To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Cyborgs, Computers & the Soul

From PRI, public radio international, it's to the best of our knowledge on Jim Fleming. Sometimes it's hard to tell who's in charge, humans, or machines. The computers of Star Trek certainly have an opinion about it. You are inconsistent. You cannot be programmed. You are inferior. Oh yeah? Well, we'll find out how Star Trek's computers stack up a little bit later on. Today, the rise of the computer and a look at life in our new wired world, from cyborg politics to the moral quicksand of the internet age. Partly what's going on is that people, even parents and children, are connecting via a cell phone once in a while, or they're sending email back and forth, and they're thinking they're in touch with each other, yet they don't really know each other well enough to love each other. Also, some early attempts at mechanical life. Would you believe one of your PC's distant relatives is a robotic, defecating duck? Remember the Matrix? The movie thriller set fire in the future at a time when computers

enslave people in a virtual earth so they can use human bodies to generate heat. It's a creepy storyline, but it's only science fiction, right? Well, I hate to be the one to break the bad news, but it may be true. According to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Yale University, there's a pretty good chance our lives are nothing more than an ancestor simulation program, developed by our descendants. Bostrom studied the logical probabilities and wrote about them in a paper he called the simulation argument. It says that the future must go one of three ways. One, humankind goes extinct due to a catastrophic event. Two, humanity endures with no interest in computer simulated life. And three, people of the future do develop simulated life, and well, it's the rest of that last option that worries Steve Paulson. Bostrom filled him in. If computers one day are so powerful that they can do that, and if people choose to use that kind of computer to run ancestors simulations, then we should think that we are

probably now in such a simulation ourselves. Because then that's where most of people like us would be. Most minds like ours with our kind of experiences would then be simulated minds. So it's already happened. This is not just something that might happen hundreds of years from now. People somewhere down the line have already developed a sophistication and they've developed these phenomenally sophisticated computer programs, and they've programmed us, and here we are. Yeah, I mean, because if we have a chance of doing it, then chances are somebody else already has somewhere in the cosmos, and then we would probably be in one of their computer simulations. But can you control all the variables? There are billions of people who are living on the earth right now, and if this premise holds, doesn't every one of those have to have been programmed every one of those people not to mention all the animals and everything else on the earth? I mean, you could distinguish different versions of the

idea that were in a simulation. So one version would be that all the people we see around us are also being simulated at the right level of detail so that they too have conscious minds and experiences in our real. Some can speculate about the possibility that maybe only a few people are simulated maybe only you are simulated in the level of detail which would make you conscious, and the rest could just be a show where people are sort of puppets that behave roughly human -like, but without any internal experiences. Even if we are in a computer simulation, I believe the most likely version of such a simulation would probably be to simulate all people. So in many respects, the world would be what it appears to be. These computer programmers would have to have a lot of time on their hands to simulate every person who now lives on earth. I mean, that would take a fair amount of time. In order to be able to run a simulation of that kind at all, I mean, it's not something that we could do right now. Our

computers are not powerful enough, and even if they were, we wouldn't know how to program them to create conscious minds in computers. So you have to imagine that the simulators would be extremely technologically advanced. They would have access to maybe computers made up of whole planets that they have transformed into computers using advanced nanotechnology. They might be radically super intelligent themselves, they might have used their technology to enhance their own intellectual capacities. And that actually makes it really hard to predict what they would choose to do in a simulation. Even if they ran simulations, even if we assume that we are in a simulation, we don't really have any good ways of determining what the motives of the simulators would be. And therefore, even if you assume that you are in a simulation, your best guide to how to go about your life and what to think about what will

happen tomorrow would still be the ordinary empirical method of looking at patterns in the past and extrapolating that. But there are actually different theories about how to respond to this. I mean, if let's just play out the scenario that we really are just computer simulations, I read one response to your paper by Robin Hanson at George Mason University who says that we shouldn't just go about our daily lives as usual, we should be crazy and dramatic and act out and do anything we can not to be boring. Yeah, I kind of agree with Robin. It's just when I say to first order approximation that least misleading advice would be to go about your business as you would have done anyway. I just think that our ability to predict what such post -human simulators would do is very small. I'm also quite skeptical about most of the implications one could draw from it. Now, there are some. For example, one thing that could happen if we are in a simulation

