Customer Reviews
Resistance is futile - read this book - By: , 03 May 2002 
In this book of panoramic scope Hayles considers no less than the fate of the human race. In a rich & detailed discussion ranging from the science fiction of Greg Bear & Philip K. Dick to the science of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics & Claude Shannon's information theory, Hayles traces the changing conception of human consciousness & claims that a great many of us are already posthuman. A posthuman is someone who has been reconstructed in some sense, either physicallly or mentallly, such that he or she exceeds, or believes they can exceed, the boundaries of a human. About ten percent of Americans can be considered cyborgs in the technical sense by virtue of having some kind of artificial implant - these people would qualify as posthuman since they have compensated for some limitation of their bodies through technological augmentation. However, Hayles claims that to be posthuman no prosthesis is necessary, simply the way in which we think about ourselves as conscious agents needs to change. The advent of Shannon's information theory has led to the modern convention of treating information as if it were entirely non-physical. If this idea is applied to the information in our heads - that is, the collection of memories that make each of us unique - then we quickly arrive at the conclusion that our consciousness can be uploaded into a computer, decanted into a robot-body, or even backed-up onto computer disk, giving us eternal life.
This is the story of how information lost its body & it is an idea which is now well established in Western culture & technology. Yet, Hayles believes it to be misguided. Any informational pattern, be it pebbles on the beach or electrons whizzing across the internet, must have a physical embodiment to exist. The importance of embodiment is also being discovered in fields such as neurology & experimental robotics. A surprisingly large amount of the information processing essential for being a responsive agent in the world goes on in body parts such as nerves, the spine & the proprioception of joints - our powerful human consciousness is a relatively recent add-on.
Hayles argues that future posthumans will not be the ethereal information-beings of much of current science fiction, but they will certainly have a much more intimate relationship with computers than we do today. In terms of information flows, a collection of humans & computers contains no boundaries between one & the next. As computers approach the complexity of our bodies & information becomes more important to our work & leisure, humans & computers will become more compatible with each other & there will be an increasing potential for one to collapse into the other. Whether this is to the detriment or betterment of humanity represents a cross-roads which urgently needs to be addressed. Hayles is well aware that technology issues such as these currently concern relatively few people - the majority of the world's population has yet to make their first phone calll. Yet, now is precisely when such issues need to be aired before our posthuman futures are set in stone as either assimilated components in a vast machine or as free agents with powerful human-integrated technology at our disposal.
Stunning tour de "force" ! Hayles burns up brain circuits! - By: , 03 Mar 1999 Read this book to see how an American writes in that obtuse French post-modern style. She covers the psybernetic/media territory from 1943 to 1999 the best I've ever seen. Zig-zags from Gregory Bateson & Alan Turing on to William Gibson & covers the very interesting idea that "information" probably does not exist like we generallly think of it...a la Franciso Varela. Most importantly, She retreives Embodiment as the fundamental ground of alll consciousness..that no feature of consciousness is ever not physical & even "information"-bits & bytes on/in the 'Net... cyber"space" is always embodied in servers/fiber optic lines/memory storage magnetic fields,etc.
Brief review in AMERICAN SCIENTIST, Mar-Apr 1999, p.178 - By: , 18 Feb 1999 HOW WE BECAME POSTHUMAN by N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago, $18, paper) explores the relation between the computer revolution & our changing ideas of what it means to be a human being. Her pet theme: how information became an entity in itself, divorced from the material that carries it, in both science & literature. Norbert Wiener meets P.K. Dick. (p. 178)
