On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  True autonomy exists when an agent can problem-solve beyond the parameters of preset programming. Many cognitive scientists doubt that this kind of free will can really emerge out of progressively more complex Boolean rule systems, but an increasing number of such scientists and philosophers are wondering if human autonomy isn’t just a very complex version of this digital processing. In this view, the difference between artificial and human intelligence is one of degree, not kind. Even simple insect robots and computer entities act in surprising and unpredicted ways when their programmers put them into novel environments. String enough of this novel problem-solving behavior together and the machines begin to seem like biological systems.

  A simple example comes from Steven Levy’s book Artificial Life. Levy describes a common occurrence, a programmer who is surprised by the adaptive resources of his creation. When Mitchel Resnick designed a small robot to follow a straight line on the ground, he set the creature rolling without actually programming a protocol for when it reached the end of the line. “We wrote the program and it was following this line,” explained Resnick. “And all of a sudden it struck me that I had no idea what was going to happen when it reached the end of the line….When it got to the

  end of the line it turned around and started following the line in the other direction! If we had planned for it to do something, that would have been the ideal thing for it to do.”7

  True robot autonomy may not be a realistic fear in the near future, but robot manipulation by an enemy force of human hackers is entirely realistic. A good hacker could access the control system and turn missiles, robots, whatever, back at us just by rewriting the target protocols. In this case, the monsters are not the robots and computers themselves, but these machines become the inflexible tools of human oppressors.

  The uniquely frightening aspect of robot-based political and social control is that such mechanical police do not have empathic emotional checks on their behaviors. Will robots be able to follow the rules of the Geneva Convention, for example? No amount of screaming, crying, or human desperation will touch the heart of a robot policeman because, of course, it has no heart. One hopes that even the most hardened human soldier or police officer can be touched in the throes of warfare by the pained entreaties of human suffering. Although, as I’ve argued earlier, this is precisely the assumption (of natural human empathy) that many human monsters invalidate. Human monsters demonstrate their lack of empathy regularly. Perhaps robot soldiers, programmed with citizen-saving protocols, won’t do any worse than flesh-and-blood warriors.

  CYBORGS

  According to a recent issue of Nanotech Report, a newsletter analyzing investment opportunities for this cutting-edge technology, “Nanotechnol-ogy is about rebuilding mother nature atom by atom!”8 This is a dramatic way of pointing out that such technological advancements as the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and such processes as nanolithography have allowed us to manipulate nanoscale structures in ways previously unimaginable. We might, in theory, be able to design chemical programs that disassemble molecules or even organisms into their atomic parts and then rebuild those parts into better organisms or even different organisms. For example, we may be able to create populations of nanobots (little chemical factories) that will eventually live inside the blood stream, releasing insulin into the veins of diabetics to control their blood glucose levels.

  The U. S. National Nanotech Initiative, established by President Clinton and continued by President Bush, has already received 6.5 billion dollars in funding for nanotech research.9 Originally formulated as a thought experiment by Richard Feynman, this cutting-edge attempt to manipulate micronature has recently brought together government, academia, and corporations like DuPont, IBM, and Sony, to name a few. Optimists like Marvin Minsky believe that the new technology will usher in a new and improved posthuman species.10

  In this age of cloning, nanotech, genetic engineering, and neurophar-macology, a new breed of posthuman philosopher is emerging. It is not just the fiction writers and filmmakers who are intoxicated with the idea of transcending our human limits. A handful of forward-thinking, slightly lunatic artists, scientists, and cultural theorists are exploring the increasingly fuzzy boundary between technology and the biological body. Post-human (or transhuman in the United Kingdom) refers to the idea that we will eventually transcend our frustratingly finite flesh. But we won’t have to wait for an afterlife to achieve this liberation; we will attain it by the application of new technology. Technology, these theorists believe, will usher in a superior life for our species; we will no longer be limited by the spatial and temporal constraints of our corporeal self. For many theorists, this transhumanism is already well under way.

  Nick Bostrom, an Oxford professor and the founder of the World Transhumanist Association, has predicted many significant transformations in the near future. In a lecture at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference in 2005, Bostrom predicted that we humans will soon be able to expand our palette of sensory faculties, rearrange our body morphology, and even alter our hormonal makeup to ensure that love will not fade over time.11 Erectile dysfunction drugs have already allowed men to stave off aging and performance anxiety; soon they will be able to tweak their chemistry to stay faithful and happily partnered. Bostrom believes that the new technology will allow us to alter our basic nature in ways that will enhance our experience—indeed, enhance our lives.

  Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, states, “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate—a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.” To that end, he has implanted microchips in his body that communicate to computers in his lab, which respond by flipping on lights and opening doors when he approaches. He and his wife, Irena, plan to get his-and-hers implants that will send signals back and forth between computers and their nervous systems. Soon, he says, they will attempt to download and swap digital versions of their personal sensations and emotions. Warwick describes his wife’s intentions: “The way she puts it, is that if anyone is going to jack into my limbic system—to know definitively when I’m feeling happy, depressed, angry, or even sexually aroused—she wants it to be her.”12

  The distinction between our physical self and our cyberself, stretched in all directions by Internet nodes and ubiquitous microprocessors, will blur irreversibly some day, the posthumanists explain. Our bodies will be accessorized with hardware and software improvements, our minds ready for uploading and downloading. Our intellectual aspirations will no longer be hindered by the wet sacks we currently call home.

  In the next few years, the French performance artist Orlan will conclude her decades-long work-in-progress titled “The Reincarnation of St. Orlan” by having a team of plastic surgeons construct the largest nose that her face is capable of supporting. Under a local anesthetic, Orlan will lecture on postmodern theory, reading from Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Lacan, while surgeons flay her face and perform her rhinoplasty. She has already done this sort of surgery ten times. In New York Orlan had plastic structures implanted under the skin of her forehead so that it would approximate that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. In another operation she had her chin reconstructed on the model of Botticelli’s Venus. While these operations are performed she is dressed in outlandish costumes and her audience asks questions of her via fax machine, phone, and e-mail. When the surgeries are completed, the excess bits of skin and fat are stored in jars for display at future performances.

  Orlan is not an escaped mental patient. She is a respected member of the international art community, displaying herself and her work at the Pompidou in Paris and touring England with a show titled “This Is My Body, This Is My Software.” She is supported by grants from France’s Ministry of Culture and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The art world has embraced this controversial play of nature and technology with open arms.13

  To some viewers Orlan is blasphemous. Some critics decry her p
roject, claiming that it is playing God to rearrange the face or body that God gave her. Is she transforming herself into a monster? Perhaps there is something sacrosanct about the natural state of affairs. Then again, it seems far too late to raise such a nostalgic objection. The natural state of affairs is already increasingly the product of human intervention. Our tomatoes are genetically engineered to ripen sometime after the apocalypse, our corn is genetically designed to detassel itself, frogs are designed with see-through skin for anatomy students, and human beings walk around with pig-valved hearts and pharmacy-bought psyches. As prosthetic gods, we lengthen and strengthen our arms and legs with machines. We expand our vision and the other senses with amplifiers. We alter our biology and psychology with synthetic chemicals. But the idea that technology makes us more god-like is premised on the assumption that we will be able to maintain control of the augmentations, that our human will can continue to retain its mastery over the mechanical and digital equipment. If it slips away from us, if the tools become constraints rather than emancipators, then we may be in for unprecedented forms of alienation. Technology may alienate us from ourselves, dehumanizing us and turning us into self-made monsters of a new sort altogether.

  The Australian artist Stelarc finds ways to fuse his own body with robotic technology. From his Web site www.stelarc.va.com. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist.

  Japan has been refining the cyborg “robo-roach” for over a decade. Microrobotics teams and biologists, like those at Tsukuba University, have successfully outfitted cockroaches with microprocessors and replaced their antennae with pulse-emitting electrodes. The scientists can actually control the movements of the roach, making it turn left and right and move forward and backward. Here, then, is the real-world manifestation of our worst fears. Are we creating technology that will eventually put us in the place of these hapless roaches?

  The artist Stelarc (Stellos Arcadiou) takes a different approach to the interface between biology and technology. This performance artist, who is funded by an Australian Council Craft Board Fellowship, fuses his own body with electrical and digital technology. According to his official Web site, “He has used medical, robot and virtual reality systems to explore, extend and enhance the body’s parameters. In the past he has acoustically and visually probed the body—amplifying his brainwaves, heartbeat, blood flow and muscle signals and filming the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon. Having defined the limitations of the body, he has developed strategies to augment its capabilities, interfacing the body with prosthetics and computer technologies.”14

  The artist Stelarc plays with cyborg technology. He pushed the robotic camera down into his stomach to create a sculpture inside his body. From his Web site www.stelarc.va.com. Reprinted by kind permission of the artist.

  One of Stelarc’s early works was his “stomach sculpture.” He first built a finger-size capsule sculpture that contained a camera. Next he fasted for a day to clear his gut, and then he piped this capsule down his gullet, tethered to a flexidrive cable and external control box. Once inserted into his stomach, it moved about and lit up LEDs by external control.

  Again the burning question: Why do this? And again no clear answer is forthcoming, though the artist’s statement is provocative:

  The idea was to insert an artwork into the body—to situate the sculpture in an internal space. The body becomes hollow, with no meaningful distinctions between public, private and physiological spaces. The technology invades and functions within the body not as a prosthetic replacement, but as an aesthetic adornment. One no longer looks at art, nor performs as art, but contains art. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.

  In Stelarc’s “Ping Body” performance, audience members in Paris, Helsinki, and Amsterdam were electronically linked through a performance Web site (with a video feed) to the main performance site in Luxembourg, where Stelarc stood with wires and circuitry dangling from all parts of his body. These wires, which were muscle-stimulation contacts, were fed into a central computer, and audience members from around Europe were invited to manipulate Stelarc’s body from their remote sites. There is something phenomenally strange about this. A person stationed thousands of miles away can push a button and make another person’s arm go up in the air.