is that the simulation ends that somebody shuts down the computer and then we suddenly all disappear. We pop out of existence. I mean, another possibility is say you suppose that the post -human's motives would be pretty much like human motives. Maybe if we one day become very technologically advanced, maybe we will still have retained a lot of our human goals and motivations. So then you can ask what kind of simulations would we run if we had the ability to do it? And obviously it depends on whom you would ask. Some people might, you know, some historians might want to know what would have happened if Napoleon had won the war or how would history have fallen differently. Others might see it as some kind of art work where instead of having a theater play with actors, you would actually have the real thing playing out. You could imagine some people using it as a kind of historical tourism where the simulators themselves would enter into the simulation,

into a past epoch. Now, there are obviously religious dimensions in all of this because one way to think about this is that these super intelligent creatures are gods. I mean, that's how we would think of them. And they are manipulating our destiny, and we are just kind of a shadow of their existence. What do you make of the spiritual implications? Well, in some sense as you say, if we were in a simulation, the simulators would be like gods toss in or demigods. In the sense that they would have created our world, they would be able to see everything that was going on inside it, so that would be omniscient, in a sense. Presumably, they would be super intelligent, so they would be sort of superior toss in some sense. And they would be able to interfere in the goings on in our world, even in ways that would break the loss of physics, so they would be omnipotent. Actually, one person

I told this argument, who was before a rabid atheist, sort of almost became convinced to become an agnostic now, and you thought this was the best argument for agnosticism that had ever heard. The empirical input into the argument is just a consideration of the kind of computing power that will be available to a technological and mature civilization. So you're not ready to throw out all the computers? I mean, if you could, to prevent the possibility of us all becoming part of a computer simulation. Oh, no, that wouldn't help. Now, either we are in a computer simulation, and then throwing out the simulated computers inside the simulation wouldn't change anything. Or if we are not in a computer simulation, then we will still not be in a computer simulation, whether or not we build more powerful computers. So that would be a very futile form of resistance. There is no resistance is what you're saying. Well, I mean, there's really much to resist. We should resist the

risks that we will go extinct. If we are in a simulation, that could be either good or bad. It would be bad, for example, if the simulator is decided to pull the plug on the simulation and we would pop out of existence. It would be bad if they were evil, sadistic simulators that could have all sorts of nasty things set up for us. But it could also be relatively good if the simulators are kind to us. Maybe they provide us with a life after life is ended in the simulation. Maybe they let us out of the simulation one day. Maybe the simulation will just go on, and then it's for most practical purposes just as good as living in the basement level of reality. Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Yale University. His paper is called The Simulation Argument. Coming up, Star Trek's vision

of computers. We see Wesley typing in commands at a computer. If we're typing in 200 years, we've done something terribly wrong with our computer science. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Fiori, Public Radio International. So far, it seems unlikely that machines will take over and completely enslave the human race. But Quentin Schultz says we're living something far more troubling right now. Schultz is the author of the book The High Tech Heart and a professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College. He told Anne Strangehamps that the internet age is

robbing our society of its best virtues, even if nobody will believe it. I think I see myself somewhat as a profit in the middle of all these priests. And I'm saying, well, you may think you got it all together there, gang, but let me tell you, we're going down the tubes fast because we're not looking at reality. It's very interesting that people who feel that they love one another, let's take a parent and a child, spend very little time together communicating anymore. The average father in the US spends less than 30 seconds communicating with his own children. So you have that on the one hand, then you have all these communication technologies on the other, and you have to say what's going on here. Well, partly what's going on is that people, even parents and children are connecting via a cell phone once in a while, or they're sending email back and forth, and they're thinking they're in touch with each other, yet they don't really know each other well enough to love each other, because you can't love somebody in the abstract. You can only love somebody that you know well. So we're losing physical proximity, obviously, through

