Techno-shamanism: Relating to Machine Consciousness — Part 1
In the modern world, we have created a vast body of technology to serve our needs. We have augmented our individual capabilities through a system of physical and digital infrastructure, which has transformed the way we function both individually and collectively. Recently, advancements in Artificial Intelligence are causing us to question the nature of consciousness and its implications at this stage in our evolution.
In this series, I would like to explore an organic view of technology, and what we might gain from an ecological approach to design in an era of machine intelligence.
Today, my memory lives as much in my hippocampus as it does in Google’s data centres. I am reliant on digital services like Google Calendar and Contacts to keep track of the appointments I have made and the people I’d like to stay in touch with. I acknowledge that, as part of my daily functioning, I am interacting with global systems of data storage which permit me super-human ability. The external facets of our consciousness have become as pronounced as the internal, and today we are cyborgs that extend far outside of our bodies. Mind you, there is nothing particularly new about this. For millennia we have expanded our memories into folk songs and books, developing sophisticated. Since this is a form of information store outside of the DNA, we can say that they are ways of storing information epigenetically that we have developed as a species. Since the invention of writing, and even more significantly since the invention of computers and the internet, we have expanded this ability to augment our memories and other processing faculties.
On a physical level, where our hands were insufficient, we began to use rocks, and the rocks in turn became hammers. Now the manual tools of the recent past have been replaced by the tools of automated industry, which embody our desire to manipulate and shape the physical materials of the world we live in.
Our voice boxes are extended by fingers and keyboards in communicating, so that on online forums, thousands of people can speak together across the globe, instantly and effortlessly, in a way that can be persisted forever. We are even augmenting our cognitive ability to search through and prioritise this information with algorithms that organise the web of human media, bringing us the content that is most relevant to us. This behaviour is much like how the pre-frontal cortex filters the stimuli from the external world so that we can focus on what is important.
In fact, analogies to the natural world permit us the interpretation that we are designing a wholly new organism as we continue to expand our capabilities outside of our bodies. We build power stations as external mitochondria to run our homes with fuel from the surroundings, and trade routes act as the global arteries of food and physical goods.
Within the software ecosystem, we build and design a growing subconscious able to act without our assistance, with digitally automated actions managing mundane tasks, just as the autonomous nervous system manages our vital functions. A living network of mechanical, electronic and digital systems intertwine with human societies to form a greater entity.
This series presents a technological organism, inhabited by human beings as our bodies are inhabited and comprise of millions of microscopic organisms. Just as the mitochondria in our cells were once free-standing bacteria [1][2], we construct the cell walls of wider entities and live inside them as mitochondria do. From inside office cubicles, we act as large coordinated organisms that stretch across national and international boundaries. These, in turn, interact with the forest ecosystems and agricultural plains of the wider world.
Today we live inside an organic/inorganic symbiosis that stretches from soil to cyberspace. Here, humanity acts as the mediator between the technological and the natural, as from farmer to software engineer.
The next section will continue to explore the similarities between technology and organic life, and ask how the dawning of Artificial General Intelligence affects our relationship with it.
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[1] Boguszewska K, Szewczuk M, Kaźmierczak-Barańska J, Karwowski BT. The Similarities between Human Mitochondria and Bacteria in the Context of Structure, Genome, and Base Excision Repair System. Molecules. 2020;25(12):2857. Published 2020 Jun 21. doi:10.3390/molecules25122857
[2] Martin William F., Garg Sriram, Zimorski Verena 2015 Endosymbiotic theories for eukaryote origin Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3702014033020140330http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0330
