In the age of smart wearables, a rehumanisation of the human is underway with a new form of intimacy with machines emerging
By Pramod K Nayar
In 1991, in an updated version of her earlier essay, the history of consciousness and feminist studies academic Donna Haraway argued that the cybernetic organism — abbreviation: cyborg — as a hybrid of human and machine, human and animal, was a much-to-be-sought-after form of life. The cyborg, she said, was a wholly different order of existence and subject, being connected with other forms of life and the non-living, partial, and with fluid boundaries.
Haraway’s pioneering essay blazed proverbial new trails — Arnie had done his steel-arms-and-camera-eye bit with Terminator by then — with this argument that struck at the very foundations of belief in the coherent, self-contained and autonomous human.
Everyday Cyborg
Haraway was in fact stating in the language of academia things that were becoming commonplace in medicine: prostheses, technological implants like pace-makers, body-machine interfaces like dialysis machines, body modifications, genetic alterations, etc. If we exclude serious body modifications and genetic alterations, cyborgisation was an everyday feature.
The 1990s and after revealed that many bodies lived in close conjunction with and dependent upon machines and machinic interventions. Accompanying philosophical writings also pointed out that our entire vital and organic being relied on inanimate and inorganic matter such as chemicals, in the form of the DNA or the elemental enzymes and matter ranging from serotonin to insulin. Animation, it seems, relies on the inanimate.
Fitbit and wearable devices resulted in a further cyborgisation as humans medicalised the everyday and the mundane, measuring various bodily parameters. The everyday cyborg was one who literally saw her/his vitals on a screen, whether this was oxygen levels, heartbeats or sugar levels. In other words, the everyday cyborg was one who could, without complicated scans and probes in the hospital setting, see her/his body’s chemical processes in understandable numbers.
The vitals in the age of the everyday cyborg produced a new form of entertainment as they scroll across one’s screen, as data which can also be shared (‘can I show you my latest heart rate?’ can be a literal techno-cultural rendering of a famous Kishore Kumar song from Rajesh Khanna’s Daag), including with healthcare providers.
Intimate techno-sites
Everyday cyborgisation adds an additional layer and new depths. Literally.
A new order of the human inside is now evident. Intimate techno-sites, as one may term the organ/region/site of implant(s), marks a whole new topography of the interior, one that was first revealed by the anatomy lesson and the dissection. ‘Intimate’ from the Latin intimus means ‘inmost, innermost, deepest’, the term is also used to speak of affections and feelings, and to describe relationships: and this captures the state of the insides perfectly.
The device is one of the most intimate items of our lives because it is deep below the surface. It is also, over time, one with which the body begins to have an intimate relationship: the body learns to trust it, adjust to it, work with it.
The intimate techno-site is marked by an alien intelligence which is now a part of the body. The implants are increasingly ‘smart’, in the sense they are responsive to the state of organic matter around them — whether this is blood, bone or tissue. The devices work with a feedback loop and recalibrate their functions based on the surroundings, whether this is minor electrical impulses being sent out or release of chemicals. That is, the device responds to the body’s conditions and reorganises — speeds up, slows down, injects — its functions accordingly. For humans with Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators (ICDs), for instance, their heart rate speeding up is detected by the ICD and electrical charges set off to control the life-threatening rhythm.
This means the integrity of the human body, if there ever was one, has been breached because the machine begins to think on behalf of the body, responding to it, feeding it, cutting it off, giving directions, etc. The body’s physiological functions merge with that of the device, and it is no longer possible to view the body as self-regulating and self-contained because a machine thinks on behalf of the body. As everyday cyborgisation with smart and smarter devices proceeds, the possibility should be considered where the body literally disappears beneath the machine.
Cyborg Vulnerabilities
Nelly Oudshoorn, the science and technology studies scholar, has argued that cyborgisation of the body produces a new form of vulnerability. She writes in an essay tellingly titled ‘The Vulnerability of Cyborgs’:
[H]aving a machine inside your body without knowing when or where it may jolt you induces feelings of disbelief and anxiety… as an internal rather than an external threat and as harm you may try to anticipate but can never escape.
First, the device inside you makes you conscious that your life depends on it. This is a departure from the standard everyday where, until things go wrong, the human does not wake up every morning recognising that her/his life depends on several parameters and organs working well and in sync. Having spent years ignoring the body and the body’s metaphoric disappearance since we are not conscious of it, the insertion of a device causes us to take note of the body, especially all the points at which something could go wrong. Everyday cyborgisation causes us to recognise the machinic means and modes of existence.
Second, a new form of acculturation and adaptation becomes essential: this time, with matter inside us. Just as humans seek to adapt to hot and cold conditions, cuisine or material settings such as crowds, the everyday cyborg adapts to matter inside the body: whether this is a cable, a device or a meter.
Third, the presence of the device alerts the human to emergent conditions of vulnerability — through and within the device itself. This means, one becomes aware of and pays attention to intimate techno-sites and services such as the regular servicing of the devices, the monitoring of its health and the constant update of data about it. The device then is the source of emergent and potential conditions of vulnerability.
A rehumanisation of the human is underway in the age of smart wearable, incorporable devices and processes. New forms of intimacy with machines also emerge. We become everyday cyborgs, and our intimate techno-sites assure us, keep us safe. But they also tell us: new forms of cyborgisation will produce new vulnerabilities.
To be human is to be vulnerable. To be human+machine is to be vulnerable too. Vulnerability, it appears, is inevitable.