by Gabriela Arroyo-Reyes

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It's way off the track of the ``Computers--Threat or Menace?'' school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush.

The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e., non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

From ``SpaceWars'' by Stewart Brand (Rolling Stone, circa 1972)

Within the remote confines of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, something big was brewing ... the implications of which would make the likes of Bertrand Russell, Norbert Wiener, and Mephistopheles himself cackle.

In all their righteous, scraggly glory, the self-proclaimed ``enlightened" hippies, from New York City to Haight-Ashbury, who'd ``Turned On, Tuned In, and Dropped Out" to the point of dullness, were immersing themselves in the writings of Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan; it was through these New Age visionaries, that they could vicariously envision themselves in a cyberuniverse, one in which they could leave behind any semblance of even an iota of responsibility for the past, present, or future, in which material reality could be wholly imagined as an information system.

The mysterious, but long-awaited Internet was about to be unleashed, like a Pandora's box upon an unsuspecting world, and there were high hopes everywhere, as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte put it, that it would ``flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people." Long gone would be the days of dirigistic economies and industry; the faint sounds of spinning lathes, milling cutters, dirigibles and gliders, cranes and tractors would inevitably fall to an eerie silence. In their place, the Internet would usher in an unprecedented era, as it paved the way for a ``digital generation." But not merely digital in the conventional sense, as Dr. Timothy Leary (not one to jump on this cataclysmic bandwagon too late), attested when he made the profound realization that psychedelia as a radical new religion attracted too few followers, and instead opted to coronate himself as the new high-priest guru of cyberculture, prophesying that virtual reality was the new and improved ``Electronic LSD."

This so-called Revolution of the Information and Digital Age, unfolding before our eyes, is a heinous attack on the nature of the human soul and mind. It is more eminently dangerous and even fatal because this scathing assault is taking place in an unseen domain that is responsible not only for shaping what individuals and entire societies think, but the way they think.

Virtually all research and development (R&D) initiatives dealing in some way or another with the gaming industry, Internet, or human brain-machine interfaces, as well as numerous other disciplines under the rubric of ``interactive computing systems" associated with Human System Integration (HIS), have a genesis which can be traced to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), founded in 1958 under the Defense Reorganization Act. It was through ARPA that the cybernetic blueprint regarding human-machine interface and advancement of information systems would first be unveiled to the world.

Today, DARPA proudly carries the cybernetic torch through its ongoing research and development initiatives for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines; amongst the myriad of projects with seemingly sci-fi undertones, the most notable is the AugCog (Augmented Cognition) program, which is on the brink of developing a computational system, with the aid of prosthetic technologies such as cued memory retrieval, that would enhance the overall effectiveness and performance of the future warrior/soldier.

``The newly emerging field of AugCog is aimed at revolutionizing the way humans interact with computer-based systems by coupling traditional electromechanical interaction devices (such as a mouse or a joystick) with psychophysiological methods (respiration, heart rate, EG, functional optical imaging), where human physiological indicators can be used in real time to drive system adaptation or apriori assess potential design issues which may induce information overload or inefficient decision making."[1] This is the beginning of what some hope will be the next big paradigm shift in not only interactive computing, but come to define new parameters for what it means to be human.

This is the training ground for what is infamously called ``post-human" warfare. A realm in which the unyieldingly faithful and self-avowed worshippers of the fathers of Cybernetics and Information Theory, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, have incessantly and tirelessly dedicated themselves to the propagation of a new Renaissance in which there exists a seamless fusion between the digital, cybernetic machine and the human being. The high priests of post-humanism audaciously preach that cognition is a logical systemic activity which is distributed throughout the environments in which human entities just happen to move and work.