computer technology, anything else? I think we're losing intimacy, which is really a key to good living. Intimacy means really being emotionally close to other people, and we're living sort of in orbits around the earth, moving around seeing each other passing by. Now that's not just because of technology that we're lacking intimacy, but I think it's so easy now to be wired with so many different people and so many different locations that we lose intimacy with those that are close by that we're dwelling with and that we love the most. I think there's a tremendous increase in civility in the last 10 years in American society, and I tie that to the growth of digital technologies, because there's a kind of anonymity, particularly in cyberspace, where you feel like you can get away with almost anything. It's interesting because when the internet began, you know, a lot of people talked about the birth of a whole new kind of community. You know, the idea was that the internet would let people come together, and they'd communicate, and you know, they'd join chat rooms and online salons, and you know, look at the online

journaling phenomenon, and you could sort of say that there's a lot more communication going on out there. Well, the North American capacity for self -deception about the quality of community life with each new technology is quite remarkable. In fact, the same rhetoric about the community in the early days of the internet existed in the early days of wireless or what we now come to call radio, and it existed before that with the telegraph, where people really thought this was going to enable everybody to communicate with everybody else, and we were going to have fantastic communities at all levels from the family on up to the nation state. Part of what community is is people who are different and even disagree, but they seek the common good. That's sort of a political way of looking at community, but I think it's very powerful, historically and very important as well. And so when you think of a local community, it's made up of different neighborhoods and different socioeconomic groups and so on. Well, when you look at the internet, what you see is happening is the community tends to revolve around self

-interest, or what we might call interest groups, so people get together because they share a love of golf, or they share a particular sexual orientation, or whatever it is. And I don't think those are communities. I think to a large extent, to steal a phrase from the historian Daniel Borsten, they're really consumption communities rather than full -bodied communities. It's interesting you're suggesting that here we say these are new kinds of communities, but in fact, what the internet is promoting is a belief in the individual, and it's kind of cyber -libertarianism. I think that the internet does promote cyber -libertarianism. I think there's an ethic that comes with the technology, which is very individualistic, almost a radical individualism where we assume that sort of the purpose of life is to serve the individual and let that individual have whatever he or she wants, whenever he or she wants it. You think of being perfectly wired in the world. You know, what would that look like? And it would be the individual sitting there with this technology that would enable her or him to communicate with

any other individual instantly. And I don't think that's a vision of the good life. I don't think it's a vision of the good society, let alone community. I think it is a kind of libertinism that has really overtaken us with this new technology, partly because of the way we use it. It tends to be a technology that we use sitting alone in front of a screen that diverts our attention from other things. You know, you think of the telephone, for instance, it has a little bit of that quality. You think of television, it has a little bit of that quality, but this interactivity where you've got image and you've got sound and you've got your mouse and keyboard and all, it's really seductive to the individual, I think. You have a word you use in the book, informationism. What is that? What's the problem you're referring to there? I think we are assuming that being well -educated, knowledgeable people amounts to being well connected to a lot of information. We're organizing our lives, whether worker personal lives, around access to information.

And I think this is a big mistake. I put the ISM on the end to suggest that it's kind of becoming absolute, that we're thinking that what life is all about is the exchanging of information. And in fact, I think life is much more about seeking wisdom. And as T .S. Eliot put it in his poetry, wisdom is at least two notches away from information. You've got information, then you've got knowledge, and then you've got wisdom. And wisdom really means being oriented to reality. Do you have a grasp of reality? The way things really are in the world, and then can you act upon that grasp of reality? And I think informationism is deadly because it tends to come in and replace all other ways of knowing. What we're in the middle of right now, and I think we need to consider seriously as a people, whether or not this is a good situation, we need to spend as much time seeking wisdom as we do information. How do you do that? I mean, you're suggesting that just more

information means we're developing more and more kind of a more and more superficial connection to the world, but what does it mean to you to seek wisdom? I think our relationships are weaker, and I think information only takes us so far in getting intimacy with each other, or with nature, or with reality, or with God. Let's include God in the discussion. Historically, people have said the search for God is important, and I think it still is important in the world today. I consider wisdom seeking ultimate reality, and I think the best way to begin that search is by anchoring ourselves in tradition. That is to say, selecting one or more of the great traditions, in our case the Western world, and to say what was wisdom there? And let's let me go back and dialogue with the people throughout the history of this tradition, and see what they thought wisdom was. So it's a connection to the past that gives us some light on the future,

