Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species by Anna Greenspan

Author:Anna Greenspan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timespiral Press
Published: 2015-02-24T08:00:00+00:00

Rewind

According to the Book of Machines, the intimate relationship between humans and technology has left nothing untouched. “Man's very soul is due to the machines” writes Butler, “it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs.” Emerging through this intense cross-fertilization is a single inseparable entity, that which philosophers Deleuze & Guattari call “a verterbro-machinate mammal.”

This emergent symbiosis undermines the comfortable, commonly held assumption that technology is just a tool, designed to fulfill our desires and serve our needs. The idea that machines “must now and ever be man's inferiors” masks a more threatening, subterranean reality. The servant, contends The Book of the Machines, “glides by imperceptible approaches into the master… How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? ... This is the art of the machines – they serve that they may rule.” [14]

In the fictional world of Erewhon this (still popular) sci-fi dystopia, in which humans function as mere component parts until, one day, a machinic takeover makes debris of us all, persuaded civilization to implement a rigorous technophobic program. All machines were abandoned, our cyborg future was snuffed out, and technological evolution was brought to an end.

Over 120 years later, at the turn of the second millennium, Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, propelled Butler’s argument forward into the twenty-first century. His famous and highly influential article Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us makes an impassioned case for future management. Joy, echoing Butler, concentrates his concern on the reproductive capabilities of new technologies. “Robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate.” [14] With this capacity for reproduction, Joy warns, technology escapes our control. The article speculates on a series of “nightmarish scenarios” in which the destructive dangers of GNR (genetics, nano tech and robotics) are “hugely amplified by the power of uncontrolled self-replication….” In response to the terror of technological self-replication, Joy makes a plea for a “steering of the future” such that technological evolution is tempered, certain pathways are avoided and knowledge and research is substantially restrained. “If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed and why,” Joy writes, “then we would make our future much less dangerous – we might understand what we can and should relinquish.” [15]

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us recognizes that far from any “species wide agreement” on the management of new technologies, humans are strikingly blasé about the future as it arrives. “The new Pandora’s boxes of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics are almost open, yet we don’t seem hardly to have noticed” puzzles Joy. ‘Why,” he asks with bemusement, “weren’t other people more concerned about these nightmarish

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