Without doubt, an increasing ability to merge individuals with powerful technologies opens up some compelling possibilities. We’re already seeing this in some of the incredibly sophisticated robotic and cyber-enabled medical devices and prosthetics that are being developed. But these are just the tip of the iceberg compared to what could be possible over the next decade or so. Advances in AI-related technologies, computing architectures, gene editing and manipulation, robotics, on-demand additive manufacturing, and the converging and merging of these and other technologies, is massively accelerating what is possible. And while I’m skeptical of technologies like Elon Musk’s neural lace becoming a reality any time soon, we’re not as far as we sometimes think from technologies that will make us faster, stronger, smarter, healthier, and capable of doing things we never dreamt possible.
Yet these emerging technological capabilities come with a complex array of risks, as Steve Mann’s experience showed. As a species, we are embarrassingly programmed to see “different” as “threatening,” and to take instinctive action against it. It’s a trait that’s exploited in many science fiction novels and movies, including those in this book. If we want to see the rise of increasingly augmented individuals, we need to be prepared for some social strife.
We’re also going to have to grapple, perhaps more than in any previous technological age, with what it means to be “human” as we artificially augment ourselves.
More than “Human”?
In 2012, Oscar Pistorius made history by being the first runner to compete in the Olympic Games with two prosthetic legs. Even for those not glued to the event, his iconic racing blades came to represent the promise of technological enhancements to overcome human limitations. Yet they also stirred up a controversy: Did Pistorius’ prosthetics give him an unfair advantage? Did they somehow make him “more than” his fellow competitors? Sadly, Pistorius went on to prove just how human he was, and in December 2015 was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. But the story of his blades is nevertheless one that challenges how we think about using technology to change and extend our innate abilities.
Pistorius was born with a congenital absence of the fibula, and at eleven months old, his legs were amputated below the knee. Despite this, he developed into a strong and competitive sportsperson, and in the mid-2000s began making a splash running on “blades”—blade-like prosthetic lower legs, designed specifically for the track. But this wasn’t the first time the world had seen such an unusual body augmentation.
Blades were the brainchild of Van Phillips, an American inventor who lost one of his legs below the knee when he was twenty-one. Phillips wanted to create a prosthetic foot that did more than replicate a human foot. Using a cheetah’s hind legs as inspiration, he created a leg/foot combination that worked like a spring, storing energy when it hit the ground, and propelling the leg forward. Phillips started his company Flex-Foot Incorporated in 1984, and continued to work on refining the design for some time after that.
Early on, Phillips worked with another double amputee, the sprinter, actor, and model Aimee Mullins. Mullins wowed the world with her “cheetah” legs in a 1998 TED Talk91 that reputedly cemented the TED brand. She repeated the “wowing” in 2009 with her TED Talk “My Twelve Pairs of Legs,”92 where she introduced her audience to the idea that, far from correcting a disability, prosthetics can be transformative. As she concludes in that talk:
That’s when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It’s a conversation about augmentation. It’s a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space.
Mullins’s vision was one of vast potential, as machines and cybernetics are increasingly engineered together to extend human performance. But this same potential was to become a thorn in Pistorius’s side in the hyper-conservative world of international sport. And at the tip of that thorn was the nagging worry that his blades somehow gave him a competitive advantage. Even as the world was beginning to accept that someone labeled as “disabled” could compete in mainstream sport, society was working hard to ensure that these “others” didn’t out-perform “normal” competitors.
Following concerns that blades and similar devices could give runners a competitive advantage, in 2007 the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) banned the use of “any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device.”93 In fact, so great was the paranoia over Pistorius’ prosthetics that the IAAF monitored his performance to see if they could detect any signs of an advantage, and they supported research to the same end. In 2008, they concluded that the blades he was using allowed him to perform better than non-augmented runners, rendering them ineligible for competitions, including the 2008 Olympics.
Later research indicated that things were more complex than this, and in 2012, Pistorius was allowed to compete in the London Olympics. You could almost hear the IAAF breathe a collective sigh of relief when he didn’t win. By this time, though, it was clear that the merest hint of mechanical body enhancements allowing someone to perform a hair’s breadth better than non-enhanced competitors was anathema to the sports world.
Both Pistorius’s and Mullins’s stories fascinate me as, they reveal two very different sides of societal attitudes toward human augmentation. On one hand, we have Mullins’s infectious enthusiasm over how her prosthetic legs increase her versatility. They become an extension of her self-expression, and a tool to extend her capabilities. Hers is a narrative of self-expression and personal achievement that inspires us, but doesn’t threaten us.
