. The joining of machine and animal–the cyborg–presages the collapse of duality. The cyborg tracks endlessly the moebius to show us that inside and outside are, in some important sense, ultimately indistinguishable, and, thus, neither are fiction and academic writing, male and female, good and bad, god and human, sacred and profane, symbol and symbolized, maker and made, author and reader. The message is not so subtly presented to us by Bill Gates through Microsoft advertisements: "I can be me on the Internet, without fear, without color, without race, . . . " Even distinctions of time and space have collapsed; we log on with Microsoft’s enticement, "Where do you want to go today?"

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