DROID RAGE

Posthumanism and Natasha Vita-Moore

This article appeared in New York Times “T” Magazine in October, 2007.

The Bionic Woman version 2.0 just hit the small screen, rendering obsolete the original robo-mate created from the rib of the Six Million Dollar Man.

Some may remember Jaime Sommers, the beta version of the Bionic Woman played by Lindsay Wagner in the late 1970s, with her fembot fighting arm, Sasquatch-sensitive bionic ear and legs that could run faster than a Plymouth Volare. That prototype, with its wah-wah-pedal slow motion and angora cowl necks, now seems a quaint vision of the future, like a robot that looks like a vacuum cleaner with lobster claws.

The new Bionic Woman (played by Michele Ryan) improves on the original conceits. Besides getting a bionic arm, ear and legs, she gets a bionic eye, “Matrix”-style kung fu skills and a dystopic urban setting. Her campiness has been rewired into a platform for exploring existential meta-questions, like: Is it creepy to be entirely rebuilt by your boyfriend (even if he is a brilliant bioethicist/surgeon)?

When overcoming human frailty, robotically or otherwise, how much is too much?

With technologies available to reverse aging and increase sensory abilities, at what point does a lady stop in her pursuit of perfection?

Natasha Vita-More, the first female Transhumanist philosopher, has been pondering such questions for some time. “Transhumanism” (a brave new word) was defined in 1957 by Aldous Huxley’s biologist brother Julian Huxley as “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his ‘human nature.’ ” The Transhumanist movement was formalized by a group of futurist artists, scientists and philosophers in the 1980s. Their mission: To support the use of emergent technologies to make humans smarter, faster and stronger.

Vita-More, currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, England, was described in the Atlantic Monthly as “a superhuman object of desire combining Madonna, Schwarzenegger and Marcel Duchamp.” She has been an artist, fitness guru, author and paralegal but is best known for having conceptualized Primo Posthuman 3+. This human model, in Vita-More’s words, would be free of “corrosion by irritability, envy and depression,” while enjoying such perks as replaceable genes, gender malleability and “turbocharged optimism.”

The mind reels: someday, we might cram the old cerebral hard drive with Mandarin language software, an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and happy childhood memories of growing up with Bill Cosby, Cher and Pegasus!

“Posthumans,” Vita-More wrote in one of her academic papers, “will be almost entirely augmented — human minds in artificial, eternally upgradable bodies.

Some may not be ready for as many “genders as colors in the rainbow,” but a bionic woman is in fact a thing of the present. In 2006, the first bionic arm was attached to a female amputee. The arm, designed by engineers and physicians at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, is controlled by thoughts, received as signals from nerves culled from the stump of the lost arm that were rewired into the recipient’s chest.

“Human nature is at a crossroads,” Vita-More claims. Evolution, she argues, will inevitably go high-tech: “In the coming decades we will experience a radical upgrading. . . . Genetic engineering, biotechnology, nanorobotics (microscopic robots inside the body) will bit by bit replace the fully biological body.”

By these lights, getting a degree in marine biology could be as simple as plugging your neck into your kitchen island for a couple of hours. Upgrade your own memory with a few of Gwyneth Paltrow’s memories, circa 1998. Posthumanity could be a real hoot.

I ask Vita-More how she might upgrade Jaime Sommers into a Post-Bionic Woman (PBW), and she replies: “The crucial elements would be flexibility and adaptability. Extreme life extension and self-healing.”

Jaime Sommers 2.0 may have a zoom-lens eye, but a PBW, according to Vita-More, would have an “infrared/ultraviolet-sensitive, high-acuity, single-photon-detecting and acceleration-resistant eyeball.” Her bionic ear would enable her to receive and send audio messages, reduce extraneous noise and pick out specific voices in a crowd. A PBW could also use her “high-bandwidth awareness” for critical thinking toward a consciousness, Vita-More says, “that has evolved past the human foibles that keep humans in an emotional state of confused reasoning.”

Not to say she’s unfeeling.

“The PBW’s nature would not be based on her ability to do battle, but to think, reason, understand and be compassionate. Her most important ‘superpowers’ would elaborate on the attributes of being a ‘woman’: healing, love, knowledge and forgiving.”

Futurism, after all, is nothing if not optimistic. Even the fearful term “brave new world,” Vita-More points out, came from Shakespeare’s “Tempest”:

“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Victor,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2022