Techuman

“A machine is as distinctively and 

brilliantly and expressively human 

as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid.”

Gregory Vlastos

        Try to imagine alien visitors returning to earth 500,000 years after the first homo sapiens appeared and taking a quick genetic sampling to see what had developed.  Based on that test they would have to conclude that we were a very dull vessel indeed.  Our DNA has hardly budged.  They would, of course, be missing the point, which is that biology is only part of the picture.  Culture, technology, communication, and other complex systems are where the real change has taken place.  Evolution is not just the story of raveling chains of nucleotides but of dynamic system interactions.

        All sorts of complex adaptive systems evolve over time, finding energetic balances between order and entropy.  Complex adaptive systems are ones that tend to organize themselves into patterns.  This happens because agents within the system react to other agents and to changes in the system itself.  The tiny adjustments that result from these interactions – even via accidents and random events – get recorded by the agents, reproduced, and magnified throughout the system. 

        This is a theory of complexity that has been used to explain financial patterns, social behaviors, and other complexities.  It is another way of applying the idea of evolution to situations beyond the biologic and it addresses a fundamental irony of the evolutionary model...the emergence of order.  Random changes can bring about an orderly progression and the sense that evolution is going somewhere, leading towards some kind of development even though unplanned.

        We certainly believe this to be the case in our case. 

        We do not think of ourselves as randomly changing, helter-skelter, from one eon to the next.  On the contrary, we envision ourselves as improving, growing, expanding.  Complexifying and becoming.  In fact, along with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we believe that the most human thing about us is our becoming, our open-ended possibility, our hope against hope for new hope.

        But if the technocosm is also evolving, perhaps even someday to the point of emergence, then what exactly are we becoming?  Mighty lords of the universe or mere maintenance workers?  Druids or drones?  There is no easy answer to this; it is all in flux.  We are so mixed up with our devices that we cannot be unblended.  After all, where would we be without the things we have made and more importantly, who would we be?  Somewhere along the line – imperceptibly at first, surprisingly later on, undeniably in the end – we became something quite unique on the planet.

        We are a techuman species, inseparable from our works.

        Two coevolving systems of humanity and machinery have turned us into this new animal.  We have to reinvent our notion of ourselves as something in between high technicians who have lost their humanity and lowly humanoids who have lost their magic.  All the decisions before us about energy, environments, medical advances, information freedom and more need to be addressed from this angle.

        Our lack of omnipotence means that we have to be careful about our choices.  More deliberate.  Our best guide in making them will not come from engineering and even less from ideology.  It will come from wrangling with the problems while remembering our Lipshitzean nature, that is, our unique capacity for both empathy and cruelty, kindness and hate, reason and lunacy, help and holocaust.  We will have to take each choice as it comes and weigh it in the scales of our duality, while trying to keep our human needs and our technological hopes at the fulcrum.

        Maybe we should not worry about those alien DNA testers missing the big picture.  Maybe will wipe ourselves out first as they arrive to find the machines and the roaches running the earth rather happily.  They might not even notice the absence of the flabby fleshmavens with the funky genomes.

        Maybe we are the only ones who would miss us.

        One more reason to think carefully about what we do next.