Are our children cyborgs now?
Harold P. Sjursen
© 2021 by Harold P. Sjursen. Draft, please do not cite without permission. This paper was prepared for The 2021 International Conference on Childhood Studies, organized by School of Education, Hangzhou Normal University (HZNU), China.
Abstract:
In many parts of the world advanced technological devices are inevitably a prominent part of children’s lives, supplementing (and sometimes replacing) interactions with parents, teachers, peer companions and others. These devices are used for education, care giving or supervision, play and even companionship. Children frequently exhibit highly intuitive capacity to use such devices interactively to the extent that they anticipate responses from such devices, which are a natural part of their environment from a very early age, in the same way that one expects appropriate reactions from living creatures. In some sense electronic devices, for example, become surrogate companions. Given the ubiquity of interactive “smart” devices in the experience of young children, it is interesting to ask how children regard such equipment. Child psychology considers how very young children learn to differentiate themselves from their environment and in so doing formulate an idea of self, distinct from surrounding environment but with various types of relationships to the environment. If the child’s environment is populated with interactive intelligent devices that respond faithfully to expressed wishes and needs, and indeed become the normative way such wishes and needs are addressed, will this experience tend to blur the distinction between living creatures and smart devices? How will this affect the child’s developing notion of self? These and other questions will drive this inquiry into how closely related children are to the machines they rely upon. Reference will be made to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology and contemporary theories of techno-humanism.
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Section 1
After seeing the photos sent back from the Mars Rover on television, the pre-school daughter of a friend told her mother that in case her mother couldn’t she would be glad to travel to Mars on her behalf. There was no sense that this would be an exceptional feat, no indication of amazement, astonishment or wonder (θαυμάζω) whatsoever. The child’s world was an artifact of technology. If Plato and Aristotle [1]are to be believed, such an attitude does not lead one to knowledge, understanding or philosophy. Are the marvels of technology closing us off to the world, or at least the natural world?
We are motivated in these reflections by Donna Haraway’s famous comment that “we are all cyborgs now” from the feminist tract, Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In this famous essay (usually identified as A Cyborg Manifesto) she makes this assertion:
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.[2]
Although she discusses the notion of cyborgs in the specific context of feminist theory, the basic notion of cyborg that she deploys can be re-situated in other social contexts including that of children. Serge Schmemann, editor of The New York Times Magazine, posed the question whether contemporary technology is changing the lived-world of experience to Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic psychology at Oxford, who is considered an authority on the impact of technology on user’s brains. Professor Schmemann responded:
I’d like to suggest that technologies up until now have been a means to an end. The printing press enabled you to read both fiction and fact that gave you insight into the real world. A fridge enabled you to keep your food fresh longer. A car or a plane enabled you to travel farther and faster. What concerns me is that the current technologies have been converted from being means to being ends. Instead of complementing or supplementing or enriching life in three dimensions, an alternative life in just two dimensions — stimulating only hearing and vision — seems to have become an end in and of itself. That’s the first difference. The second is the sheer pervasiveness of these technologies over the other technologies. Whilst it’s one thing for someone like my mum, who’s 85 and a widow, to go onto Facebook for the first time — not that she’s done this, but I’d love for her to do it — to actually widen her circle and stimulate her brain, there are stats coming out, for example, that over 50 percent of kids, between 13 and 17, spend 30-plus hours a week recreationally in front of a screen.[3]
Sherry Turkle’s well received book The Second Self [4]discusses the implications for personal life and everyday experience of computer use. She, like Schmemann, recognizes that the computer is not merely a tool that we fully control and freely decide when and how to use. In the book she examines how sustained computer use affects the way we look at ourselves and our relationships with others, arguing that this technology strongly influences the way we think and act. Her research consisted largely of interviews she conducted with children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers and personal computer owners about how they felt computers changed their personal lives.
Since publication of The Second Self in 1984, the advancement of computer technology and access to and utilization of networked computers has been nothing short of stupendous. How the nearly ubiquitous presence, in many social/cultural settings (the impact of the digital divide is another equally significant topic), has intensified the concerns about whether its influence on childhood psychological development, socialization and ethical understanding is perhaps fostering the evolution of post human being or a new society of cyborgs.