and maybe the biggest problem in the information age is that we are so connected to the current, to the contemporary, to the latest information that we lose our continuity with the past. In my home, we have no significant technologies around where we eat. The place we eat is a kind of sacred space where we come together, and we take our time. Our children now are off, one just graduated from college, the other one's going to be a junior, but we have from the very beginning said, we're not going to put any television sets here, we're not going to have computers around here. I hate to tell you we're not even going to have any radios going when we're eating, but that's the way it's going to be, and we're going to take our time. And what we're going to do when we get together to eat is get to know one another again. I have a kind of a standard question I would ask our children at the end of the day when we're eating together, and that is, tell me the stories of your life today, especially those things that were funny, because I think there's great grace in humor. Humor really helps us cope with the zaniness of

life, and the funny stories I think maybe are the place to begin where we find grace and we can reconnect with each other. So there are a lot of different things to do, but I think separating to some extent the technological stuff we do from the non -technological so we can protect the non -technological is extremely important. And Strangelms talked with Quentin Schultz about his book The High Tech Heart. It was late, I couldn't sleep, I tried reading and counting she, I went to the fridge to get a bite, I saw the computer in the pale moon light, so I decided to go online to pass away a little time. How could I know a little restlessness would turn my life into such a mess lost in cyber space? From an online place to place, yes I know, I've really flipped, I'm trapped inside a computer chip lost in cyber space. People have never known quite what to expect from the computers

they create, but luckily we have science fiction to imagine the future for us. Robert Weinberg and his co -author Lois Grash wrote the book The Computers of Star Trek. Weinberg told Steve Paulson that Captain Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise gang were especially suspicious of computers. Each Star Trek series reflects the make of our country and the feelings that we had about computers at the time the show was produced and in the 60s I remember very well that computers were seen by many many people as a great threat to workers and to jobs and even to people that these were called impersonal machines and the big talk of course was automation that in 20 years there would be no workers anymore doing any type of physical labor that machines would be doing all of it and everybody was sitting home watching their giant screen TVs and growing into fat tremendous blobs and eating popcorn all the time. Now that seems to have happened anyway but at the same time most of those people

still have jobs that they have to go to that didn't come true but when Captain Kirk complained in the episode The Ultimate Machine where a computer takes over as the captain of the Enterprise he's voicing real concerns about his specific job he says we can have a machine in charge we need a captain in charge and that was a very common theme you know and that was expressing what I think were very real fears at the time that computers were going to take over replace people and there's another episode court martial where Captain Kirk is actually accused of killing one of his crewman and the evidence has been martialed from the computer log and it's up to Kirk's lawyer to show that the computer was wrong. That's probably the most interesting episode involving a computer because the argument in the first half of the episode is that Kirk gave some orders that resulted in an Ensign

being killed and all the evidence against him is as you say from a computer which kind of monitors everything he does and everything he says kind of like a black box does on airplane today and Kirk's lawyer argues that you can't trust a machine that is not human and you can't put a man's life at jeopardy by what a machine tells him. The most devastating witness against my client is not a human being it's a machine an information system the computer log of the Enterprise and I asked this court adjourn and reconvene aboard that vessel. I protest your arm and I repeat I speak of rights a machine has none a man must my client has the right to face his accuser and if you do not grant him that right you have brought us down to the level of the machine indeed you have elevated that machine above us. I asked that my motion be granted and more than that gentlemen in the name of a humanity

fading in the shadow of the machine I demand it I demand it then in the second half of the show Kirk gets back on the Enterprise and uses the Enterprise's computer to prove that no this man hadn't died and he's really stowing away on the Enterprise which was a pretty outrageous so it went from one extreme of not trusting the machine because it was too reliable into let's trust the machine because it's pointing the finger at somebody else other than Captain Kirk. What about the battles that we see in Star Trek the Captain ordering a photon blast from the bridge. Captain the board ship is closing. They're frying again. Sheels have been reduced 41 percent. Another hint and we will be defenseless on the photon torpedoes torpedoes armed by the protons.

