Anthropology is the study of humans as individuals and members of society. "Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the scientific of the humanities."
raises questions about the place of humans in the evolving global culture. While it may seem to be a wonderful advance in human creativity one wonders about its long term impact on the humanistic side of human life.
Is it time that we create a new science, Androidology which would be the study of the evolution and development of self actualizing machines capable of performing the functions that biological organisms currently perform. This is an interesting question when we consider the implications of these devises on the power relationship between humans.
Western culture is beginning to experience what many non-western cultures have long experienced under western colonization. The value of the average human is no longer determined by one's contribution to the local society. Instead, it is determined by a global market which places humans against humans, and humans against capital in the form of technology.
How will androidology relate to anthropology and the other social sciences? Will it compete with the humanistic side of anthropology and the other social sciences?
What happens when humans are bred and enculturated by androids just like what we do with our domesticated animals?
Nature has demonstrated what a catastrophic explosion can do to the environment and life on this planet.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia in 1815 lowered global temperatures by as much as 5ºF and historical accounts in New England describe 1816 as “the year without a summer.”
Growing up during the height of the Cold War and learning to "duck and cover" in elementary school. I am fully aware of the dangers of nuclear war not just to the combatants but also to the planet. I remember waiting for the Russian ships to challenge the American blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.
While anthropologist, especially archeologist, have studied climate change among "primitive" cultures and extinct civilizations, there has been very little anthropological attention given to the culture of nuclear warfare and the threat it poses to the planet. The threat of volcanoes are natural phenomena; nuclear war is a superorganic threat. Both can have the same effect on the planet. The former is beyond our immediate control, the latter should be under our control.
What does anthropology have to contribute to our understanding of process that leads societies and cultures to embark on a military policy based on nuclear weaponry?
Richard Rhodes has studied the history of nuclear weaponry and the political and military maneuvering associated with it, from the building of the first A Bomb to today's proliferation of nuclear technology.
Rhodes presents one scenario that illustrates the danger facing the planet if a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan were to take place.
This is an example where the insights of anthropology might be applied to help to prevent that one mistake that might bring about the results projected here or in other hot spots such as Israel and Iran, North Korea and the US.
Can anthropologists identifying the socio-cultural forces that might be employed to resolve the outstanding issues that make this scenario a real possibility?
Here is a related resource that gives a perspective of how those charged with the nuclear weaponry have seen their mission during the Cold War period:
The virtual worlds of the Internet pose an interesting challenge to modern American Anthropology. Comprised of memes in a virtual electronic universe, the Internet is a transorganic organism that is changing how organic human beings and superorganic institutions conduct their relationships. As Internet technology spreads around the planet and as the means for accessing becomes more diverse, powerful and cheaper, it becomes easier for individuals and institution to form, develop, and evolve relationships unconstrained by physical time and space. One of these virtual worlds is Second Life.
Here is an example from the FRONTLINE program Digital Nation showing how IBM (a global superorganic institution) has moved into this new world.
The anthropological question is: Is Second Life, a social network or an alternative socio/cultural universe? How does Second Life compare to Facebook as a human enviroment and as a superorganic institution?
Memes are those meaningful elements found in the members of a superorganic entity. They act like genes do in an organic entity to determine what the individual will look like and how they will act. Memes can be beneficial such "altruism" or they can be deleterious such as "suicidal".
In the current Deep Water Horizon disaster, where lives have been lost, careers and businesses ruined, the environment and way of life of the Gulf Coast threaten with permanent lose, we find that there is a meme which causes its infected host to be blind to the meaning and impact of the situation.
Here is an example of a politician infected by the meme "corporate capitalism." Ask yourself. "Is this politician's meme infection dangerous to the health and welfare of human beings and nature?" Or "Is it an example of a predatory parasitic meme blinding a good descent human being to the reality of his position?"
We can see from Rep. Joe Barton's statement that the "corporate capitalism" meme has lead to a misappropriate application of the "shakedown" meme in his speech. This lead to a behavioral reaction -- that of applying the "apology" meme inappropriately. The "apology" meme is normally applied by the guilty party to ask for forgiveness from the harmed party. In this case, Rep. Barton displays a pathological misunderstanding of the "apology" meme as it applies to this situation. This is evidence of how memes can be dangerous to human beings.
In a recent post, Welcome to the true TransOrganic Age we looked at the development of a technology that will enable a computer to create new life forms on demand. In this earlier essay we looked at the computer as the parent of the new life form where the machine code determines the process of assembling the DNA code.
