From homo sapiens to man-machine

This article is published in issue 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 26, 2022

“Between a man, a cyborg and a robot?” Surely it would not be the human to come out the winner. Nor the robot, still too far from the sphere of emotions to be unbeatable. On cyborgs, on the other hand, many steps are being made: the fusion between machine and man has reached incredible levels ». Daniela Cerqui is an anthropologist who teaches Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne and for years has been involved in looking for what can be human among artificial intelligences, chips and hi-tech prostheses.

In the sense that man, as he naturally is, is becoming obsolete?
“Undoubtedly it is changing and will change again. The homo sapiens of today is no longer that of yesterday and it is not even said that it will not disappear: the crazy thing is that if this were to happen, we would be the only extinct species to have planned our extinction, unlike the others. have suffered. We are changing by merging with the machines, we are becoming different subjects. Think of Kevin Warwick, the English engineer who became the first cyborg in history: he really belongs to a new species, which has endowed itself with abilities that humans normally don’t have. He was the first to have an electronic chip under his skin for non-therapeutic reasons: the device allowed him an easy entry to his laboratory thanks to a computer system that registered his presence through the chip implanted in his arm. Then he had another chip placed in the median nerve and connected his peripheral nervous system with a computer: the system received the signals sent by Warwick’s brain, thus allowing him to control his technological environment with his thoughts, for example turning the computer on or off. light. And so for Warwick, as for many transhumanists, the human body is just an obstacle that slows down the communication between the brain and the environment ».

So only reason and technology, but where do the emotions go?
“If it were up to me, it would not be possible to conceive the individual without a head and a body, with all the emotions attached to it, but I see that today it is not the focus of much research. It is as if we only focus on functional skills. I am thinking of Zora, a super robot used as a health and education assistant, who has already “worked” in various homes for the elderly in Switzerland. Years ago, the advertisement on the website that sold it (modified in the meantime) listed the reasons why Zora was regarded as a perfect solution, including being “kind” and “patient”, which are by definition the characteristics one might expect from humans. The use of these terms to qualify a robot cannot leave indifferent, especially in a historical moment in which health workers denounce working conditions that do not allow them to stay long with their patients and only have time for the acts. doctors, without being able to chat a little longer. So a future is drawn in which human beings and robots become interchangeable and it is paradoxical that the technical part is attributed to the human while the social part is attributed to the robot “.

So could technology be the solution to all problems?
«A hypothesis that I call“ magical thinking ”, as if with hi-tech everything could be solved. In reality I don’t think so: technology can solve problems only if it is properly integrated into a social solution. A simple example is that of electronic voting: the problem, when people do not go to vote, is a political one, that is, that non-vote is telling me something. But if you give everyone the opportunity to easily vote with a click through the Internet, giving a technological answer to facilitate everything, well, that is magical thinking precisely, because it is an apparent solution, but this is not really how the solution is resolved. political disaffection. Like when during the lockdown it was thought that it was enough to give a computer to those children who did not have it at home: but if a family does not have a computer today, the problems are quite different, they are economic and cultural, it is not a technological obstacle. In short, it depends on how we want to build our future ».