Mechanical Animals: Still Animals

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach. — IHT

Time to step gingerly and avoid being called a luddite by my fearless libertarian friends. At times like these I reach for John Gray, the supremely disgruntled anti-Enlightenment British philosopher whom George Kateb has accused of Uli Kunkel-like levels of nihilism. Gray teaches us usefully that the inevitability of technological or scientific progress has no necessary connection with, or even implication for, political progress. It seems pretty clear that the vector of scientific development will keep pointing in the more or less obvious sci-fi directions; less clear is whether political development around the world even has a vector. If this is true then probably the thing we have most to fear about technology is its use in situations of excessive chaos, not excessive order. One thing Iraq has reminded us (and keep an eye, too, on the swarm tactics, sea and air, driving the new military thinking in Iran and China) is that big technologies fall hard when cheap countermeasures can exploit critical weaknesses. Another important thing we’ve been reminded of lately is that big technology itself gets relatively cheap relatively fast.

So Gray tells us the question is not whether we ‘should’ develop technologies that introduce robot claws to monkey mind control, because those and technologies like it will develop. The question is what, if anything, such technologies will really do to change the way we live together and structure our social and political order. The answer I intuit from Gray is not much. We will have bigger problems on our hands than who is and who isn’t walking around with giant robot legs or controlling the huge hydrogen-powered steel golems that have replaced human garbage collectors in the World of the Future — problems concerning our essential inability to escape our bodily condition as physical beings. You might argue that outsourcing our actions to mechanical prosthetics would at least increase our independence from our physical bodies. But the point is that the problems of political order basic to all human societies go fundamentally unchanged. Unless, that is, we are ruled by scientists, and whatever hierarchy of power shakes out as a result of technology just goes.

But as we all can guess, a ruling clique of scientists would never want that to happen. Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’d be replaced. Even at the ultimate levels of nerd rule, the science and the scientist can never completely merge. Put another way, power can’t ever solely be knowledge. This strikes me as a curb on the dystopian powers of both. We’re stuck being beings, and as messy and complicated as that is, that’s a good thing.