In this essay we look at the other end of the spectrum, replacing the organic parts with synthetic parts to create life.
When computers become sentient, a new order of life will emerge. This will be an order of life which favors organic/machine integration such as we have seen portrayed in AVATAR and The Terminator series. Control of production in such a world will shift from DNA based life to trans-organic technology. Human, and other DNA based life forms, purpose in the world will be dependent on their economic value to the super-organic creatures which dominate the planet. These creatures will weigh the value of DNA life relative to non-DNA life for their survival their technological complexes and chose accordingly. This is another way of saying that societies and civilizations will struggle for survival based on the competition between, human capital or DNA capital and non-DNA capital represented by technology.
James Cameron's Avatar presents a fictional depiction of what this future might be like. The battle between "humanity" and "technology" is played out here on many levels. The Corporation, a super-organic entity representing Earth, is driven by its need for "food", the mineral Unobtanium which is found on Pandora. It is this premise which drives the story line.
One plot line which stands out, Jake Sully's story, is based on the fact that today's robotic and prosthetic technologies are breaking new ground in treating the human body traumatized by war, accidents and natural disasters. New ways to restore function to damaged bodies offer new opportunities for individuals to return as productive members of society. It creates economic value as well as a new economy for the super-organic civilization.
The wedding of technology with the human body began some 250,000 years ago with the first use of animal skins for protection from the elements. Today, this union has evolved to where we might expect the next generation will have a blue tooth implanted at birth to insure they have instant communication across the planet.
At the University of Reading, Kevin Warwick and Ben Whalley have taken an different and interesting approach. Build the machine and implant an organic brain. They have inserted a rats brain tissue into an mechanical robot and demonstrate how this organic brain can learn to control its mechanical body.
If the mind is the home of the soul, and brain the loci of mind, then here we have an alternative evolution track. Detach the organic soul from the organic constraints of the organic body. Then enable the soul to survive in a hostile physical environment by installing it into the appropriate robotic container. This may be a necessary step for humanity as a species to seed the universe with earth born intelligent life.
What does this mean for our mortality, our morality and our humanity?
Here is the announcement of the end of organic man as the dominate species on Earth and the raise of non organic man-made technology as the next evolutionary order of earthly life.
On April 25, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published their ground breaking paper Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid Today, a little over 57 years later, mankind can claim to have truly unlocked the secrets of the the gods: "How to create life through technological and non-organic means". Technology, building on the human capacity to change the environment has emerged as the TRANS-ORGANIC order of life.
As a graduate student in anthropology, I was fascinated by Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I speculated on what that future would mean to our definition of "human". That was 52 years ago.
Later, 38 years ago, the story was transformed into the Ridley Scott's 1982 Sci Ft classic movie, Blade Runner. Blade Runner depicted a distant future where the boundary between organic and trans-organic orders of life become blurred.
Suddenly, that future appears to be a lot closer to reality. The following, posted and presented on TED in May 2010, marks the public announcement of how technology, through the computer, will be able to create new life forms. Four bottles of chemicals, and a computer program and maybe an advanced HP chemical printer, life is created. How long before we can do this at home on our Iphone?
Humanity's capacity to create solutions to its evolutionary problems by technological means has been nature's unique adaptive strategy for our species. Now the tables appear to be turned. Nature and evolution will be directed by Technology using the tools discovered and invented by human for its purposes. The capability of purposefully synthesizing DNA marks the emergence of The Trans-organic Order of life.
What will this mean for our species in 10, 20, or 50 years?
This is an NSF (National Science Foundation) sponsored lecture by Doctor Andrew Lo of MIT in which he attempts to explain the technology behind the financial crisis of 2007 - 2009. He addresses the issue of who or what was responsible. His conclusions are that it was the free market and human behavior which ultimately brought about the crisis. The technology of modern financial engineering has created products which are far more complex than the systems designed to regulate and control these markets could adapt to in a timely manner. That is, success in regulating these instruments requires perfect timely in a perfect free market by totally rational human actors, none of which exists.
Financial systems are super organic systems. They exist and operate at the societal level. As social systems they are beyond the control of single individual actors. They depend on the coordinated actions of many moving parts and the perfect synchronization of all elements in the process to achieve the 'engineered" outcome. These action turn out to be the parts in an imperfect free market being synchronized by poorly prepared and integrated human actors.
While Dr. Lo's lecture deals with rather complex issues, his presentation is geared to an informed, but not necessarily technically trained, audience. His presentation style, illustrated with simple PowerPoint slides, is understandable and enjoyable.