On the other hand, we have Pistorius’s fight with the IAAF for acceptance and legitimacy, precisely because his augmentation was seen as a threat. As Pistorius rose in fame and ability, there was a growing fear that he would best “normal” athletes, and win through having an undue advantage. And here we see a convergence between the two stories. As a species, we’re remarkably good at celebrating success, as long as it doesn’t undermine our sense of how the world should be. But as soon as our worldview comes under threat, we dig in. And this is where we hit the sharp end of what will inevitably become a growing debate around cybernetic augmentation.
Mullins, Pistorius, and others using advanced prosthetics are a long way removed from the augmentations in Ghost in the Shell. Nevertheless, they do foreshadow a future where what defines “normal,” and by extension, what defines “human,” becomes increasingly important. This echoes the challenges of cognitive enhancement seen with Limitless (chapter five) and the human cloning in Never Let Me Go (chapter three). And it emphasizes a particularly knotty challenge that the body-hacking movement also highlights: How do we navigate a future where technology not only has the capacity to bring everyone to “normal” spec, but also to redefine what “normal” means in the first place?
Here, I’m using “normal” intentionally and provocatively, as at the center of this challenge is our built-in social survival instinct of grouping together and isolating anyone, or anything, that is perceived to be threateningly not-normal. Socially, we’re remarkably good at being open-minded and accepting of diversity when it’s not seen as a threat. But as soon as enough people perceive “different” as threatening something they value, whether it’s their lifestyle, their possessions, their beliefs or their identity, there is a metaphorical circling of the wagons. Through history we’ve seen this with race, gender, socioeconomic status, appearance, character, beliefs, political affiliation, and pretty much anything that can be labeled as defining someone as being different from the crowd. It’s not a pleasant human trait. But it is one that kicks in when we’re content to go with the social flow and stop thinking. And it’s going to be an issue when i
t comes to body augmentations that threaten the status quo.
But it gets worse. There’s an easy shorthand that people slip into when what they consider to be “normal” is threatened, and this involves implicitly equating the divide between “normal” and “abnormal” with “human” and “not human,” just as we saw with Never Let Me Go in chapter three. Few people, I suspect, would admit that they think of people who they perceive as threatening as not being quite human. But the narrative’s there nevertheless. Just look at the language that’s been used over the centuries to denigrate people of color, or people of other races, people of other religions, people who are intellectually, emotionally and physically different from “the norm,” and people with non-binary gender identities. There’s a dark, deep tendency to label threateningly different traits and abilities as “non-human” or even “sub-human” in our collective psyche.
This will inevitably become more of a social issue as technologies advance to the point where we can use augmentation to enhance human abilities beyond what is considered normal. But it will also become increasingly important for the self-identity and self-acceptance of those who have enhanced abilities. This, again, is not a new narrative. Labeling someone as “inferior” or “less worthy”—both subtle metaphors for “not quite as human as the rest of us”—can engender self-doubt that is ultimately deeply debilitating. But such labeling also sets up tensions that can lead to tipping points in the social fabric and bring about revolutions—whether cultural or physical, or both—that lead to a readjustment of what is considered normal and what is not. This is sometimes necessary as society grows and evolves. But sometimes these transitions are deeply damaging in ways that could be avoided.
As augmentation technologies continue to advance, we’re going to have to grapple with how to evolve as a society without falling prey to our instincts to deprecate the value of those we perceive as threatening us. This will require developing a society-wide appreciation of the perceived and actual risks and benefits of augmentation and enhancement. And it’ll take plenty of soul-searching around our collective values, and how we put them into practice.
The good news is that we already have a long history of augmentation that helps set the baseline for future advances. People augment their eyesight with glasses, contact lenses, and eye surgery. The clothes we wear augment how we express and define ourselves us. Our computers, phones, and other devices augment us by connecting us to vast and powerful networks. And medical devices, from pacemakers to replacement body parts, augment us by extending our ability to live healthy, fulfilled lives. We are, without a doubt, already a technologically augmented and enhanced species.
Yet we’ve assimilated these augmentations in ways that lead to their acceptance when they don’t confer what we consider to be an unfair advantage, and that question them where they threaten something we consider important. This is human instinct, and an evolved survival mechanism. But it’s also socially lazy. It’s an assimilation that lacks consideration and intentionality, and it’s one that’s not strongly guided by moral values and ideals. And because of this, it’s an assimilation that can appear enlightened until a serious perceived threat appears, at which point instinct takes over with a vengeance.
If we’re going to ensure the beneficial, equitable, and—let’s be honest, life-enhancing and affirming—development of augmentation technologies, we’re going to have to get a lot better as a society at working out what’s important, and intentionally opening pathways for this to occur. And this is going to mean stepping away from our instinctual fear of differences that we perceive as threatening, and getting better at embracing diversity. At the same time, we’re going to have to be intentional in how we develop and implement the frameworks within which augmentation occurs, so that socially-agreed-on values guide the use of augmentation technologies. And as increasingly advanced technologies challenge embedded but outmoded notions of what it is to be “human,” we’re going to have to think hard about what we mean by personal value, worth, and rights.