That's just absolutely ridiculous. The most pertinent thing of course is that they're traveling at such high speeds. In the show they have mentioned that when they're not traveling at warp speed which is beyond the speed of light which is an entirely different subject but when they're traveling at like cruising speed they're traveling at one quarter of the speed of light. Again these are numbers that we can conceive of a quarter of the speed of light is still 75 ,000 kilometers per second. That's a huge distance in one second and so if you aim in another ship when you're fighting and you aim where it is at the moment well by the time your photon torpedo arrives or even your light beam which will travel the speed of light that ship is still not going to be there. It's going to have moved 100 ,000 kilometers or more and so having human beings in charge of the weapons makes absolutely no sense. But it's frightening to think that humans would not be in charge

of the weapons that it's all done at the level of computers. It is and yet if we go 200 years in the future and you see 10 spaceships coming into attack you and you're a starship captain and they're coming in at half the speed of light at 150 ,000 kilometers per second. You can't maneuver your ship on your own. You can't come up with a strategy to fight other ships that are moving that fast and have computers directing how they go how fast they go where they fire their photon torpedoes or laser weapons or things like this. So what you have to do is you have to give complete control of your ship over to a computer that makes decisions in nanoseconds in a millionth of a second. You can't make decisions that fast. The human brain doesn't work that fast. Our brains work off we fast. But it takes time for us to even relay information to the computer. By the time we talk into a microphone and say weapon systems up we've been destroyed for about

you know since the W since the W came out you know we're we're just space debris. So in the future if there's star battles and I have my doubts whether there will be any type of star war type star battles humans will definitely not have any role to play in them. It's all going to be completely controlled by machines. It just goes too fast. Well if we're talking about Star Trek we have to talk about the Borg which is part biological part machine and I don't know how accurate they are but they they sure look scary and I guess I wonder if this is the cyborg of the future. Now Lois and I hope not. We both had a great time writing this book. We were both Star Trek fans science fiction fans and both are involved in computers and mathematics and like and we love the Borg. We just think they're terrific monsters but are they believable? Not at least hopefully not because the Borg is stated in the first episode I believe that the Star Trek encounters the

Borg that this is the result of a hundred thousand years of melding like man and machine. We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. This is what is supposedly the supreme achievement of melding man and machine and all I could think of is this is it this is Frankenstein's monster this guy that walks at a half a mile an hour with one mechanical hand with a clog going click click click we think that artificial intelligence and design design work of computers with you know human appearance is going to result in what we would think is being much better than human and I don't think anybody wants a Star Trek say wow I really wish I could be a Borg you know that's the last thing that you might want to be data you know and live for 400 years and have slightly pale

skin but also be really strong and really smart and be able to play the violin and paint 26 paintings at the same time but nobody dreams of being a Borg. Robert Weinberg is the author of the Computers of Star Trek Steve Paulson spoke with you just ahead being a cyborg citizen why people in politics haven't quite caught up with the wired world I'm Jim Fleming it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International you

our vision of cyborgs is pretty scary I mean think of the terminator blade runner the matrix and AI. Chris Gray thinks we've already become cyborgs. In his book Cyborg Citizen he says we better get a handle on cyborg politics if we want to be prepared for the monumental changes still ahead. Gray defines a cyborg as any person whose body has been changed by technology. So what does that make me? I don't wear glasses. I don't have prosthetic limbs. I don't use a hearing aid. Are you immunized? Yes, yes I've had I had my smallpox but that was in the 1950s so still your body's been programmed to recognize certain foreign objects not

programmed by nature but by man. I'd call you a cyborg but even if you particularly weren't immunized you'd still be living in a cyborg society. Cyborgization represents this new stage humans have to our technology. It's not just man the tool user or humans and machines. It's humans intimately linked to all sorts of complex systems that depend on machines. We are within these systems and sometimes we have these machine systems actually in our own body but the result is that our society has a relationship to technology that's never existed before. Do you think that we are pretty well prepared to deal with the interaction of human living and technological living? No no absolutely not. The pace of technological change is much faster than the pace of political change. In some cases the courts will keep up with it and defend our rights even when new technologies threaten them but in many cases the courts will decide