  One of the reasons it’s difficult to make sense of Orlan and Stelarc is their clever confusion of the means and ends relationships. When technology serves an engineering purpose or solves a practical puzzle, its role as a tool is clearly defined. As I write this line on my word processor, the computer technology slavishly follows the parameters that lead to effective typing and storing of data. The computer is a means to my goal of writing a book. But in Stelarc’s “Ping Body” performance, the technology is almost an end in itself. He is literally playing with technology rather than pressing it into service for some preset goal. The parameters are not clear because the function of the technology is not clear. What will come of Stelarc’s technological achievements is difficult to say, though we can bet that electric-organic cyborg fusions and remote-control manipulation will not go unnoticed by people with very definite ends in mind (e.g., the military).

  So, too, in the case of Orlan, the means-end distinction is blurred. Plastic surgery and implantation is a technology that’s becoming cheaper, more widespread, and more acceptable to popular culture; the public now expect celebrities to be accessorized in this way, and many well-to-do teenagers get new body parts as graduation presents from their parents. When we compare Orlan and Cindy Jackson, for example, the means-end distinction becomes highly relevant.

  Cindy Jackson is an American woman who holds the world record for most plastic surgeries, around thirty operations, to transform herself into that cultural icon of beauty, the Barbie doll. When she was thirty-four her father died and left her a sizable inheritance, which she straightaway began to invest in her future face. She had surgery to remove the bags under her eyes, she had implants put into her cheeks and lips, and she had her chin chiseled, her eyes enlarged, her makeup colors permanently tattooed onto her face, her jaw broken and sawed shorter, and more.

  Most people recognize a significant difference between Orlan and Jackson. Both employ the same cutting-edge medical technology (pun intended), but though the means are comparable, the ends or goals of the two differ greatly. When asked why she has been reconstructing herself to look like Barbie, Jackson replied that she does it for the power: “I used to seek pleasure from men and now they seek it from me….This is the ultimate feminist statement. I refuse to let nature decide my fate just because I missed out on the genetic lottery.”15 Orlan, on the other hand, has a different goal; it is more abstract, more philosophical, less personal, and indeed less understandable than Jackson’s. But for all that, intellectuals and connoisseurs seem quite sure that Orlan’s goals are more legitimate. The use of plastic surgery is vaguely respectable in Orlan’s case because her goals are artistic, whereas in Jackson’s case, they say, the practice seems just sad. I feel less confident about this tidy distinction. Perhaps they are both artists, but one of them has not realized it yet. Orlan has expressed interest in meeting Jackson, but she refuses and is confused by the “artist” designation that some want to bestow on her. Can you be an artist and not know it? Unclear. Can you be a kook and not know it? Doubtless.

  As we have seen repeatedly, monsterology is an ironic field of inquiry, and here we find another example. Monsters are symbols of the disgusting, with their decaying flesh, mottled limbs, and rotting, putrefying tissues and organs. In short, monsters are thumbnail sketches of our own destiny. It is our human fate to slowly fall apart and to cause revulsion in younger, healthier witnesses. If we think about the limping, moldering state of most imaginary monsters, we can see our own elderly selves in much exaggerated form. In this view, part of our odium for monsters can be understood as fear and loathing of our own mortality. Cyborg research and development will certainly have great benefits for those of us
who become injured or otherwise find ourselves in need of sophisticated prosthesis, but we can also see an emotional meeting place of posthuman philosophy, cyborg research, and mundane plastic surgery—namely, the all too human urge to escape aging and death. In our attempts to live forever or at least ensure that we’re, like, totally hot, we may be hybridizing ourselves into new uncanny territory, where the cure looks worse than the disease. On the other hand, human beings who have freely chosen cosmetic surgery have a remarkable ability to avoid anything like regret; I suspect that Michael Jackson, for example, is entirely happy with his uniquely engineered visage. And one can imagine a thoroughly accessorized human head, floating in a vat, feeling sincerely that his radical new weight-loss amputation program was indeed well worth it all.

  DISEMBODIED MINDS

  The idea of a head floating in a jar or perched in a pan dredges up the memory of many bad B-movies, among them The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), Who Is Julia? (1986), and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971). But bad horror films aside, the assumption of most posthumanism is that the human mind, and therefore self-awareness, can be theoretically and metaphysically divorced from the body. It’s only a couple of short steps, it would seem, from rebuilding human bodies with computer and robot parts (cyborgs) to downloading a human mind into a digital and robotic substrate. Extreme forms of posthumanism contend that one’s mind, one’s self is capable of disembodied (or at least transplanted) existence. In part, this view is descended from a strong tradition of Platonic and Cartesian dualism in the West, but it has taken on more credibility lately because of the computer model of consciousness.