``We need first to understand that the human form--including human desire and all its external representations--may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism."[2]

The litmus test for the age-old question of whether or not machines could supersede man's intellect, is typified by what was widely known as the Universal Turing Machine, or Turing test, as described by Prof. Alan Turing in his 1950 paper ``Computing machinery and intelligence." His test consists of the following procedure: A human judge engages in a conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; based on the responses from both entities, the judge on the receiving end must decide which is the human, which is the machine. It is presumed that both the human and the machine will try to mislead the judge as to its real identity and pose as the ``most human." If an intelligent being cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, this failure, according to Turing, would be the final and necessary proof that machines can think, and would draw out an obvious distinction between intellectual and physical capabilities of the thinking human being.[3]

Carrying on where Turing left off, the likes of Nancy Katherine Hayles, Ihab Hassan, and Hans Moravec propose in their rehashed theories that human identity is essentially an informational pattern, and that it has become increasingly ``disembodied." Moravec even makes the modest proposal that, in the not-too-distant future, human consciousness will itself be downloadable into a computer.[4]

``We are cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbiots: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non-biological circuitry."[5] The fusion between the biological domain and the technological domain has created what academicians and scholars are calling a ``cognitive machinery," which they predict will inevitably evolve into a self-perpetuating process.

To begin to understand the convoluted phenomenon they describe, assess with a clinical eye the woes, the cursing, and overtly bizarre sentimental delights that emanate from the mouths of mesmerized computer video-game players. These zombies further affirm the idea that they are merely projecting their proprioceptive sense into the synthetic simulation that is the gaming world.

Watch the multi-faceted array of hypnotic colors that are projected onto the stultified eyes of the poor fools who reload the shotgun as they gaze matter-of-factly at the mangled bodies of opponents scattered about the ground. Watch as the red player throws the grenade from which the blue player leaps aside, with feline-like agility, and raises his shotgun in the middle of it all. As though entranced by the flashing graphics of the Technicolor LCD screen, the tournament goes on: hazy blue lights shine from four TV screens, each one connected to an Xbox, and the four Xboxes are linked through a Local Area Network, as various cutthroat players find themselves vying for the most coveted rank of top slayer (player)--whilst killing each other through the networked gaming consoles. These players are entrenched in a virtual world to the point of seeming to occupy simulated space. They have indulged in their fantasy to the point that they are completely oblivious to the world around them. There has been a fluid intermingling between flesh and metal, where there seemingly exist no physical boundaries between their fleshy bodies and the joystick which has now become an unconscious extension of their hands.

Whether battling opponents with missiles, guns that fire spikes, lasers, energy blasters, or one of an array of other weapons of mythological proportions, these Halo 3 Parties, already more popular than college football on campuses across the nation, are hosted by Big Shot Gaming and Microsoft Student Partners as well as by chronic fanatics during all hours of day and night.

Welcome to the era of disembodied information, where flesh and metal become one. But before the preconditions of a post-human future are fully imbibed, the question must be posed: Who are the agents of this degrading misnomer that passes for human sciences?

Nancy Katherine Hayles, professor of English at UCLA, author of the cult-classic of cyberneticists and futurists alike, How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, speaks for an emerging breed of academician determined to keep this odiously entropic and venomous dogma alive. She describes the kooky ``research" of one Kevin Warwick, professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, who inserted an implant into his arm: His first implant was a passive device, communicating only with embedded sensors in the environment. He went on from this to a second implant that also sent signals to his nervous system, creating an integrated circuit, linking his evolving neural patterns directly with environmentally embedded sensors and computer chips. Such are the depths to which these engineers of apocalypse will go for their revival of a science (by nomenclature only) devoid of real, profound, and impassioned ideas.

The other leading propagandists of this perverse social fusion between man and machine include the Institute for Creative Technologies. In December 1996, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a workshop focussing on the common and organized aims that existed in the defense and entertainment industries, regarding modeling and simulation. The report that would emerge in the aftermath of this workshop at the request of Prof. Michael Zyda[6], prompted the U.S. Army to grant the University of Southern California a $45 million budget to create a research center that would develop and advance military simulations. This allocation further reflects the overlap between the Pentagon and Hollywood.