that technological assaults on our rights aren't worth defending. So we're taking these things on a case by case basis without a kind of master plan. Exactly and down the line the problem is there's going to be much more intrusive technologies. The ability to actually tell what you're thinking is going to come to science and technology very soon. It's a tremendous amount of work going into this area both for good reasons. It's really crucial to understand how the brain works treat all sorts of mental diseases, mental defects, whatever but on the other hand there's also great interest in the military and the justice system to be able to read people's minds and it's not a technology that's impossible to imagine coming very soon within 10 years, 15 years maybe sooner. You've talked in your book about a foolproof lie detector test for instance. How would that work? Well there's several ways people are trying to develop a much more accurate lie detector. You know the current lie detector system involves just measuring how nervous someone is galvanic skin response increased

respiration increased heart rate. Many things can cause that but now thanks to such innovations as real -time three -dimensional brain tomography which basically means looking at the brain as it thinks we can see all sorts of things like hesitation like immediate decision somebody has made whether or not somebody is suffering internal cognitive dissonance and very soon actually I think they'll be able to pick out individual thoughts and be able to say this word these ideas are there. There's actually a lie detector test that works now they can tell if they show a human a picture of a place or a picture of a person by how the brain responds they can tell if the person has seen that image before and remembers it so that alone could be used to interrogate criminals and even in court situations. Did you ever see this person you say no but the brain information says yes. Absolutely accurate lie detector except for perhaps

psychopaths or people who don't remember is just an extension of that current work and it couldn't be very far off I can't imagine it'll take more than 10 or 15 years before they have an extremely reliable lie detector. It strikes me as you describe that kind of lie detector test that it is not an extraordinary leap to imagine that you might begin to substitute images into someone's brain you might begin to alter the way people perceive reality and that's very perceptive if you have the ability to see what someone is thinking to capture it it's not a very big step towards actually putting things into the brain and making other kinds of modifications to the brain has been efforts by the military for many many years through training through the giving of drugs to make young men better soldiers to do away with the fear response to make them react as machines unthinkingly to certain situations now we're developing the technology so this could be done in a very direct way and you would get something

like the bog of Star Trek you would get people who have lost their individuality who are just in many ways just sort of organic robots one of the other issues that has come up and I don't know whether there's been much done in a technological sense on it is the we all have a fear of death Ted Williams recently brought to light the cryogenic technology although they don't think that there's any hope that it would work in his case it does sound as though we're putting death off frequently through the use of technology yes and there's a vast political movement growing that's arguing that you don't have to die that immortality should be a goal of scientific research and it is for many scientists and engineers and they argue that cryonics is part of this cloning space travel in mortality research the very idea of nanotechnology was coined by a guy named Drexler

who was arguing it was needed to make cryonics work so these technological innovations are often linked together not just on a scientific level but politically and of course if you manage to stave off death permanently for the entire population you'll create other problems with overcrowding and so forth and again you will not be dealing with all but a small portion of the population I suppose see that's what will happen it's not that immortality or any of these improved medical technologies will be used for everyone at least not initially it will go to the elites and to the rich and you're going to see the development of class differences that are quite quite stunning people will actually be different once genetic engineering gets going well and it's making tremendous progress but this might be 50 to 60 70 years off people will be genetically engineered to the extent they won't be human you will have post -humans race actually only exists as a social construct humans aren't fundamentally different even though we have many different colors and

different antigens different ways our immune systems are set up there's no simple mapping that puts us into these different categories well one species but quite soon we will not be one species we will be many different species there will be humans there will be different kinds of post -humans and that has of course incredible political implications it's also kind of scary to think about given the number of problems we have had with the simple differences that you describe between basically similar humans you talk about much larger differences between cybernetically different beings yes we are only 1 .6 percent different in our genetic information from chimpanzees for example so it's not hard to imagine genetic engineers down the line making all these different kinds of post -humans some of them will be bigger and stronger smarter live out in space easily live under the sea and one can easily imagine if humans don't grow up politically and morally that we will be at