But this raises another challenge that Ghost in the Shell addresses full-on: the possibility of our augmented selves being hacked by others, especially when this augmentation extends to developing ways of directly connecting our brains to machines.
Plugged In, Hacked Out
The physical augmentations in Ghost in the Shell, including Batou’s eyes and Motoko’s body, are important. But it’s the neural augmentations that ultimately drive the narrative. In the metaphor of the movie’s title, the physical body is merely a shell, whether it’s augmented or not. This in turn houses the essence of what makes someone who they are, and gives them their identity, their ghost. Yet in the world of the movie, this “ghost” is vulnerable, precisely because it depends on technological augmentation.
In Western culture, we deeply associate our brains with our identity. They are the repository of the memories and the experiences that define us. But they also represent the inscrutable neural circuits that guide and determine our perspectives, our biases, our hopes and dreams, our loves, our beliefs, and our fears. Our brain is where our cognitive abilities reside (“gut” instinct not withstanding); it’s what enables us to form bonds and connections with others, and it’s what determines our capacity to be a functioning and valuable part of society—or so our brains lead us to believe. To many people, these are essential components of the cornucopia of attributes that define them, and to lose them, or have them altered, would be to lose part of themselves.
This is, admittedly, a somewhat skewed perspective. Modern psychology and neurology are increasingly revealing the complexities and subtleties of the human brain and the broader biological systems it’s intimately intertwined with. Yet despite this, for many of us, our internal identity—how we perceive and understand ourselves, and who we believe we are—is so precious that anything that threatens it is perceived as a major risk. This is why neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s can be so distressing, and personality changes resulting from head traumas so disturbing. It’s also why it can be so unsettling when we see people we know undergoing changes in their personality or beliefs. These changes force us to realize that our own identity is malleable, and that we in turn could change. And, as a result, we face the realization that the one thing we often rely on as being a fixed certainty, isn’t.
Over millennia, we’ve learned as a species to cope with the fragility of self-identity. But this fragility doesn’t sit comfortably with us. Rather, it can be extremely distressing, as we recognize that disease, injuries, or persuasive influences can change us. As a society, we succeed most of the time in absorbing this reality, and even in some cases embracing it. But neural enhancements bring with them a brand new set of threats to self-identity, and ones that I’m not sure we’re fully equipped to address yet, including vulnerability to outside manipulation.
Elon Musk’s neural lace is a case in point, as a technology with both vast potential and largely unknown risks. It’s easy to imagine how overlaying the human brain with a network of connections, processors and communications devices could vastly enhance our abilities and allow us to express ourselves more completely. Imagine if you could control your surroundings through your thoughts. Or you could type, or search the net, just by thinking about it. Or even if you could turbocharge your cognitive abilities at the virtual press of a button, or change your mood, recall information faster, get real-time feedback on who you’re speaking with, save and recall experiences, manipulate vast cyber networks, all through the power of your mind. It would be like squeezing every technological advancement from the past five hundred years into your head, and magnifying it a hundred-fold. If technologies like the neural lace reached their full potential, they would provide an opportunity for users to far exceed their full biological potential, and express their self-identity more completely than ever before.
It’s not hard to see how seductive some people might find such a technology. Of course, we’re a long, long way from any of t
his. Despite massive research initiatives on the brain, we’re still far from understanding the basics of how it operates, and how we can manipulate this. Yet this is not stopping people from experimenting, despite what this might lead to.
In 2014, the neurosurgeon Phil Kennedy underwent elective brain surgery, not to correct a problem, but in an attempt to create a surgically implanted brain-machine interface.94 Kennedy had developed a deep brain probe that overcame the limitations of simply placing a wire in someone’s brain, by encouraging neurons to grow into a hollow glass tube. By experimenting on himself, he hoped to gain insight into how the parts of the brain associated with language operate, and whether he could decode neural signals as words. But he also had a vision of a future where our brains are intimately connected to machines, one that he captured in the 2012 novel 2051, published under the pseudonym Alpha O. Royal.95
In this brief science fiction story, Kennedy, a.k.a. Alpha O. Royal, describes a future where brains can be disconnected from their bodies, and people can inhabit a virtual world created by sensors and probes that directly read and stimulate their neurons. In the book, this becomes the key that opens up interplanetary travel, as hurling a wired-up brain through space turns out to be a lot easier than having to accompany it with a body full of inconvenient organs. Fantastical as the book is, Kennedy uses it to articulate his belief that the future of humanity will depend on connecting our brains to the wider world through increasingly sophisticated technologies; starting with his hollow brain probes, and extending out to wireless-linked probes, that are able to read and control neurons via light pulses.
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