Introducing Techno-Adam and Techno-Eve (Formerly Known as Cyborgs)

The Future and the White Pill. Part Twenty-Two.

Techno-Adam? Who’s that? And why would you care?

Who’s that? Take a look in the mirror. You’re looking at either Techno-Eve or Techno-Adam. I looked in the mirror earlier today and also saw Techno-Adam.

We (that is, we the people, the live human beings, not we the starfish or we the zombies) are all Techno-Adam, part animal and part tool, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the tool part is growing much faster than the animal part.

Am I talking about AI? Of course I am. Who isn’t, these days? Yes, I am saying that AI is a tool, just as the stone axe, the pliers, and the pickaxe are tools. Very few, if any, non-human animals have and use tools that are not body parts they have grown. Some apes use straw to dig ants out of ant-holes. A tool? Maybe, but not as impressive as, say, the steam locomotive or the robotaxi.

The important thing about Techno-Eve is that she (OK, she can have babies too) can not only invent tools and use them, that she herself is part tool. She might, have, say, dental crowns or titanium hip joints. Very likely she uses eyeglasses, which are not part of her body, nor are contact lenses, but close. Most importantly, she probably has some kind of smartphone and spends many of her waking hours doomscrolling and communicating with other humans and with non-human entities such as AI’s and social media bots.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and human beings gotta invent stuff and make use of things human beings have invented. It’s part of nature, human nature, Mother nature.

So what? That’s the second question I asked earlier. Why would you care?

We must care because it is much too dangerous to ignore this fundamental fact of human nature.

And this is a good time to introduce my old imaginary mentor, the Toronto-based media guru Marshall McLuhan, who wrote a great deal about something he called the extensions of man.

Extensions of man? What’s that? You want a link. Okay. Here’s a link. Did you click it? If and when you click it you will have seen an excellent example of an extension of man. The link, the screen on which you are reading the media, the device on which the screen is located, and the eyeglasses or contact lenses you are wearing: they are all extensions of man.

But, you might ask, do we really need all of these extensions of man? Can’t we go back to when life was simpler? No doomscrolling? No Facebook? No Amazon? No Starbucks?

How far back do you want to go? No fire? Eat your berries cold, if you can find berries? Eat bugs? Where have we heard that recommendation lately? No stone axes, no blades with which humans can chop each other? Just rocks to throw and pound each other? That far back? Or maybe the Middle Ages? The 1950’s?

Or, as I am claiming now, in the sacred name of Marshall McLuhan, it’s too late. No way to put AI back in Pandora’s Box. Nor Amazon, nor drones, nor constellations of satellites, nor electric cars, nor those bots trolling your posts on social media.

It’s too late. We must make the best of it.

As that French intellectual who was killed in a car collision with a tree back in 1960, put it, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.“

That French guy’s name was Albert Camus, but who was that Sisyphus guy?

Okay, here’s another link, but I’m going to tell you here and now: Sisyphus was a character in an ancient Greek legend who was punished for arrogance by being forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill every day, at the end of which, it would roll down the hill, and the next morning he’d have to start all over again.

You and I, being human, are not only Techno-Adam of Techno-Eve, we are Sisyphus too. Every day we roll the boulder up… we go to work, or deal with the tax entities; we doomscroll looking for some good news, which is far exceeded by the bad news, and we worry whether we are eating too much sodium or seed oils. We finally get to sleep, with or without the help of pharmaceuticals, and start rolling the boulder up the hill again the next day.

Yet, as I believe, along with the late Albert Camus, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Besides inventing things, humans want to be happy. As Cyndi Lauper once sang in 1979, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” That’s something that we humans have in common with the other animals. Lions want to sink their teeth into a nice fat zebra, and zebras want to run with the rest of the herd in the middle, where there are fewer lion attacks.

But what about the cyborgs? Why do I even mention cyborgs? Cyborg is an old-fashioned name for what I am calling Techno-Eve and Techno-Adam: a hybrid of human and machine. Yes, we are all cyborgs. For you cultural history buffs, the word cyborg was first published in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in an article called Cyborgs and Space. In the introduction, they said,

Artifact-organism systems which would
extend man’s unconscious, self-regulatory controls are one possibility.

So, for those of you who have actually read this Substack post to the end, bear in mind that the next link you click will enable you to extend your unconscious, self-regulatory controls.

And don’t forget to have fun.