Techno-Sapiens in a Networked Era

Becoming Digital Neighbors

Ryan K. Bolger, Kutter Callaway, Ryan K. Bolger, Kutter Callaway

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781725280526
  9781725280533
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725280540
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Techno-Sapiens gathers together leading scholars of technology, theology, and religion in order to explore the ways in which modern technology is neither solely a dehumanizing force in the world nor a mere instrument for evangelizing the world, but rather the very means by which incarnation happens--the media in and through which humans love the (digital) other. The essays explore the question of how technology encourages and/or inhibits the human capacity to love our neighbor through asking the following questions: Who is my (digital) neighbor? How does social media in particular allow us to love our (digital) neighbor? How does one become a (digital) neighbor?

Part I

Who is my (digital) neighbor?
And for that matter, who am I?

Chapter 1

Religion and Posthuman Life

Teilhard’s Noosphere

Ilia Delio

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most significant new sciences of the twentieth century. Born from insights on cybernetic systems, machine thinking, and information, AI now dominates the cultural terrain personally and globally. We are enamored by its powers but frightened by its possibilities. How do we adequately assess the role of AI in human life? Can AI enhance human relationships and build communities or are we inventing machines that will eventually cause human extinction? By contextualizing the rise of AI within the larger historical context of evolution we can begin to define a more integrated role for AI in the emergence of human personhood. This paper will examine the emergence of AI in the midst of the violent twentieth century and the significance of this development for a new philosophy of personhood. I will explore two trajectories of AI that support different philosophical positions: transhumanism and the emphasis on human betterment and posthumanism and the quest for deep relationality. Using the work of John Johnston and Katherine Hayles, I will examine the significance of posthumanism as new levels of consciousness and complexity. I will suggest that a new type of person is emerging with posthumanism, one that corresponds to the insights of Teilhard de Chardin and his ideas on ultrahuman life in the Noosphere. Teilhard’s evolutionary paradigm gives direction to posthuman/ultrahuman life in which religion plays a significant role. I will explore his insights on religion and evolution and suggest new ways to develop it for planetary life.

The Emergence of AI Life

In his book The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston argues that in the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctively new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death—breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities—homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, and reproduction. Neither fully alive nor at all inanimate, these liminal machines (thinking machines) exhibited what he calls “machinic life,” mirroring in purposeful action the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether different form of “life,” an “artificial” alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign prerogatives of the organic, biological realm. These forms of machinic life are characterized not by any exact imitation of natural life but by complexity of behavior.

Johnston questions if the new biological-electronic hybridization or machinic life is an extension of “nature” life. He states, “our human capacity as toolmakers (homo faber) has also made us the vehicle and means of realization for new forms of machinic life.”6 He continues by saying that artificial life is actually producing a new kind of entity or being that is at once technical object and simulated collective subject. He writes:

Constituted of elements or agents that operate collectively as an emergent, self-organizing system, this new entity is not simply a prime instance of the theory of emergence, as its strictly scientific context suggests. It is also a form of artificial life that raises the possibility that terms like subject and object, physis and techne, the natural and the artificial, are now obsolete. What counts instead is the mechanism of emergence itself, whatever the provenance of its constitutive agents.7

Johnston identifies “becoming machinic” as the process of cyborgization, a process of increasing levels of hybridity between human and nonhuman life forms. The term cyborg emerged in the 1960s with space travel and the need to maintain human physiological function in nonhuman environments of outer space. The cyborg (or cybernetic organism) is a mixture of biology and machine whereby the machine enables biological function. The emergence of the cyborg signals the fact that nature’s boundaries are not fixed but fluid. Nature is a co-creation among humans and nonhumans, machines and our other partners. The two narratives that Johnston highlights reflect the two trajectories of AI: Shallow AI or radical Transhumanism and Deep AI or Posthumanism. Each posits a different philosophical perspective of the human person. While they are not exactly conflicting positions, since aspects of transhumanism are also found in posthumanism, they differ philosophically.

Transhumanism

The word transhumanism was initially coined by Julian Huxley to describe novelty in evolution; however, philosopher Nick Bostrom seized upon transhumanism as the technological salvation of modernity’s failure to achieve social change: “In the postwar era, many optimistic futurists who had become suspicious of collectively orchestrated social change found a new home for their hopes in scientific and technological progress.”8 He began the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, with David Pearce, as a cultural and philosophical center of human betterment through technology. A corollary group known as Extropy (a philosophy devoted to the transcendence of human limits) was founded by Max More, who immigrated to California from Britain and changed his name from Max O’Connor to Max More. More founded the Extropy Institute to catalyze the transhuman ideal of betterment: “I was going to get bette...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III