#cyborgology

Academic psychologists and computer scientists generally did not understand the major role they played in orienting the military toward automation, “symbiosis,” and artificial intelligence as practical solutions to military problems. Some caught a glimpse of the overall pattern—such as Wiener, who renounced all military associations in 1946, and Licklider, who deeply desired to contribute to new military technologies from his areas of expertise. But many others simply pursued their own interests, oblivious or indifferent to their place in a larger scheme. They could do so precisely because for the most part there was no scheme, in the sense of some deliberate plan or overarching vision. Instead, this larger pattern took the form of a discourse, a heterogeneous, variously linked ensemble of metaphors, practices, institutions, and technologies, elaborated over time according to an internal logic and organized around the Foucaultian support of the electronic digital computer. Supported by computers, the military-industrial drive to engineer semiautomatic command-control systems intersected with the postwar political hegemony of the United States in closed-world discourse. The central metaphor of “containment” combined the closures of Cold War ideology and military global reach with computerized systems for total central defense. Likewise supported by computers, the academic-intellectual drive to create artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and “man-computer symbiosis” intersected with the psychology of information processing in cyborg discourse. The central metaphor of the computer as a brain or mind combined information theory with concepts of complex mental processes that could ultimately be modeled with computers. The closed world and the cyborg have in common not only their history and their technological support, the computer, but also their institutional backing by the armed forces, an ideology of formal-mechanical modeling, a metaphorical system, and a cybernetic language of natural-technical objects. Together, the two discourses constituted an organized, coordinated collection of institutions, technologies, and ideas for integrating human beings and information machines. Ultimately, closed-world discourse represents the political logic of the cyborg. Seen against its backdrop, military support for cognitive research and artificial intelligence is part of the practical future of military power. The closed world, with its mathematical models, tactical simulations, and electronic battlefields, represents the form of politics and war for brains seen as computers and minds conceived as information processors.

Human After All - Cyborgology

World War II nearly drowned in the noise of its own technology. Added to the older sounds of artillery and gunfire were the newer ones of rockets, airborne bombs, and various combat vehicles—tanks, airplanes, submarines, half-tracks, trucks, jeeps, and a host of others—that had gradually joined military arsenals during and after World War I. The tremendous din of mechanized battle created two unprecedented military problems. The first problem came from the fact that complex machines like tanks and airplanes had become critical to military success. The battle-worthiness of these machines depended crucially on the intercommunication of the soldiers inside them. Such technologies were not simply machines “used” by men, as railroads were used to transport armies that then continued toward the front on foot in World War I. They were a new cavalry, a new kind of integrated fighting unit. The airplane, the tank, and the submarine were primitive examples of what would eventually be labeled “cyborgs”: biomechanical organisms made up of humans and machinery. Their internal and external linkages took the form of electronic feedback circuits. These included not only interphones and radiophones for communicating with other humans but the dials, controls, and bombsights through which humans communicated with the machines. Should any of these information linkages fail, a cybernetic weapon could be totally disabled. The limits of communication under noisy conditions formed, therefore, ultimate limits to their effectiveness. The noise the machines made and endured had to be checked, or else, somehow, their communications systems had to be made to function despite the noise. The second new problem came from the radical increases in the speed of motorized military units and air warfare, which necessitated matching increases in the rapidity of communication. This meant new technologies, both human and electronic, for transmitting information. As one psychophysicist posed the problem, “The waist-gunner with a new “bandit” looming in his gunsight has no time to code his message to the rest of the crew in dots and dashes. “Tally-ho, three o’clock,” fills his quota of seconds …. Even speech was often too slow when the kamikaze came boring in and the radar lookout had to relay his data on the “contact” through the ship’s information center to the gun directors. On too many of our ships the tearing boom of a suicide strike preceded the bark of the gun that should have dropped the attacker into the sea.” Techniques for extremely rapid communication, and even for taking certain information processing tasks out of human hands altogether, therefore became an important war research goal.

While the discussions of the proto-cyberneticians ranged over many mechanisms, antiaircraft guns, torpedoes, and guided missiles were by far the most central. Concerned to emphasize the universality of cybernetic theory, the cybernetics group also characterized purposeful activity in many other machines. But while these other examples typically varied from work to work, virtually every one of the early articles and books in the emerging field mentioned the self-controlled and servo-guided weapons of World War II. The centrality of these metaphors reflects a number of features of early cyborg discourse and the emerging cybernetics community. First, these machines embodied shared wartime experiences. Second, semiautomatic weapons systems integrated humans and machines through both mathematical description (formal structure) and embodied practice (mechanism), making them prototypical cyborg devices. Finally, before computers, in terms of information activity such machines were the most advanced devices known to the group. So the war machines were not simply one example among others, but a central, unifying metaphor of early cyborg discourse.

Human relationships can be vague, shifting, irrational, emotional, and difficult to control. With a “hard” formalized system of known rules, operating within the separate reality of a microworld, one can have complexity and security at once: the score can always be calculated; sudden changes of emotional origin do not occur. Things make sense in a way human intersubjectivity cannot. Turkle notes that in the cultural environment of MIT, computer science majors of the early 1980s were veritable outcasts, the loners and “lusers” (an in-group pun on computer “users”) in a culture of loners. Levy and Weizenbaum describe hacker culture, from the 1960s to the present day, in similar terms. Certainly women can be loners and outcasts. But male gender identity is based on emotional isolation, from the demands for competitive achievement at others’ expense through the systematic repression of means of emotional release (especially of grief and fear) to the organized violence at the center of the masculine gender role. It seems likely that many men choosing engineering careers replace missing human intimacy with what are for them empowering, because fully “rational” and controlled, relationships with complex machines. What all this means is that the experience of the computer as a second self is the experience of the closed world of a rule-based game. The second self computer users find within the machine is, in general, a “hard,” quasi-scientific, male self, an experience of reality in the terms of closed-world discourse. The disembodiment of subjects operating inside the computer has sometimes opened the possibility of new articulations of gender, age, race, and other identities classically inscribed in the human body (as others have argued). Nevertheless, cyborg subjectivity during the Cold War tended overwhelmingly to reinscribe the rationalistic male identity on its new electronic surfaces. Thus the cyborg — as both experience and theory, subject position and objective description — is a profoundly and inherently political identity.