On February 10th, about 150 people gathered at the British Museum to hear guest speakers Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, and Daniela Cerqui from the University of Lausanne, speak on Prof. Warwick’s advances in cybernetics and its ethical implications for human well-being.  The talk, titled Becoming Bionic: The Activist meets the Anthropologist is part of the ‘Making Things Better’ series hosted by the Medical Anthropology department at UCL in partnership with the Biocentre.  The talk was immediately followed by a Café Scientifique at UCL where the audience at the British Museum could continue the debate with Kevin and Daniela in a more informal setting.

Kevin Warwick spoke about his successes in his attempts to become the self-claimed ‘world’s first cyborg’.  The experiments are exciting.  Some audience members were amazed and delighted, others were shocked and anxious, and most were at some points confused, not with the factuality of what was before them, but with how to process a very real technology that most do not know exists.  What is his perception of the cyborg?  We do not have to guess.  He tells us that he views ‘transhumanism’ in accordance with Nietche’s Ubermensch, of which Zarathustra thus spoke.  He shows us his ability to experience sonar, akin to a bat in a cave, and he introduces us to his grad students.  One has been wired to experience infrared, sensing heat signatures through walls.  Another can move cursers on a computer screen through thought alone…  a neat trick indeed, but its human transcendency remains questionable.  He also shows experiments in which he wired his nervous system to that of his wife’s.  Although the experiment was simple, it was a first of its kind.  They were able to essentially speak telepathically through sending each other electrical impulses.  Anthropologically speaking, the work forces us to evaluate our current Western conceptions of the self as an impenetrable unit. Kevin’s cyborg-self is less Jungian and reinvokes, perhaps, the 18th century “bundle theories of the self” presented by David Hume.  Then again, Kevin speaks of our future ability to wire ourselves to the internet, sending our consciousness into the world, travelling to exotic places without moving the physical body, absorbing and exporting memory and experience.  Perhaps, then, ‘transhumanism’ is a way to eliminate the ‘delusion of the self’, an endeavor that Buddhists have been practicing throughout the centuries.  Or perhaps ‘transhumanism’ is the delusion.  

One of the greatest insights we gain from Prof. Warwick’s rhetoric is the knowledge that technology can often be a double-edged sword; where the promise of scientific endeavor; for medicine, for therapy, and for benefit of society, is juxtaposed so strongly with the potential threat it brings towards the human condition and to the world at large.  In his presentation, Kevin displays some miracles of sci-fi in action with performance akin to Tesla era showmanship.  On a screen above the stage, a video shows a man, essentially immobile with full-onset Parkinson’s disease, become able to walk again, his tremors instantly subsiding due to the cybernetic implants surgically inserted in his chest.  The audience cheers in the background with disbelief.  The screen then shows an interview between BBC personality Jeremy Clarkson and Prof. Warwick in which Kevin has wired living brain cells to adapt and ‘learn’ in a robot host.  Kevin also lectures on the use of data encoded implants, microchips under the skin that record a patient’s medical history so that hospital can instantly provide care for patients with long-term illness such as diabetes.  And there is, of course, robotic limbs for paraplegics, and the potential to control these limbs, not through mechanical means such as a twitch of a shoulder or a finger, but through thought alone.  

Yet Kevin’s miracles always seem to come with a warning.  He tells of successful research with fighter pilots, wired to their cockpit so that they can fire missiles simply by thinking about them, thus eliminating precious half seconds of reaction time.  He then explains that the practice has not been implemented because the missiles would also fire when pilots thought about beer.  He talks of his controversial experiment to place a tracking device within an 11 year old girl as an anti-abduction device, abandoned after public outcry. He shows us upscale nightclubs that require implants for membership, and he speaks of the ‘post-human’, the quickly coming revolution of selfhood.  Post-humans, he excitedly lectures, will calculate faster, communicate far more intimately, and will never be confined by geography because they will be wired to the world.  He explains that the post human intelligence will be intensely superior to what he claims is a vastly inefficient and self limiting human cognition.  This is perhaps the Ubermensch that Nietzsche envisioned; the un-humanitarian that German philosopher Rudiger Safranski terms the ‘artist-tyrant’; a higher form of life achieved through creativity and strength.