each other's throats you can imagine a horrific kinds of wars so where do you start to organize a different approach to the organization of cybernetics in the future well I urge everyone to start recognizing these new technologies and their implications to accept the fact that we have more engineers and scientists alive and working now than in all the rest of history combined and they have better machines and better systems for doing their innovations so the pace of technological change is extraordinary and we have to adapt our political systems to that do you think we're capable of making this kind of broad policy change can we anticipate all of the needs based on a technological future I think humans are definitely capable I have my doubts about our current political system which is incapable I think actually representing the voices of the people dominated as it is by mass media which

demands mass amounts of money which mainly comes from the corporations in the rich for example and of course in many countries around the world you just have a straight out dictatorship and these technologies are being developed globally even though the United States leads in many of them so it's a problem for the whole human race and another reason we have to think of the whole human race is one palace one political entity and not as just this citizen of this nation state or that the cyborg citizen is an international citizen a cosmopolitan citizen all of us in the world even in those countries where people have little access to these complex technologies we are all cyborg citizens Chris Gray is the author of cyborg citizen and a computer science professor at the University of Great Falls in Montana people have long dreamed about creating life from nothing today's computers still don't quite fit the bill

but humankind has certainly had a lot of fun trying Gabby Wood has written a history of the quest for mechanical life it's called Edison's Eve and it's tale about automatons a bit of cheating and a couple of famous curiosities made by a French scientist Vocasson one was a flute player that is a kind of life -size man who could play the flute and the other was a duck that could eat food and digest its food and then excrete it the other end and these things were so marvelous that the king king Louis the 15th thought they were wonderful and and masses of people came to visit them I mean I think they had an unprecedented success certainly one that Vocasson himself didn't expect and because they were made in the 18th century and people were wondering what a man was exactly whether men could be described whether human beings could be described as machines they took on a further importance so rather than just being toys or trifles they were seen as ways of investigating what exactly it was meant by

human and the duck which I can imagine people were flocked to see if you will was also fascinating that the wings head up to 400 moving parts is there right? apparently so yes I mean that the duck there's a bit of debate about the duck because it was absolutely marvelous and strangely enough I mean people tended to admire that if anything more than the flute player because it was so strange I mean why would you want to make something that had these kind of disgusting properties if you want but then later on people claimed to have repaired the duck because nobody had really quite understood how it worked and so in centuries beyond the 18th century people did claim that it had survived for console that it had come into their hands that they had repaired it and discovered it to be a fake so there's still a rather divided opinion on that matter I have to say well it's typical in many ways of the things that you discovered they are fascinating mechanical objects they are in fact extraordinary creations and a lot of them seem to have well less than complete honesty about them

yeah I mean I'm quite interested in the ones that were fakes because I think they indicate much more people's desires I mean I think the ones that really worked are fascinating in their great feats of engineering and they can contribute to an understanding of what's technically possible but for me the things that either didn't work or were abandoned at some point or the things that were always hoaxes those things are interesting because they're much more indicative of what people really wanted to do what their ambitions were and and they're quite connected to if you like a sort of Frankenstein story which is about humans wanting to kind of play god well vocalist as you said considered himself a scientist and in fact the creation of the duck does indicate that he had a great many skills and a good deal of ability to reflect humanity absolutely I mean he knew exactly what he was doing and he was very proud of that he was very proud of the fact that his mechanics had biological properties as it were I mean that he really could mimic the bones in the wing

that he could make the duck swallow its food in this way that you know the neck would move that it would muddy the water with its beak you know all these things were lifelike and he really did them with a sort of attention to detail that was absolutely extraordinary it's fascinating idea what it does make you wonder is why he felt if he did that he had to cheat at the end yeah you see I mean I wonder because people in terms of the general public people did tend to come and see these things whether they were real or not I mean a bit later than that a few decades later there was this chess playing machine which hid a man inside and it was really I mean right from the beginning people thought there might be a man inside it but they just couldn't work out where that man would be whether the man was actually not a man but a child whether the man was a dwarf because you know the compartment was so small and as it happens there always was somebody inside it at one point there was a young girl and yet people came back to see this machine because they still thought it was amazing and so whether it's cheating

