In this post, the combination of the body, the mind and the computer is going to be analyzed. Terms like Arificial Life (ALife), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cyborgs are going to be discussed, according to Dr. Stewart's notes (found at Blackboard Academic Suite):
Artificial Life: ALife
"In his book, Virtual Organisms Mark Ward describes research into the phenomena of Artificial Life (ALife). ALife is the study of systems related to life, “its processes and its evolution”. It is based on designing programs, simulations or robotic systems that are self-replicating and capable of maintaining ordered patterns over time. According to Stephen Levy:
"Artificial life, or a-life, is devoted to the creation and study of lifelike organisms and systems built by humans. The stuff of this life is non-organic matter, and its essence is information: computers are the kilns from which these new organisms emerge. Just as medical scientists have managed to tinker with life's mechanisms in vitro, the biologists and computer scientists of a-life hope to create life in silico" Levy.
Arguably, the most famous example, of ALife research is the computer game- Conway's Game of Life. This is not a computer game in the conventional sense, but is a simulation based on a chequer board on which a series of generations are projected according the rules lay out below.
Rules for Conway's Game of Life
* Any given cell on the checkerboard is either alive (on) or dead (off).
* If a cell is alive, it will continue to be alive in the next iteration, or generation, if and only if it has either two or three neighbours that are also alive.
* If a cell is dead, it will continue to be dead in the next iteration, or generation, unless exactly three of its neighbours are alive, in which case it will be born.
Overtime completely random selections will mutate into a series of stable and self-replicating systems."
Inorganic Life
"Proponents of Alife research suggest that the informational properties of life are not unique to organic life forms, such as humans. It is argued, therefore, that life can be formed out of any material capable of maintaining an order. Interestingly, the idea of inorganic ‘life’ is not new...One of the most famous cautionary legends is Frankenstein's 'monster' which originated in a book by Mary Shelley. In this story dead flesh is brought back to life by Frankenstein's experiments. As the critic Maurice Hindle notes:
“As a cautionary tale warning of the dangers that can be cast into society by a presuming experimental science, Frankenstein is without equal” (Shelley 1985 pg 7)
This story, which pre-dates contemporary transplant surgical practice by nearly two hundred years, still acts as a warning to researchers and society. One of the significant aspects of Shelley's story is the way the monster is treated by human beings. This intelligent thinking entity is utterly rejected as an abomination and driven by this rejection to terrible acts. The monster also struggles without success to understand the nature of its being. The story ends with the destruction of both the monster and its creator."
Artificial Intelligence:AI
"Another strand of the vitalist argument has centred on the uniqueness of the human ability to reason and make intelligent decisions (the Latin designation of our species Homo sapiens literally means ‘knowing man’). However, in the foreword to The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain Robert Pepperall argues that:
“the development of an artificially conscious entity may happen within our lifetimes” (Pepperall 2003:iii)
One of the holy grails of computing is to make an intelligent machine that could successfully complete a Turing test (by convincing a human that it was an another intelligent human). This research area goes under the name of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Unlike a conventional program that uses pre-set algorithms (worked out by their programmers) to solve problems, AI programs are designed to learn (these programs sometimes make use of interconnected neural nets). Over time, these programs develop ‘models’ of their worlds and they exhibit behaviour that their programmers can’t predict. Sometimes they have quite uncanny capabilities. For example, in the 1990s an IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov at a game of chess.
Enthusiasts for AI computing, such as Ray Kurtweil (see website below), claim that AI computers will soon be as smart as human beings. Kurtweil also claims that computers might make a suitable environment for human intelligence. In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines; How we will live, work and think in the new age of intelligent machines he sketches out a future in which organic human beings upload their minds to superior AI computers in order to enjoy better lives.
One of the challenges facing designers of AI systems is the notion of consciousness. This sense of self-awareness is thought by many philosophers to be the cornerstone of any definition of intelligence. A true Turing machine would have to know of its own existence as an entity and have a sense of self. See the Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose (1989)."
DNA: The Digitisation of Organic Life
"Let's return to Richard Wise's key observation about digitisation:
"The key concept and technology behind multimedia has been digitisation: the conversion of images and sound to numbers, making them amenable to manipulation by a computer." (Richard Wise pg 2)
To what extent is organic life amenable to manipulation though the messages encoded in the genome?
The first stage of this ‘digitisation’ was implemented with the Human Genome Project. This massive scientific undertaking sequenced the whole human genome (all the DNA in the human cell) so that it is now possible to ‘read’ the code that makes up human life (as well as number of other species). With other developments in molecular biology (such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep by scientist at the Roslin Institute) this situation might rapidly develop into full-blown manipulation (read and write).
