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As your new scientific advisor,
I would like to draw your attention to an important and perhaps surprising
fact. The citizens of your country are not just flesh and blood. They
are, increasingly, flesh, blood, and machine. Let me explain why, and
then why it matters.
Andy
Clark
Mr President,
As your
new scientific advisor, I would like to draw your attention to an important
and perhaps surprising fact. The citizens of your country are not just
flesh and blood. They are, increasingly, flesh, blood, and machine.
Let me explain why, and then why it matters.
While
the biological bodies of our fellow citizens remain (temporarily at
least) much as they ever were, their minds are more and more the minds
of hybrid beings. As thinking beings, as persons, they are constituted
not just by the blood and guts contents of their ancient biological
skinbags, but also by vastly transformative webs of social and technological
structure.
To see
what I mean, reflect that recent advances in genetics, cognitive science,
neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and cross-cultural studies are
helping to paint a much fuller picture of the complex interplay between
native skills and rich developmental plasticity that makes us who and
what we are. Part of this picture involves native dispositions of various
kinds. But another big part involves a vast and distinctive shot of
cortical plasticity. This plasticity allows young (and older) human
brains to factor surrounding culture, tools and technologies deep into
their problem-solving practice. Brains like ours alter profoundly to
fit the technologies and practices that surround them.
And there
is more. In the past, this process of fit was mainly one-way. Human
brains adapted to the devices that they had to work with. But new technologies
are changing this one-sided profile. Our best devices now adapt to individual
users according to patterns of use. They provide for fast, fluent, painless
information retrieval that alters the tasks left to biological memory.
They are mobile, portable, robust. Lose one and you feel impaired, as
if afflicted by some transient neural trauma. The simple cell phone,
with its ever-expanding range of functions, will probably one day be
seen as the key transition technology that led humankind into a new
hybrid age.
The level
of productive debate and co-operation between the humanities and the
sciences of the mind is also rising daily. At this critical historical
moment, America can lead the world by taking the quality of human life
seriously, and by devoting its impressive resources not to hopeless
and misguided causes but to helping all its citizens lead full and rewarding
lives. That means spending money on the kinds of education, training
and research that will help us to understand ourselves as we are today,
and to build better hybrid minds tomorrow. Such a project requires understanding
both our biological roots and the socio-technological matrixes that
take those roots and turn them into the hybrid intelligent systems we
recognize as persons.
This project,
the project of tracking the interactions between biology and the social
and technological matrix itself, could be for the new century what sequencing
the human genome was to the last. Done properly, it could mark a transformative
moment in human history: the moment we put war and aggression aside,
and tried to build better people by better understanding who and what
we are.
Andy Clark
Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program
Indiana University, Bloomington
Author of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.
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