Timothy Lenoir has argues[5] that the fusing of the “digital and the real” in
recent developments in artificial intelligence, presents an example in the field of evolutionary robotics, in which researchers apply models of biological evolution to the development of technical systems. Cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. Cybernetics was envisioned by scientists and engineers as a way to maximize human potential in a chaotic and unpredictable postwar world. The computer-driven alternate reality The Beast [a complicated computer challenge developed by Microsoft in 2001, solved the spontaneous collaboration of thousands of individuals and computers] produced was make-believe, but every aspect of the player's experience was, phenomenologically speaking, real.[6]
In other words, what was a fiction created to amuse and promote a Hollywood film (AI–Artificial Intelligence) called forth a massive effort in which the distinction between human and machine was insignificant if even noticed. And, from the standpoint of the players, it was a reality in which the difference between human and machine made no difference. In this reality, even the notion of cyborg attenuates the intimate closeness inherent in the machine-human partnership. Lenoir presented his essay as a requiem for the cyborg; not only have we passed beyond the age of humanity, but the cyborg must be honored and put to rest as evolution has taken us to the age of techno-humanism. Lenoir does not claim his view is original. He describes[7] what he thinks as the latest stage of evolution in these terms:
The transition is made to what many have called the “posthuman,” bridging the discontinuity between humans and machines. Katherine Hayles has provided the most useful diagnosis of the posthuman condition [8]… According to Hayles, the posthuman view holds that consciousness is not the effect of a gathered, unified entity but is rather a distributed phenomenon. It “configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” Most important, the posthuman condition understands the body as simply a prosthesis we have learned to use, capable of being extended or replaced by other technological prostheses as they develop. “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”
That this view is the abrogation of so many of the categories of thinking and being by which we think we understand the world; that it is destructive of humanistic and religious traditions; and that for many–including perhaps a sizeable majority of educated individuals globally–it simply does not accord with experience, does not address the question of how or whether children born in this era will embrace it. If, as suggested at the outset, in the phenomenal world of children, there is no discontinuity between the artificial and the natural, and our bodies are just devices that under certain circumstances facilitate our networked activity, then surely we are entering upon something quite different from the technocratic dystopia envisioned by Huxley in Brave New World.
I will return to what developmental psychologists have noted about the impact of computer technology on children’s beliefs and sense of reality. But before that let’s step back to the middle of the last century and what Heidegger called question concerning technology.
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Section 2.
It is not without some irony that the NASA Mars rover Perseverence has as its mission the search for life. If one accepts the premises of techno-humanism natural and artificial life have bred offspring that are both or neither. The idea of life as something that stands apart from the rest of reality has been has been a cherished belief through most of human history. With the rise of the new science in the 17th century, the effort to distinguish and proclaim the superiority of human life above other lower forms focused on the problem of agency: how were the actions of the biological machines that were our bodies initiated and directed? The mind, the locus of rational intelligence, was given the job and in so doing the groundwork was laid for techno-humanism. The mind did not reside in the body, and the possibility of mind-body interaction presented an essentially intractable problem. The influence and importance of science, however, despite this theoretical difficulty, because of its harnessing of technology, continued to grow and became the standard of modernity. In this construct, the mind is a calculating machine and is coextensive with the ego. Where is humanity in this? Heidegger saw question partly in how technology was understood and valued.
In the 20th century, perhaps the most important text in the philosophy of technology is Martin Heidegger’s lecture/essay Die Frage nach der Technik. [9]This essay, first published in 1954, is notable for its approach to the question. The title is not the question of technology (or the problem of technology), but the question concerning technology. The difference in expression is significant because the essay is not so much about technology per se as it is about how we, humankind, in our ordinary experience relate to the technology we encounter and use, or perhaps more succinctly put, it is the question of how we experience technology. In some sense we are related to technology or experience technology as we are to other features in our life, other people for example, or the natural environment where we act out our lives. The issue, Heidegger tells us, is not in the first instance to know what technology is (as efficient technique, for example) but how to have a free relation to technology.
This problematic Heidegger frames not as an ordinary question or problem to be solved, and in that sense it is not scientific. Rather it is an existential issue, meaning it is one of choice or decision. But the choice in the modern era is constrained because one cannot simply choose technology — one can’t easily opt in or opt out of technology; it is more or less the horizon or the background of all experience. What this reality means for us and the assumptions or attitudes we might possess in our unavoidable interactions with technology because of this, and ultimately how technology might destine our future, are the themes Heidegger discusses.