Are we happy to manipulated like a digital text?
It is already possible to select the characteristics of a baby, such sex, before it is conceived. In the future it might be possible to dial-up a child from coded sequences or alter our own genetic code. This will raise all sorts of moral issues about who should have the power to make these kinds of decisions. A recent Guardian article reports that the scientist Craig Ventner has constructed a chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and “is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth”.
This is a controversial area. The manipulation of life has already caused concern amongst the general public. In particular, there have been protests at the release of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) into the wild. Cell stem research using human embryos has also given great cause for public concern. Both experiments have been branded as Frankenstein's monsters by pressure groups. They see such practices as being 'unnatural'; whatever that might mean."
Robotics: The Body's Return?
"In 1979 The Robotics Institute of America defined a robot as:
"A reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks".
The industrial robotic arm, used to spray cars, is the classic implementation of this idea. The arm, using a series of motors and sensors can carry out repetitive actions that would be tiring and dangerous for a human being to do. These commonly deployed machines, however, are just the beginnings. Workers in their area are trying to produce 'artificial creatures' that display many of the functions of life such as spontaneity, autonomy and self-regulation. So far the results have been rather mixed.
Early robot designers at MIT based their work on AI and programmed their robots to make cognitive maps of their locations, so that they could 'understand' their environments. These robots turned out to be very slow, and unable to deal with changes. More recent work by researchers such as Rodney Brookes devised much simpler robots that do not have centralsed cognitive elements in their programs. Instead Brookes modelled their systems on insects, with a series of simple routines built one of tope of another. These robots have been amazingly successful at producing life-like results. Brookes argues that it is important that his robots have the following features; situatedness and embodiment.
"A situated creature or robot is one that is embedded in the world, and which does not deal with abstract descriptions, but through its sensors with the here and now of the world, which directly influences the behaviour of the creature.
An embodied creature or robot is one that has a physical body and experiences the world, at least in part, directly through the influence of the world on that body. A more specialised type of embodiment occurs when the full extent of the creature is contained within that body." (Brookes 2002 pg 51)
The implication of Brookes' work is that intelligence requires a body. The body also gives, the entity purpose and potentials. Brookes and many others argue that the future of AI and robotics lies with a fusion between man and machines?"
The Cyborg Ancestry; 'Cybernetic Organism'
"The world's first cyborg was a white lab rat, part of an experimental program at New York's Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s. The rat had implanted in its body a tiny osmotic pump that injected precisely controlled doses of chemicals, altering various of its physiological parameters. It was part animal, part machine.
The Rockland rat is one of the stars of a paper called "Cyborgs and Space," written by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. This engineer/psychiatrist double act invented the term cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") to describe the vision of an "augmented man," better adapted than ordinary humans to the rigors of space travel. Clynes and Kline imagined a future astronaut whose heart would be controlled by injections of amphetamines and whose lungs would be replaced by a nuclear-powered "inverse fuel cell. The contemporary realisation of the cyborg is somewhat different. Human beings have been fitted with devices such as heart pace makers and insulin pumps. However, these devices are not under the immediate control of their human host and largely work on a chemical basis though, cochlea implants, that help treat certain types of deafness do interact directly with the human nervous system, converting sound to electronic machine signals and then to nerve signals.
A more integrated vision of man and machine has been realised by a Kevin Warwick in an experiment conducted over the Summer 2002. Warwick, who is a professor of cybernetics at University of Reading, had an electrical implant surgically placed into the median nerve of his wrist. With this implant he was able to communicate using his nervous system, for example, in one demonstration he drove a motorised wheel chair without using a joystick. In another experiment, Warwick connected his wrist implant up to the Internet, and he was able operate a robotic arm in Reading. This experiment raises the notion of a 'distributed' cyborg body.
I, Cyborg: Resistance is futile
The Borg Collective from the TV series Star Trek is a powerful fictional warning, in this case about the dangers of the cyborg and the hive mind. This alien species are imagined to have lost any respect for individuality and they seek to assimilate everything else into their collective. They communicate using a system a little bit like the Internet and have no concept of privacy or free-will.
Not all visions of the cyborg are apocalyptic. Donna Haraway, for example, sees the independence between organic life and technology as being a long-term and on-going phenomena. In a Wired interview she noted
"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade."(Kunzru)"
I, personally, do not have any comment or thought about these matters because they have enormous importance and they play (or will play) a very important role in our lives. So I am not for or against something because this field seems extremely large, sensitive and complicated to me. Nevertheless, I recommend you read Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (previous post) and watch "The Matrix" for a wider look at the subject. Cheers!
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