Biointerface: contemplating the singularity

4:00pm, Frances Searle 1-483; Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)

Abstract: The specter of a postbiological and posthuman future has haunted cultural studies of technoscience and other disciplines for more than a decade. Concern (and in some quarters enthusiasm) that contemporary technoscience is on a path leading beyond simple human biological improvements and prosthetic enhancements to a complete human makeover has been sustained by the exponential growth in power and capability of computer technology since the early 1990s. While both the internet — in its Web 2.0 version — and the rapid proliferation of mobile computer-based communications have already produced significant changes in the organization and production of knowledge as well as in the functioning of the global economy, the deeper fear is that somehow digital code and computer-mediated communications are getting under our skin, and in the process we are being transformed. Indeed, among the products Mihail Roco, the senior advisor to the US National Science Foundation and chief architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative predicts within the next decade are new types of nanotech interfaces linking people directly to electronics. When considered in light of current research successes in the development of brain-machine interfaces, the sorts of scenarios envisaged by Ray Kurzweil in recent texts such as The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in which he charts the conditions for the merger of computer-based intelligence and human biology to occur around 2045, begin to sound eminently plausible. The claim that we are machines on a continuous path of co-evolution with other machines prompts reflection on what we mean by “posthuman.” If we are crossing to a new era of the posthuman, how have we gotten here? And how should we understand the process? What sorts of “selves” should we imagine as emerging out of this postbiological “human”? In Biointerface, I propose to address the impact of digitality on the self, subjectivity, and the body embedded in soon-to-be ubiquitous computing environments — indeed, possibly even postbiological environments of the sort discussed above. The question of embodiment and the future of the human in networked digital environments has been the subject of numerous recent investigations. But these studies, particularly the important recent works of Katherine Hayles, have focused almost exclusively on the role of metaphor, narrative, and ideology in shaping our views and attitudes toward a hypothesized posthuman “singularity” rather than considering the constitutive role of technology in shaping the human. My discussion will focus on how contemporary scientific and engineering efforts to develop nanomachines interfaced with biological materials as well as other efforts to replace silicon-based computers with new, biologically-inspired computational media may reshape the playing field of debates about posthumanity, ought to give us cause for reflection, but in the end build on the singularity that constituted us as human in the first place.