Cyborgs & Posthuman Living

HYPER-REALITY, while over-the-top and sort of Black-Mirrorish in nature, is honestly not that different from how we live today. At the end of the short, the protagonist’s hand is cut open, causing some sort of data leak which drives them to reset their identity. In Andy Clark’s “Natural Born Cyborgs,” he describes the experience of losing his laptop as “brain damage”-- something that resonates with me after just having my phone stolen. These experiences are parallel in that one who is dependent on technology has more to lose than one might expect. 

In the clip we watched from Her, we see the protagonist begin his relationship with an AI chatbot. This is also not distant from the technology available to us now; even in 2003, Clark noted that the “fortress” of our human minds “has been built to be breached; it is a structure whose virtue lies in part in its capacity to delicately gear its activities in order to collaborate with external, nonbiological sources of order to better solve the problems of survival and reproduction” (5). Just like someone who might download Tinder or Hinge on their smartphone to find a mate, our lonely hero in Her begins to find that missing connection through a computer program.

Clark’s writing spoke to me more than Hayle’s because it was rooted more in personal experience than philosophical theory. Clark’s writing was especially interesting because I was born in 2003 when it was published. It was fascinating to me that I was born into a world that was already so “plugged-in”.

I’ve never seen the movie Her, but I really want to watch it after seeing the clip for this assignment. Hearing Samantha speak was so eerily close to what AI chatbots are already capable of, and as these chatbots are trained more and more on human speech, they’ll only get closer. So far, I haven’t seen a big rising of AI chatbots that are intended to be romantic partners, but I know that they exist, and I feel like I could see them growing in popularity in the near future.