The opening paragraph of the essay sets the tone:
In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.[10]
We need to pay attention not only to the content of this paragraph, but its form and the process it advocates. Indeed, in this case the distinction between form and matter is not appropriate, the point of Heidegger’s remarks on Aristotle’s four causes. Before turning to that we note that we are questioning, a continuing process and not a discrete question to be answered. Questioning might be described as a mode of thinking which would remind us at once of Descartes’ doubting as a mode of thinking. It is the stance we should have toward technology. The relationship is toward technology (not to technology) again emphasizing the continuing or existential nature; questioning concerning technology is a way, a way of being, and this way of being can prepare a free relationship to technology.
Heidegger is not suggesting the avoidance of technology, something in any event not possible, his position is not — as has been said — anti-technology. His theme has to do with the way humans relate to technology, or what we believe the essence of technology is. It is in how we relate to technology that we come to realize what it is essentially. If we are mistaken about what technology is our relationship to it will be likewise mistaken. And this, Heidegger suggests, is to our detriment.
The way to have a free relationship to technology begins by correcting what Heidegger sees as common misunderstandings of what technology is as indicated in the instrumental and the anthropological approaches to technology. The instrumental approach sees technology just in terms of its utility and measures it by the efficiency of this usefulness. It is technique only, and technique is a means to a desired end. In this view, it is the end that counts and the means to it are neutral. The anthropological approach supplements the instrumental approach by making the ends those of human desire. Thus technology is a tool or set of tools for the sake of achieving ends desired (as good) by humans. The ends might be proximate, a cooked meal in the future, or enduring (leisure, happiness). The anthropological understanding of technology in Heidegger’s view amplifies the instrumental such that it appears to be the agency of a good like human happiness.
To say that these two approaches misunderstand technology is not to say that they are incorrect. Of course technology is instrumental and technique does help implement the achievement of desired ends. While these two approaches do, in a limited way, describe features and aspects of technology, they do not disclose the nature or essence of technology. Just as the description of a tree in a garden, or acknowledgement of its shade-giving functionality, does not tell us what a tree really is, so these characterizations of technology do not reveal technology’s true essence.
Why is this important? The quest to know the essence of something recalls the exercises of medieval theology: The essence of a thing is that which without which a thing would not be that which it is. But Heidegger is not reverting to that kind of essentialist analysis; essence is not an eternal and unchanging object of knowledge. The kind of essence Heidegger means is what he calls enframing. This complex and important topic requires more explication than is possible in this context.
The German term Gestell is what is translated as enframing and it is the concept Heidegger refers to when, as in the paragraph quoted above, he discusses Wesen der Technik. Gestell is by no means used as a synonym for Wesen; the reference is more to the habits of mind that accompany how we tend to think about technology, especially or at least modern, scientific technology.
Heidegger’s notion of Gestell together with his distinction between older and modern, scientific technology is made clear by his examples, but for present purpose we want to emphasize the formative habits of mind that characterize how children relate to technology. Does the apparent lack of wonder over technological feats, the expectation that a slight gesture will initiate a complex response from a touch screen, that the horizons of experience rarely lead beyond fabricated entities, convey the post-human/techno-human construction of reality in a convincing way?
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Section 3.
Hannah Arendt, herself a student of Heidegger, advanced the idea of natality by which she meant that with each new person infinite possibility appears.
It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.[11]
This assertion is made as a statement of hope. She distinguishes human action from fabrication. But does this difference survive in a world where fabrication in the sense of the material construction of things may be accomplished entirely by a certain sort of cognitive activity, including the replication of human action with the application of artificial intelligence (AI)? Again, this question is beyond the scope of these reflections. Nonetheless, we can be reasonably clear that the presumption of individual uniqueness would not obtain within techno-humanism.
Knowing the response of children to their digital, highly technologized life-world is the work of developmental psychology. As a project of psychological research, how should we proceed? Sherry Turkle was interested in how young children think about the world or reality they meet through computers, particularly when their engagement includes a degree of programming activity. She turned to Piaget’s notion of epistemologie genetique. For Piaget children’s use of different standards of knowledge, that at the stage of development are coherent and efficacious, should not be regarded as untrue or incorrect since, he believed, they eventually led to the accepted formal style. His epistemology sees children’s ways of reasoning and understanding the world a cognitive style more than a flawed correspondence between knowledge and reality. On this point Turkle comments:
Where he saw diverse forms of knowledge in terms of stages to a finite end point of formal reason, we see different approaches to knowledge as styles, each equally valid on its own terms.[12]
Whereas Piaget saw the cognitive style of children as reflecting a stage of development that would eventually yield to standard (and formal) discourse, due to the underlying stability of reality, Turkle, on the contrary, sees these cognitive styles especially when induced by familiarity with computing, an opening to an entirely new way of conceiving or constructing reality.