or not it still generates this kind of extreme public attention in fact that's the Turk that you're talking about and the Turk fascinatingly won many of its and in fact most of its chess matches which I think probably drew even more people to it whether there was a human inside or not it was a fascinating display yes I mean what had happened was that they at one point the man who invented it and then later on the man who who toured with it invited the best chess players in Europe to play inside the machine that was how it managed to win all those matches but but also you're right I mean it did absolutely make people come again and again and again and the very best players in each country would wonder why they'd lost you know I mean Napoleon lost him not that he was necessarily the best player in his country but you know people did return to play against this machine and a parent machine and the ones who didn't play came to watch the chess games to see how it was being done well it's a kind of fascinating two -parted thing isn't it

because on the one hand you you can see the fascination that everybody had but this all seems to have started as you said with musings about the nature of life these things wouldn't have been fascinating if we didn't think we were going to learn something about who we are and why we are I think they're sort of ideal enlightenment projects in that respect you know that they were intended for amusement but also intended for education I think the one slightly worrisome edge there is that people I mean I suppose we still haven't decided this and it's a philosophical question rather than anything you can necessarily answer with hard facts but the issue of what makes us human had not then and has not now been solved and so every time one of these things was invented people did start to worry about whether they were kind of usurping their place in the world you know if a machine can play chess that is you know if a machine can think if a machine can digest food if a machine can play the flute you know play musical instrument which is also something that requires some feeling then who are we you know what is there that we can do that

is unique to us that machines can't do and that does then become I suppose a sort of intellectual problem in the examination that you've done in Edison's Eve you start with Descartes and his musings on on life he was not himself the creator of and and Tomatron but his thinking about it was leading people toward it well I think yes certainly his thinking about it although there remains a bit of mystery about this about his original intentions he said he thought that animals were machines that they didn't have a soul and we think that towards the end of his life he was leading on to say that humans were the same you know that the soul was only another organ if you like and that actually everything else breathing sneezing sleeping was a mechanical faculty so that men were in fact machines and so people began to think about this take up was was a religious man and this was absolutely atheist thoughts

so he never quite in his lifetime came to saying it that directly he was interested in mechanics and he did create some automata and legend has it that he created one that he then named after his daughter who had died earlier it's very hard there to separate the myth from the fact again because you know we don't actually know if this this android existed but it seems connected to the thoughts that Jacob was having around that time seems to me that the most interesting question of all about all of these experiments is why we do them and perhaps the best example of that is the one you've chosen for the title of your book it reflects a doll that Thomas Edison worked on for for a long period of time he spent he spent a good period of his life in fact musing about the perfect woman and trying to create her yes I mean he didn't call her the perfect woman but I think that that's in a way what this doll was because he he sent somebody all over Europe to find the ideal parts for the doll the ideal face the ideal body the ideal hands something that would in any way encase the miniature

phonograph which he wanted to put inside it and he did spend many years thinking about it initially that the design for the doll had a funnel coming out of the doll's head and people said we you know you can't have that children won't want that it has to be much more lifelike and and so the very fact that he was not all that interested in what children would play with and much more interested in creating this thing as a you know it's a great sort of feat of his own indicates to me that the project was slightly different from just wanting to manufacture a toy and in the end it weighed too much you know it had this sort of metal hard metal torso which is also sort of robot like when you took the clothes off and it was very hard to get the phonograph to work and people sent letters of complaints saying could you teach this doll to speak properly again as if it really were a human child have you ever seen one I have well that there are some in what used to be Edison's factory in West Orange and there's also one in on exhibit in a case in his old summer home in Fort Myers in Florida what did you think when you saw it well I thought it was very interesting because it I mean it's a beautiful

doll I mean the faces are made in Germany painted to look like those classic porcelain dolls which Jumo made in the 19th century in Paris he was the biggest maker of sort of luxury dolls if you like and their dress very pretty but there is there's something funny I mean I tell you what I thought was funny you can see the teeth and I mean the doll's mouth is slightly open and the teeth are showing and I just kept looking at that and thinking there is something it has exactly that edge of sort of the uncanny you know something that's very pretty and very ordinary and common you know a child's doll but also has an edge of the monstrous Gabby Wood is the author of Edison's Eve a magical history of the quest for mechanical life it's to the best of our knowledge I'm Jim Flunning to the best of our knowledge

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