Another incubator for the continued creation of explicitly anti-human ideas goes by the name of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). The conception for the HASTAC consortium came in 2003 at a meeting of humanities leaders sponsored by the Mellon Foundation; founder Cathy N. Davidson (Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, co-founder of John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University), and co-founder David Theo Goldberg (University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine) had already envisioned a plethora of projects that would expand innovative uses of technology to create unparalleled cyberinfrastructure. Included in the core leadership of HASTAC are Jeffrey Schnapp (director of the Stanford University Humanities Lab), Ruzena Bajcsy (director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at the University of California, Berkeley), Hadass Scheffer (director of fellowship programs at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and Henry Lowood (curator for Germanic Collections and History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University Libraries, Stanford University).

HASTAC sees itself as ``a voluntary consortium of leading researchers from dozens of institutions, who have been co-developing software, hardware, and cyberinfrastructure.... Legal, ethical, social, historical, and aesthetic issues must also be carefully considered as we expand our capacities for accumulating and analyzing data and as we push the boundaries of science and what it means to be human."[7] From among its ranks, HASTAC seeks to create a new generation of scholars in the humanities who have an infallible expertise in the most advanced work in creating leading-edge Information Technologies, and transform institutions in the process of spreading their cyber-humanities vision.

Only in its fourth year of existence, HASTAC already commands ``academic attention," and has more than 70 institutions under its umbrella, including Wayne State University, Duke University, Stanford University, UC Irvine, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, University of Washington, Boston University, Cornell, George Mason University, Rice University, and last, but not at all least, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Digital Promise. Two of the most ambitious projects under the HASTAC umbrella are: ``The global body and the virtual Cyborg," which is already under way through programs at Duke University, and ``How They Got Game: Cultural Implications of Interactive Simulations and Video Games,"[8] stemming from Stanford Humanities Lab, one of HASTAC's founding members.

These are not merely colorful concoctions springing from the lucrative imaginations of mad scientists and pedagogues of calamity. They are an attempt to create from among the ranks of this emerging generation, a class of desensitized drones who will conform to the absurdity of a society in which nothing is held to be true, and everything is permitted.

What needs to be urgently understood, if this generation is to take up the fight of generations past who thus far have so nobly advanced the condition of mankind, is that the human mind is divinely endowed by the Creator with a purpose.

The conniving deceitfulness by which a society is compelled to drink the elixir of its own self-destruction always relies on the same, tired, monotonous, and unchanging criterion: Convince the masses that, however much their freedom may be limited in the causal sphere, at the very least they can admit no limitations to their freedom in the sphere of the mundane and banal. Keep the minds entrapped in an uninspired abyss where they cherish, with ridiculous reverence, the random and absurd.

The only prerequisite to join the human race is fundamentally simple. It is to do the good in such a way that our actions will impel others to want to do the same, and this is the true historic mission of the American Constitutional Republic.

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[1]The 2007 Augmented Cognition International. The Augmented Cognition Program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which is the main research and development organization for the Department of Defense. The patented technology is owned by San Diego State University and is licensed for commercial use exclusively to Eye Tracking, Inc.

[2] Ihab Hassan, ``Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Post-Human culture? A University Masque in Five Scenes," in Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello, eds., Performance in Postmodern Culture. Theories of Contemporary Culture (Milwaukee: Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1977). Hassan is a former Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and current chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Association of University Professors of English.

[3] Alan Turing, ``Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind, Vol. LIX, No. 236, October 1950.

[4] Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Moravec is a research professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

[5] Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

[6] Computer Science specialist in artificial intelligence at the Naval Postdoctoral Academy in Monterey, Calif. and director of the MOVES Institute, which spawned the game ``America's Army."

[7] History of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. www.hastac.org

[8] ``How they got game..." started out at Stanford University with collaboration between Henry Lowood and Timothy Lenoir. Today, the Project is housed at Duke University at the Kimberly Jenkins Collaboratory, and exists for the sole purpose of the development of industrial-strength simulations that are the product of the military's relationship with Hollywood and the gaming industry.