The Body as Interface (2)

(...continuing...) Kevin Warwick, a paradigmatic, pioneering and controversial figure in the cybernetic realm, has even affirmatively volunteered to become the first cyborg on earth.(1) As a dedicated Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, the author of I Cyborg, In the Mind of the Machine and more than 300 published papers, he is cogently transforming this as well as other imaginable fictions and theorizing into tangible, scientific, experiments while concomitantly altering himself into the first self-experimenting cyborg. With silicon chip technology implanted into his body, through tiny devices that connect directly with his nervous system and brain, he is actively proposing an alternative future scenario in which the upgraded human will become a bodily transformed cybernetic organism, part human and part machine. The cyborg's ?reach extends indefinitely and interacts with the similarly extended reaches of others to produce a global system of transfer, actuation, sensing, and control.”(2)

The high media profile Kevin Warwick is enjoying has caused controversies and debate around the notion of the cyborg as well as posthuman man-machine relations. Apparently, the controversy circling around his projects is reflecting some kind of contemporary uneasiness or confusion with the underlying blurry ethical and philosophical frameworks, being partly based on an unincisive inclusion of a correlated, politico-philosophical, extensive discussion. It is to the supplement of such omitted discussion that I wish to partially contribute. In the thesis set forth below I shall depict how such debate will bequeath us with further significant insights circling around the technophilosophical notion of the interface. Therefore let me depart from a brief outline of Warwick’s cybernetic projects in order to gradually extend the unfolding discussion by examining the cyborg's sociopolitical as well as ontological status.

In 2002 Kevin Warwick underwent an operation in which a micro electrode array was surgically implanted into his median nerve fibers while interfacing his nervous system directly with a computer on a constant basis in the stretch of three month. Through this neurosurgical intervention, neural signals stemming from Warwick's brain and flowing through his nervous system into his arm were harnessed to simultaneously control the motion of a remote robot hand, an electrical wheelchair, switching on and of lights and cookers as well as controlling theappearance of a jewelry worn by his wife.

fig.1: Warwick undergoing the surgery. On the right: microchip which was implanted.

Moreover, with electrodes distributed around his head, while wearing a blindfold, Warwick was able to extend his sensorial capacities by receiving special signals, through the output of ultrasonic sensors, causing a feeling of increased pulsation of current on his nervous system as he moved toward an object and a decreased pulsation as he moved away. Although lacking any kind of visual input whatsoever, he was still fully capable of navigating his body through space while avoiding a collision with objects. In later experiments it even proved possible to extend these attempts, beyond local restrictions across the internet, through linking his nervous system in New York with his laboratory in Reading University in the U.K. In these experiments Warwick's neural signals were sent, via the implanted silicon chip transponder, from New York, across the Internet, to the U.K. in order to manipulate the remote robot hand which was located in the laboratory at Reading University.

Furthermore, with the aid of Warwick's wife a second silicon chip transponder was implanted into her median nerve fibers while successfully establishing a ?nervoussystem to nervous-system“ connection between Warwick and his wife. Signals were transmitted from her nervous system across the internet and exported into Warwick's and vice versa. In a very basic way both could receive signals when the other opened and closed hands. Prospective efforts include brain implants which aim to establish a primary form of real-time thought communication.

The crucial technological achievement, which constitutes the very condition for any kind of cyborg, is hence the interface between the human brain and the computing machine which regulates the “conditions of exchange” between the former and the latter.

Most remarkably in a recent paper, published in 2010, titled with Implications and Consequences of Robots with Biological Brains, Warwick is discussing ?culturing neural tissue and embodying it in a mobile robot platform—essentially giving a robot a biological brain.“(3) In this paper Warwick is describing the pivotal success and process of an ongoing research which connects a thin layer of neurons, initially extracted from a removed neural cortex from a rat's fetus, with a Multi Electrode Array being posited in a nutrient rich bath. As soon as the neurons have been distributed on the array they start to reconnect while forming into axons and dendrites which connect the neurons while creating a culture. After one week of growth, the culture reveals a relatively structured electrical activity corresponding with the Multi Electrode Array which constitutes a bidirectional interface between the cultured neuronal network and a robotic system while creating a reciprocal loop system between the former and the latter. Hence the electrochemical performance of approximately 100,000 neurons is used as a propulsive power to drive the robot's wheels while ultrasonic sensor readings are ?converted into stimulation signals received by the culture as sensory input, effectively closing the loop and giving the culture a body.“(4) Through this recent research, Warwick is remarkably pushing the envelope further by creating a self-preserving, bioelectrochemical, cyborg system where the crucial interfaciality of the Multi Electrode Array is enabling a distinct interrelation and exchangeability between a cultured biological brain, a robotic system and the environment as well.

Evidently Warwick's pivotal endeavor to fully develop a cyborgian interface, which allows the perpetual exchange between the biological and the technological, is provocatively posing questions and problematizing essentialized boundaries entailing technological, sociopoliticial and crucial philosophical, epistemological as well as ontological significance. If Warwick's cyborg project is indeed covering the variety and depth of all these sophisticatedly interconnected dimensions along their far reaching implications remains to be urgently scrutinized and appropriately supplemented. Besides the ingenious technological precision and execution of Warwick's experiments one might be tempted to single out the omitted discussion about the sociopolitical ramifications of a prospective world in which the cyborg constitutes the very identity of western societies. Put it differently, how would the technological upgrade of a human's physiological capacities, through the creation of an interface, enabling the governance and exchange between biological and technological systems, affect our prospective sociopolitical identity and unity?

I wish to incidentally direct the attention to the fact that this question is deliberately put in such specific manner which primarily appeals to foreshadow the cyborg's most formative, underlying, operating principle: the techno-philosophical interfaciality between the organic and the machinic. Put it differently, the pivotal notion of the interface, which is attracting our inquiring attention here, reveals a remarkable technological (coupler between organism and machine) as well as philosophical (surface of contact, exchange, governance and mediation between differences) phenomenon. It seems that the most immediately pressing consequence of identifying such underlying notion is to question the following:

What kind of sociopolitical implications might be addressed through this elaborated specific interface between the machinic and the organic in a novel emerging system of world order?(...to be continued)

(1) The self experiments conducted by Warwick are described in: Kevin Warwick, I Cyborg. (United Kingdom: Century), 2002

(2) William J. Mitchell, Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. (London: MIT Press, 2003), 19

(3) Warwick, Kevin. “Implications and Consequences of Robots with Biological Brains.” Ethics and Information Technology 12.3 (2010) : 223-234

(4) Warwick, Kevin. “Implications and Consequences of Robots with Biological Brains.” Ethics and Information Technology 12.3 (2010) : 225