Cultures of Fetishism (37 page)

There are those purists who say that “artificial” should only be used in the first sense, to mean something illusory or merely apparent. They claim that robots are made up of mechanical processes that give the illusion of life. Therefore, they are only apparently alive. There are others, like Brooks, who would claim that although robots are fabricated artifacts constructed and controlled by human beings or computers designed by human beings, once they are set in motion they are capable of thought. Robots do have a real form of intelligence. Robotic intelligence has its own special vitalities and energies.

But we don’t have to settle for one or the other stark alternative, artificial vs. natural. We do not have to set the human brain and nervous system against the computer or the robot. We don’t have to think of natural intelligence as something carried on in the brain and artificial intelligence as something carried on by the computer. In other words, rather than yield to the fetishism strategy and deprive the artificial/natural dilemma of its vitality, we can keep the motion going and in the process learn some new things about the mean- ing of the term “intelligence.” It is not how much AI can produce in terms of practical, tangible results but how much it can “illuminate” our under- standing of the human mind.

Nearly two decades ago, when the artificial intelligence debate was gathering steam, Robert Sokolowski, a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, argued against establishing firm distinctions between artificial and natural intelligence. The approach of defining intelli- gence according to the medium in which it takes place puts our thinking about intelligence into a strait-jacket.
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This approach is blunt and naïve because it neglects something that bridges natural and artificial intelligence: the written word. Artificial intelligence does not simply mimic the brain and nervous system; it transforms, codifies and manipulates written discourse. And natural intelligence is not just an organic activity that occurs in a functioning brain; it is also embodied in the words that are written on paper, inscribed in clay, painted on a billboard.
Writing comes between the brain and the computer
(
itals.
mine).
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If we are willing to acknowledge that writing is an activity that mediates between the brain and the computer (somewhat analogous to the way skin mediates between the inner body and the outer world), we will be in a posi- tion to open our minds to some alternative visions of human intelligence.

For me, the major problem with the way some robot engineers and scien- tists settle this dilemma of natural vs. artificial intelligence is that they do away entirely with the distinctions between human flesh and blood and robotic metal parts. In
Flesh and Machines
, Brooks has stated again and again in many different ways that the human body is nothing but a machine. For example: “The human body is a machine with billions and billions of parts, parts that are well ordered in the way they operate and interact. We are machines, as are our spouses, children and dogs.”
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He concludes by arguing

that these machines are nothing but, “a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules.”
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Robots and androids are not our enemies. Nor are they “creatures” who are turning out to be better and more humane than human beings, as they are so often depicted in science-fiction literature and films. It would be senseless and meaningless to do what Jeremiah and Ben Sira did. We need not destroy these marvelous creations of the human mind. But it is vitally important that we try to understand how silicon-based machines with their unique and peculiar forms of intelligence might enlighten us about human intelligence and the fantasies that emerge from our carbon-based human minds.

Essentially, I am agreeing with Sokolowski’s view that we put ourselves in an intellectual strait-jacket when we pose firm and absolute boundaries between the natural intelligence of humans and the artificial intelligence of computers and computerized robots. It is true that an understanding of the intelligence of computers can teach us important new things about human intelligence. Moreover, I am particularly impressed with his highly original sentiment that we humans and our computers share a common affinity for the written word.
Writing comes between the brain and the computer
.

Nevertheless, I am not willing to do away with
all
distinctions between silicon-based creatures like robots and androids and carbon-based creatures like us. One of these crucial distinctions, which I called attention to earlier, is the fantasy life of humans. “Silicon-based life cannot produce fantasies The human fantasy life transmits erotic vitality to the carbon-based body.” And this body is not just “a bag of skin,” as Brooks would have it. The skin twists around like a Mobius strip to include the brain and nervous system. The skin suffuses the brain and the nervous system with erotic vitality. Analogously, when a human being writes, her words are imbued with erotic vitality, even when she is writing about death and the deathlike grip of the fetishism strategy.

Primo
*
Levi concluded
The Periodic Table
, a series of short stories on twenty one of the elements that appear on the Periodic Chart of the Elements, with an extended reverie on carbon. Essentially he made up little tales about the possible origins of carbon-based life. In doing so, he inadver- tently created a powerful argument for maintaining some distinctions between silicon-based “creatures” and carbon-based “creatures” Robots, the creations of humans, and humans, the creations of Nature, have many affinities. But they are not and can never be interchangeable.

Levi, the chemist who might have been struck mute by his experiences as a starved and abused prisoner in Auschwitz, instead decided to write about them. His meditation “Carbon” is not directly about those holocaust

*
It is coincidental and ironic that Levi’s first name, Primo, and the name of Vita- More’s full body transplant, “Primo,” are the same. Everything else about them is different. The writer is emblematic of carbon-based life. The body transplant is emblematic of silicon-based life.

experiences, but it is about the crucial importance of writing as a way of pre- serving and salvaging the human spirit. It is also, at the same time, a parable about the way that carbon comes to make up the cells of the human body.