In our research on programming styles, the computer has emerged as an important actor in the revaluation of the concrete, a privileged medium for the growth of alternative voices in dealing with the world of formal systems. The conventional route into formal systems, through the manipulation of abstract symbols, closes doors that the computer can open. The computer, with its graphics, its sounds, its text, and its animation, can provide a port of entry for people whose chief ways of relating to the world are through movement, intuition, and visual impression. At the heart of the new possibilities for the appropriation of formal systems is the computational object, on the border between an abstract idea and a concrete physical object. In the simplest case, a computational object such as an icon moving on a computer screen can be defined by the most formal of rules and is thus a mathematical construct, but at the same time it is visible, almost tangible, and allows a sense of direct manipulation that only the encultured mathematician can feel in traditional formal systems.' The computer has a theoretical vocation: it can make the abstract concrete; it can bring form down to earth.[13]
The computing experience of the young children Turkle interviewed was of course far less than one would find today. The most powerful reactions she noted were among children who had had some programing experience, generally using Logo.[14]
What Turkle and her coauthor and Logo designer Seymore Papert recognized was that young children who use computers are introduced into an enticing world where their agency and their particular cognitive style are not only coherent and efficacious; they are genuinely empowering.
How should we, guardians of our children’s welfare, stewards of the world and protectors of its future regard the increasing immersion of children in an environment that empowers while simultaneously possibly alienating them from nature and human society?
But perhaps these questions and concerns are misplaced. The impact of such powerful technology upon the development of children is being widely researched, and it has been argued that when considered within the appropriate historical context that what we are experiencing now is little different from past innovations. [15]
Current debates surrounding the emergence of computer technology and new media echo the promises and concerns of the past. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 parents in households with at least one working computer and at least one child between ages 8 to 17, some 70% of parents said the Internet is a place for children to discover "fascinating, useful things," while more than 75% were concerned that their children might give out personal information or view sexually explicit images on the Internet. Much as television critic Robert Lewis Shayon referred to television as the "New Pied Piper" in a series of newspaper articles in 1952, public commentaries in the 1980s gave voice to concerns that children were becoming "addicted" to interactive computer products.[16]
These particular concerns, however, do not address the situation in light of advanced AI technology nor the notion of techno-humanism. If we think that technology is transforming the nature of being human and that consciousness is evolving to include machines; if we recognize that automation, communication, sexuality, economics and much else is now bound to computer technology in ways that are not avoidable, then it seems obvious that children will be in the vanguard of this new ontological revolution.
[1] Theaetetus 155d; Metaphysics 982b.
[2] Haraway, 2006, A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century.
[3] New York Times Magazine, Nov. 30, 2012, “Global Agenda: Are We Becoming Cyborgs?”.
[4] Turkle, Shirley, 1984, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit.
[5] Lenoir, Timothy, 2007, “Techno-Humanism: Requiem for the Cyborg” in Riskin, Jessica, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life.
[6] Lenoir, Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
[9] Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik published in 1954 in Vorträge und Aufsätze.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Arendt, Hannah. 2018. "The human condition,” pp 177-8.
[12] Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert. “Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture in Signs, Autumn, 1990, Vol. 16, No. 1, From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference, pp. 128-157.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Logo is described in Wikepedia as follows: Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. Logo is not an acronym: the name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek logos, meaning word or thought. A general-purpose language, Logo is widely known for its use of turtle graphics, in which commands for movement and drawing produced line or vector graphics, either on screen or with a small robot termed a turtle. The language was conceived to teach concepts of programming related to Lisp and only later to enable what Papert called "body-syntonic reasoning", where students could understand, predict, and reason about the turtle's motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle. There are substantial differences among the many dialects of Logo, and the situation is confused by the regular appearance of turtle graphics programs that are named Logo.
[15] Wartella, Ellen A., and Nancy Jennings. “Children and Computers: New Technology. Old Concerns”. The Future of Children 10, no. 2 (2000): 31. doi:10.2307/1602688.
[16] Ibid., p 35.