Under The Microscope

HOW WE BECAME POST HUMAN - VIRTUAL BODIES IN CYBERNETICS, LITERATURE AND INFORMATICS, by N. Katherine Hayles; University of Chicago Press, 1999; 350 pp; $36.00

Reviewed by Craig Webster

In this book of panoramic scope, Hayles considers no less than the fate of the human race. In a rich and detailed discussion ranging from the science fiction of Greg Bear and Philip K. Dick to the science of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, Hayles traces the changing conception of human consciousness and claims that a great many of us are already posthuman.

A posthuman is someone who has been reconstructed in some sense, either physically or mentally, such that he or she exceeds, or believes they can exceed, the boundaries of a human. About 10% of Americans can be considered cyborgs in the technical sense by virtue of having some kind of artificial implant -- these people would qualify as posthuman since they have compensated for some limitation of their bodies through technological augmentation.

However, Hayles claims that to be posthuman no prosthesis is necessary, simply the way in which we think about ourselves as conscious agents needs to change. The advent of Shannon's information theory has led to the modern convention of treating information as if it were entirely non-physical. If this idea is applied to the information in our heads -- that is, the collection of memories that make each of us unique -- then we quickly arrive at the conclusion that our consciousness can be uploaded into a computer, decanted into a robot-body, or even backed-up onto disk, giving us eternal life.

This is the story of how information lost its body and it is an idea which is now well established in Western culture and technology. Yet Hayles believes it to be misguided. Any informational pattern, be it pebbles on the beach or electrons whizzing across the Internet, must have a physical embodiment to exist. The importance of embodiment is also being discovered in fields such as neurology and experimental robotics. A surprisingly large amount of the information processing essential for being a responsive agent in the world goes on in body parts such as nerves, the spine and the proprioception of joints -- our powerful human consciousness is a relatively recent add-on.

Hayles argues that future posthumans will not be the ethereal information-beings of much of current science fiction, but they will certainly have a much more intimate relationship with computers than we do today. In terms of information flows, a collection of humans and computers contains no boundaries between one and the next. As computers approach the complexity of our bodies and information becomes more important to our work and leisure, humans and computers will become more compatible with each other and there will be an increasing potential for one to collapse into the other.

Whether this is to the detriment or betterment of humanity represents a cross-roads which urgently needs to be addressed. Hayles is well aware that technology issues such as these currently concern relatively few people -- the majority of the world's population has yet to make their first phone call. Yet, now is precisely when such issues need to be aired before our posthuman futures are set in stone as either assimilated components in a vast machine or as free agents with powerful human-integrated technology at our disposal.

Craig Webster is currently a clinical researcher in the Anaesthetics Department at Auckland's Green Lane Hospital.