Cyborgs Today & in the Future
Posted by Jeriaska on August 4th, 2007
James Hughes leading a discussion at the IEET conference in Chicago, Illinois
James Hughes, Ph.D., is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies Executive Director. A bioethicist and sociologist, he teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Westview Press, 2004), and produces a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio.
He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often on radio and television. In his talk at Transvision 2007, entitled “Cyborgs Today & in the Future,” he explored some of the historical continuities between the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes and the present-day steps toward cybernetic augmentation of the human body.
The following excerpts from James Hughes’ July 24, 2007 talk “Cyborgs Today & in the Future” have not been approved by the author.
Cyborgs Today & in the Future
The Enlightenment thinkers combined faith in the possibility of human progress with commitment to values such as individual freedom, social equality, solidarity, democratic governance, and the supremacy of reason over dogma and tradition. These convictions led the progressive champions of the Enlightenment to pioneer scientific medicine and public health. It led them to anticipate the radical enhancement of the human body and the brain, and the complete defeat of disease and death.
In the 17th century, Francis Bacon‘s utopia The New Atlantis imagined a society in which medicine is used not only to eliminate disease, but also to increase strength, relieve pain, retard aging, and prolong life. In 1665, in his landmark study of the world revealed by the microscope, the pioneer British scientist Robert Hooke proposed that humans might have artificial organs, implants to enhance sight and hearing, and machines to enhance memory. He said, “The next care to be taken, in respect of the senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial organs to the natural.”
Denis Diderot, one of my new favorite Enlightenment philosophes, waxed eloquently that future science would be able to reanimate the dead, take a man’s brain apart and put it back together, create human-animal chimerae and intelligent machines, and that we might evolve in to posthuman forms of different kinds. Benjamin Franklin, writing to Joseph Priestly in 1780, said, “In a thousand years, all diseases will by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard.” And this is Marquis de Condorcet, who was a liberal supporter of the French Revolution, and shortly after was put to death by the Jacobins. BUt even in the midst of all that turmoil, he wrote, “Nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties. The perfectibility of man is truly indefinite, and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now on words independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limits than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.”
So, it is with this inspiration of these radical forbearers who have inspired so many of the movements for liberation over the last couple hundred years that we in the transhumanist movement are applying one particular strain of their thought to the question of the right to control your own body, your own brain, and your own reproduction. And the opportunity to improve life for everyone by making these kinds of rational mastery generally available. There are a couple different categories of mastery of the body that we see a continuity from things that are thousands of years old with things that we want to see in the future. There are external devices that can enhance the body. Shoes, glasses, and bicycles are examples. But also exoskeletons and PDAs, maybe hats that we wear that send magnetic waves into our brains, all kind of external devices that are possible. There is chemical management of the body through diet and drugs, and eventually through gene therapy. And we may redesign the body through reconstructive surgery, as we already do, and eventually through inheritable genetic modification.
But what I want to focus on today is the question of cybernetic augmentation. I am working on a collaborative project with a British transhumanist, Peter Houghton, on the needs of people today who are on the bleeding edge of putting machines into their body, who are blending the body and the machine in ways that are troubling for some bioconservatives, although I think that trouble will pass on these questions. Nonetheless, there are issues troubling to us, because the conditions of life of people who have these implants today are far from perfect. And we look forward to their ongoing perfection, so that their bodies and minds will be enhanced rather than simply repaired.
Again, these are not new ideas. In 1929 , the essay “The World, the Flesh & the Devil” by JD Bernal, he was one of the first to propose cybernetic implants in the human body and brain. His essays are actually quite radical about the future evolution of humanity and the way that we would evolve into a diversity of posthuman species. And he saw this as of a part with the social reform that he fought for as well. When you look at Vannevar Bush, a stodgy old New England Republican, but also the person who convinced the presidential administration after World War II to create the National Science Foundation and gave a great boost to American science. He writes in 1945 in The Atlantic that we need machines to augment human cognition. His imagination led him to this kind of a device, something on your desk that would allow you to do computations and access information rather fast, something like your desktop computer. But he also imagined that it would eventually be connected directly to your brain.
In 1960, NASA asked these two researcher, one a musician and the other a psychologist, what do we do if we send astronauts up into space for a year and they suddenly start babbling weird prose into the microphone? These two guys imagined a bodysuit that would monitor their telemetry from the astronauts in space, monitor their mental condition, and also have tubes and wires going into their body so that ground control could say, “Uh oh, looks like they’re losing their head,” and push a button to release Haldol or Prozac, whatever they needed. So, that was actually the origin of the term “cyborg.” A cybernetic organism was in this essay proposed as a way to keep astronauts sane, by having a kind of feedback loop with their suit and with ground control.
But today we have a variety of different cyborg technologies. More than 25 million Americans, about 8-10% of the population, have a surgical implant of one kind or another in their body. There are about 100,000 pacemakers and 250,000 implantable cardioverter defibrillators implanted, including in the vice president. We have stents that we put in people, and valves, and we’re working on the total artificial heart. We also have dialysis, which is an external cyborg augmentation, but we are also working on implantable artificial kidneys that will have far better blood purification. At Cleveland clinic they are working on a nanomesh of about 10,000 pores per square millimeter to catch very specific toxins that are in the blood. Dialysis right now only cleans out about 17% of the toxins that are in your blood. And the new implantable artificial kidneys will do a far better job.
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8.01.07 IEET: Partial transcript of Hughes on Cyborgs at TV07
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