transhumanism

This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?

We define machine vision as the registration, analysis and generation of visual data by machines, and include technologies such as facial recognition, optical implants, drone surveillance cameras and holograms in this. The project team has selected 335 creative works, primarily games, novels, movies, TV shows and artworks. We have entered structured interpretations of each work in a database (http://machine-vision.no/knowledgebase). We have identified situations in each work where machine vision technologies are used or represented. For each situation, we identify the main actors involved, and specify which actions each actor takes. For instance, the scene in Minority Report where eyedentiscan spider-bots scan Anderton's newly-replaced retina to identify him involves the character John Anderton, who is evading and deceiving the machine vision technologies. The machine vision technologies biometrics and unmanned ground vehicles (the "spyders" or spider-like bots that crawl through the apartment building to find Anderton) are searching, identifying and deceived.

Many contemporary games and narratives have key characters who are machines, cyborgs, robots or AIs, ranging from the Terminator to contemporary figures like the emotionally awkward SecUnit in Martha Wells' Murderbot novels, or the android player-characters in games like Detroit and Nier: Automata. Our analysis of 36 such characters finds that their actions in relation to machine vision can be grouped around three key action verbs: analysing, searching and watching. Interestingly, the watching cluster has two distinct sides, where one set of related actions seems to cluster around communication and social activities, with verbs like hiding, impersonating, confused and feeling, while the other side shows the passive and uncomfortable ways these machine characters engage with machine vision, as they are disabled, overwhelmed and disoriented. Of course, all these machine characters are imagined by humans, and their very positioning as focalisers, narrators and protagonists in narratives and games tends to lend them human qualities.

The 235 human characters we analysed use machine vision and are affected by machine vision in many different ways. Humans are watched, identified and scanned, and they are scared. The most frequent action taken by humans in relation to machine vision is evading it, but the next more frequent action is to attack using machine vision technologies. There is of course far more nuance in the material than this might suggest, and human characters also use machine vision technologies for activities such as deceiving, embellishing and killing. Our quantitative analysis will be qualified using close readings of excerpts from the works we have analysed.

Despite its many flaws, the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones could be seen as attempting to resist what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have identified as narrative prosthesis, in which disabled characters are oversimplified and utilized primarily as a kind of catalyst for normate characters in their foregrounded narrative arcs.

Characters in the series can arguably be seen as more complex at times, while also evoking other stereotypes of disability, from Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, who is referred to as a “dwarf” and has congenitally restricted growth, to Bran Stark, who is paralyzed after being thrown out of a window, and Hodor, who only ever utters the word that has become his name.

The use of various forms of prostheses is common in the series as well, from Bran’s horse saddle, modified and made for him by Tyrion, to his developing ability to “warg” into animal and human others, which allows him to control and move around in their bodies, while perceiving the world through their eyes and ears. It is significant, though, that the only human character he “wargs” into is one who appears to have a cognitive disability, the character of Hodor.

The purpose of this paper is to think through various kinds of prosthesis suggested by the series, particularly when animality and disability are thus juxtaposed with each other, when animals are constructed as objects merely to be utilized by humans, and disabled humans are arguably seen as closer to animals. I engage with posthumanist theory, biopolitics, and human-animal studies to reiterate challenges to the idea that animals cannot have agency or subjectivity, as well as disability studies in relation to various ways of theorizing prosthetics.

These fields come together through the concept of companion prosthetics, which I have theorized with Jan Grue, as a way of taking into account the animacies, in Mel Chen’s sense, of various animal, human, and technological prostheses. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s work on companion species, I emphasize the difference between prosthetic relations which are merely instrumentalist (denying the animacies of the prosthesis itself) and those in which an animated actor responds to the animacies of a prosthetic other, whether it be mechanical, animal, or human. Game of Thrones can ultimately help us to see the ways that companion prosthetics suggest better ways of acknowledging and responding to the inevitable dependence we all have on prosthetics of various kinds, even if we do not think of ourselves as disabled.

What makes us human? Descartes believes it is the cogito – the rational mind, or the soul. “Reason,” he writes in the Discourse on the Method, “[is] the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.” This categorical distinction between the human species and all other living things is embedded in the western philosophical tradition which has held, since antiquity and even before, that man has a privileged position in the natural world. Human life is endowed with intrinsic value, while other entities, such as animals, plants or minerals, are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.

If humankind’s core characteristic is intelligence, and the body (to quote Katherine Hayles) may be seen as a mere accessory, then the transference of intelligence to a different kind of body – let’s say, a machine – may create an even more perfect and entitled being. This is the underlying premise of post-humanism. Post-humanism envisions a condition in which humans and intelligent technology are becoming increasingly intertwined. It focuses on function rather than form and defines a species by the way it operates – in other words, processes information – rather than by the way it looks. The post-humanist worldview dethrones the human subject from his privileged status and transcends the boundaries of the human to include other intelligent systems, such as machines, animals and even aliens.

Trans-humanism does not aspire to transcend the boundaries of the human but rather to overcome its limitations. It seeks to enhance the functions of the human body via implants and prosthetics, and to modify human brain power and longevity with the help of technologies such as bio- or genetic engineering. While the post-humanist perspective denounces anthropocentrism, which celebrates the exclusivity and hegemony of the human species, trans-humanism may be described as “anthropocentrism on steroids”, because it centers on the enhancement of the human.

Both post-humanism and trans-humanism address the question of what makes us human, but offer two different answers. A third answer is suggested by the concept of the ecological self, coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. We tend to confuse our self with the narrow ego, he argues, but “human nature is such that with sufficient, comprehensive (all sided) maturity we cannot help but identify our ‘self’ with all living beings.”

This is the attitude apparently adopted by the protagonist of The Vegetarian, a novel written by the South Korean female author Han Kang. Winner of the 2016 Man Booker prize, it describes a young woman who refuses to eat meat, repudiates her body and her very humanity and yearns to become a tree. The taboos she breaks, the transgressions she commits and her shocking and spellbinding transcendence of the human are the topic of this paper.