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Introduction

• Introduce our selves – are you a cyborg?• Assignment #1• Steve Mann – “At a airport gate, a Cyborg

unplugged”• NBC – Introduction & Chapter 1• SM – Chapter 1

Walt Whitman “I Sing the Body Electric” (1900)

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I SING the Body electric; The armies of those I love engirth me, and I

engirth them; They will not let me off till I go with them,

respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full

with the charge of the Soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their

own bodies conceal themselves; And if those who defile the living are as bad

as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do as much as the

Soul? And if the body were not the Soul, what is

the Soul?

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Brain• Brain: an apparatus with which

we think we think. – Ambrose Bierce (1842 -

1914), The Devil's Dictionary

• If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. – Lyall Watson

• People who don't Think probably don't have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake. – Pooh's Little Instruction

Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

Human-computer interaction

• From interacting with ATMs to playing video games to neural implants…

• What makes humans differ than computers?– Human (1533): a bipedal primate mammal

(Homo sapiens)– Computer (1646) - one that computes;

specifically : a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data

• How do we interact with computers?

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Human Brains

Advantages : • Enormous size.• Uses parallel processing &

biological preprocessing.• Uses memory instead of

processing power.• Efficient when performing

small # of useful operations.• Good at : pattern

recognition, motor control, perception, flexible inference, intuition & guessing.

Disadvantages : • Slow.• Imprecise, make

erroneous generalizations,

• Prejudiced.• Often incapable of

explaining their actions.

Computer-aided = ?

• When does computer-aided cross the line into no longer human?

• Andy Clark – Natural Born Cyborg

• Howard Rheingold – Smart Mobs

• Cory Doctorow – Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Artificial intelligence (1956): a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers; the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior (onelook.com)

• Cyborg (cybernetic organism) -- “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” Donna Haraway (1991).– E.g., Kevin Warwick & Steve Mann vs.

Terminator, Borg

Andy Clark

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Andy Clark: Natural Born Cyborgs : Introduction

My body is an electronic virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I don't even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes). But I am slowly becoming more and more a Cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery or bodily alterations, we shall be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable...just fill in your favorite fictional Cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be Cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry. This book is the story of that transition and of its roots in some of the most basic and characteristics facts about human nature. For human beings, I want to convince you, are natural-born cyborgs.

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Terminator, Eve VIII, Cable, Santa Claus Meets the Martians?

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Clark’s Argument – Cognitive hybridization, mindware upgrades, man

the toolmaker, cyborg• Humans have always done cognitive

hybridization.– Speech & counting written text

& numerals printing printing press digital encodings

– Cascade of “mindware upgrades”• Our cyborg nature can explain

– Why humans differ from other animals while having similar neural & bodily resources

– Why it’s hard to build a decent thinking robot

– Why losing his laptop was tough

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• Human mind can’t be seen as bound & restricted by biological skin-bag– Prejudice that “whatever

matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin & skull.”

• Role of biological brain – Good at pattern

recognition, perception, controlling physical actions

– Bad at complex planning & long derivations of consequences

“bad at logic & good at Frisbee”

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Cyborg

• “an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems” (Wikipedia)

• Cultural icon of human-machine hybrids• Clark – “hijack that image & to reshape it,

revealing it as a disguised vision of (oddly) our own biological nature.”

• Humans – unique in ability to enter into deep & complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props & aids.– Doesn’t depend on physical wire-and-implants– Does depend on our openness to information-

processing mergers

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Post-humanismwww.robertpepperell.com/Posthum/

gener.htm1.1. It is now clear that Humans are no longer the most

important things in the Universe. This is something the Humanists have yet to accept.

1.2. All technological progress of Human society is geared towards the redundancy of the Human species as we currently know it.

1.3. In the Posthuman era many beliefs become redundant - not least the belief in Human Being.

1.4. Human Beings, like Gods, only exist in as much as we believe them to exist.

1.5. The Future never arrives.1.6. All Humans are not born equal, but it is too dangerous not

to pretend that they are.1.7. In the Posthuman era machines will be Gods.1.8. Intelligent Agents will be the religious authorities of the

Information Age. We will ask them to interpret the Chaos of the God machines for us.

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Clark is not post-humanist

• As NBC, humans ready to merge our mental abilities with technology

• E.g., Lolo & his silicon chip– No signs of “cat-machine”

symbiosis• New waves of user-sensitive

technology that adapt to us will help us merge with technology -> harder to say “where world stops &the person begins”

• We are “creatures whose minds are special precisely because they are tailor-made for multiple mergers & coalitions”

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Clark’s argument continues

• Barrier between biological self & technological world was never very firm.– Plasticity & multiplicity are true constants– Technology has always been present

• Example – home town of Brighton– Cell phones, Nokia, text messaging– Finnish use of “kanny” – extension of the hand

– for cell phone.• Something you use + something that is part of you.

• Upgrades have pros & cons– Every new technology brings new limits &

demans.

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Mind-Body Problem is Really Mind-Body Scaffolding Problem

• Understand how human thought & reason is born out of looping interactions between material brains, material bodies & complex cultural & technological environments.

• Create environments, but they create us too.

• “Baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural & technological scaffolding.”