Kevin has named the two sides of his twin-edged sword therapy and enhancement.  There are those who, like Kevin, find the idea of enhancement exciting, and there are those who find it quite ominous.  Daniela Cerqui is one of the latter.  For 10 years she has studied Kevin and his intimate relationship with technology.  She tells us that technology has inherent morality, and asks the audience if they truly wish to penetrate their skin and their selfhood in the name of ‘upgrading’, a concept she finds quite illusory.  She believes that Kevin is either wrong, or mistaken, in both practicality and ethics.  She tells us he is a level ahead of modernity; that he is the researcher whom other researchers consider peripheral.  They play off each other quite well, but if he is a step ahead of modern epistemology, perhaps she is a step behind.  Kevin reminds us that his implant, seen as ‘mad’ 10 years ago, is now being used by the layperson in nightclubs.

There are those, like myself, who cannot help but take a middle stance, that Prof Warwick and Dr Cerqui are both a bit naïve, on either side of their constructed spectrum of nano-cyborg-ethicality.  On the one hand, the fears provoked in the audience from Kevin’s somewhat laissez-faire philosophy towards technological inquiry are indicative of, and demonstrate, the need for the responsible regulation of the emerging tech.  On the other hand, to imply that there is an inherent morality to the unexplored potentials of scientific creativity creates something equally troublesome.  That is, we would stifle those creative sparks of the adroit individual whose ingenuity is required for the betterment of mankind.  To do so seems, perhaps, as counter-intuitive to human enterprise as merging our nervous systems with mechanics.  
The quandary remains that one may not be able to separate the intellectual energy that theorizes ingenious medicine and therapy from that which theorizes ‘upgrading’ and ‘enhancement’.  Dr Cerqui seems fearful of the latter, but she also seems to take for granted that these enhancements are simply the intellectual pursuits of a philosopher of machinery.  The academic crowd that met in the café scientifique after the Museum talk admitted that they, like myself, are not the policy makers.  As social researchers, and as proponents of public engagement, there is something we can do.  We do not create policy, but we can affect the social epistemology of technology, giving the science, and the scientists, a mechanism for self-regulation.  The metaphors we use to make sense of the world are instrumental in shaping the future of our endeavors.  Kevin tells us that the cyborg revolution is like a giant elastic band stretching to its breaking point, and that people are going to have to choose their side, post-human or human, before the elastic band finally snaps.  I’m not convinced this is the healthiest metaphor.  As leaders in the development of mankind’s intimacy with machines, few are better poised (and perhaps more responsible) to be able to shape the epistemology of science then Prof. Warwick and Dr. Cerqui.  Indeed, because the technology is still so new in the eyes of the public, they have a unique opportunity to actually create from scratch the metaphors society will come to depend on to make sense of our surroundings.

Clearly, the ethicality of the effective regulation here seems so nebulous.  I do not envy the policy makers.  Still, all shoulds and should nots aside, Kevin’s messages to the public are profoundly useful.  I believe the nano-ists are correct in telling us that the ability to significantly alter the human condition is quickly coming (I carefully avoid the terms ‘enhancement’ and ‘upgrading’).  To borrow the words of the American theorist Susan Sontag, “The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ‘what is already known.’ Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”  In bringing his ‘heresies’ to light, Kevin allows us, and begs us, to ask those questions we would have otherwise never known could be appropriate.  Perhaps, in the end, that is only what he wants of us at the moment; a bit of a harbinger of uncertainty to be sure, but a social activist afterall.

Aaron Parkhurst is a PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology at UCL.  His research includes humanity's struggles with modernity and changing perceptions of the 'self'. He can be contacted on this email address.