It [Carbon] is again among us, in a glass of milk. . . . It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream; it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the
me
who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic miniscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.
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And so with that dot (
.
),
The Periodic Table
ends.

Levi’s intricately woven meditation on carbon is a vivid illustration of the incommensurability of human intelligence with the intelligence of creatures like robots; not because the human’s intelligence is natural and the robot’s is artificial, but because, ultimately, carbon-based intelligence can accomplish feats of writing that are beyond the most extraordinary perfections of a silicon- based intelligence.

Although Levi is ostensibly writing a scientific description of the tangled and convoluted journey of a chemical element as it moves through the body, the essential humanity of his words is a testimony to the human spirit, “that flamelike spirit which delights in defying order and neatness and logic.”
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Levi’s “Carbon,” like most serious writing, is a model of the “delicate and humane process” that Strachey attributed to biography.
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And, as Edel, despite his own partiality for biography, might have agreed, Levi’s tale “partakes of all the ambiguities and contradictions of life itself” and is a record in words of something that is “mercurial and as flowing, as compact of temperament and as the human spirit itself.”
58
Finally, therefore, Levi’s “Carbon” is tantamount to an overcoming of the fetishism strategy.

Levi illuminates the life energies that reside in what might otherwise be thought of as an inanimate substance. His words bridge the borders that separate animate from inanimate. Levi does not proclaim that machines can become human; or that humans can be transformed into machines. By demon- strating the differences between carbon-based life and silicon-based-life, he counters Marx’s prediction that if “we endow material forces with intellectual life,” we must necessarily “stultify human life with a material force.”
59

Silicon and carbon are cousins and share some fundamental characteristics. But, in the end, there are also crucial differences between them. Silicon does not journey through the bloodstream and knock at the door of a nerve cell,

enter and supplant the element in that cell. And even if “someday” silicon could be transplanted into a carbon-based human cell, that cell though it migrated to a transplanted silicon brain could not fire the imagination of a writer. It could never be part of “the brain of the
me
who is writing.”

In the next and final chapter, we will be confronting the vast challenges of retaining our essential humanity in a technology-driven culture—a culture that breeds and nourishes all varieties of the fetishism strategy. Despite their basic differences, silicon, which belongs essentially to the world of technol- ogy and carbon, which belongs to the world of humans and other natural entities, nevertheless can, because of their similarities, eventually become amicable partners in the progress of human existence. For example, in the past few decades, I have come to depend on the neatness and orderliness that my computer imparts to my disorderly thoughts. Even though the hand that wrote the words of this chapter defied logic and neatness, my computer makes it all come out looking pure. But, at the same time, the ambiguities and contradictions that haunt my words defy purity. So let us see what mis- chief the partners can come up with. The brain who is the
me
who is writing has decided to let Levi have the last words. Therefore I will conclude “Robots and Humans,” which I have transferred to my silicon-based com- puter from its original location on the sheaf of carbon-based papers that were written on with my carbon pencil, by impressing on the virtual paper before my eyes, “this dot, here, this one.”

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T
e n

C
ultures of
F
etishism

T
he twenty-first century ushered in a technology-driven world where machines, not only supercomputers, but also those on the small-scale level of personal computers and iPods and cell-phones and TV sets, have begun to assume the place of human relationships.

One of the major differences between the earlier cultural activities that evoked the fetishism strategy and the later cultures of the twenty-first cen- tury, is the way human beings increasingly are substituting controllable, tech- nological proficiencies for the uncontrollable “insufficiencies” of human biology. Something elemental about the human being is being tamed, sub- dued, distorted beyond all recognition. The repetitive monologues offered by machines are replacing the variegated dialogues of human beings.

Stephen Holden’s review of the film
In My Skin
, which I called attention to in chapter four, “The Body of a Woman,” bears repeating here.
1
Although Holden focuses exclusively on the skin-cutting that was the central motif of the film, his ideas could be applied to any variety of writing on the skin. He empha- sized that skin-cutting, the compulsion to cut into one’s own flesh, represented “a desperate attempt to re-establish a connection with the body that has been lost.”
2
He also identified the culture that breeds and nurtures this disconnection with the physical body. “In a sterile corporate culture where human appetites are quantified, tamed and manipulated by market research and where people have been rewarded for functioning like automatons, it implies, uncontrollable tics are really the anxious protesting twitches of an oppressed animal spirit.”
3

Many of us, who on the surface seem to be happily and unquestioningly adapting to the technologies that are offered to us, are responding, uncon- sciously, with the tremblings of an animal possessed by a torment it does not comprehend. Writing on the skin is one way of expressing this torment. Writing on the skin can also be a sign of the protest and rebellion of the oppressed animal.