Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful nfidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, cate-gories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, 1991.Cyborgs not centaurs…
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- I could easily escape the curse by claiming that the name of a theory is of no importance, and that, after all, serious scientists avoid the name Gaia as much as possible, preferring the euphemism “sciences of the Earth System.” But this would be cheating; it would amount to passing from one ambigu …
What if we tell a different history
There is something eerie about the statement I am making here. Something obvious, yet somehow unsayable: humans become servants of the machines they invented to serve them.
This is not entirely new. The history of industrialisation already carried a strange reversal of the promise of liberation from hard work. With the factory, human bodies began to adapt themselves to the rhythm of machines. The clock entered the workplace not to measure time, but to discipline it. The machine did not adapt to human rhythms. Human rhythms adapted to the machine.
For a while, consumer society seemed to soften the contradiction. Machines produced more; we consumed more. Life seemed be easier, more comfortable,… faster? Faster?
Did we gain time? The faster technology became, the more there seemed to be to do. Acceleration did not free us from time.
And now another chapter: Artificial intelligence does not merely perform tasks for us. It introduces a radically different temporal capacity into human life. Without pause, sleep, hesitation, recovery, forgetting, or waiting for an idea to emerge, it produces in seconds what may take a human being hours.
What happens when the machine becomes the measure against which our own pace is judged?
Will we still say that AI is serving us when we are expected to answer as quickly as it does, produce as much as it does, and work without interruption because it can?
Perhaps the question is no longer whether machines will replace humans. Perhaps the more troubling question is: will we begin to measure what a human being should be capable of by what the machine can do?
Meike Gleimof our Imagination
