Law and Culture in the Age of Technology

Daniela Carpi

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110788204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire Histoire et théorie

Scientific experiments and medical improvements in recent years have augmented our bodies, made them manipulable; our personal data have been downloaded, stored, sold, analyzed; and the pandemic has given new meaning to the idea of 'virtual presence'. Such phenomena are often thought to belong to the era of the 'posthuman', an era that both promises and threatens to redefine the notion of the human: what does it mean to be human? Can technological advances impact the way we define ourselves as a species? What will the future of humankind look like? These questions have gained urgency in recent years, and continue to preoccupy cultural and legal practitioners alike. How can the law respond and adapt to a world shaped by technology and AI? How can it ensure that technological developments remain inclusive, while simultaneously enforcing ethical limits to its reach?

The volume explores how fictional texts, whether on the page or on screen, negotiate the legal dilemmas posed by the increasing infiltration of technology into modern life.

Chapter 1 Transcendence: Death or Rebirth of Metaphysics?

1 Introduction to the movie

Produced in 2014, Transcendence is the first feature film by the director Wally Pfister with Johnny Depp as Will, Rebecca Hall as Evelyn, Morgan Freeman as one of the scientists, Paul Bettany as Max, Will’s closest friend, just to name five of a starstudded cast. It is considered a science-fiction thriller, but it is also a dark movie. The plot deals with a very innovative technology program capable of interacting creatively with human scientists, but not yet efficient enough to have its own decisionmaking power. The huge machine elaborates all the inputs it receives, to the point of acquiring the consciousness of a human being and of re-creating their physical body.

The movie’s theoretical assumption, with the implicit suspension of disbelief, is the idea that conscience and memory can be copied inside the electronic system, thus creating a real living human being. This marks a difference from the seminal movie on this topic, derived from Philip K. Dick’s very innovative novel Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, a cult movie that started the long-standing debate on what is human and what is a cyborg. In the script the cyborg is so perfect, a real “work in skin”, that it cannot be distinguished from a human being except that it cannot feel emotions. Emotion is the final step towards becoming a whole human being, but in Ridley Scott’s movie it is not yet achieved. What started with Blade Runner is brought to a climax in Transcendence, because in Pfister’s movie the “human being” comes out of the machine perfectly reproduced, in its sentient essence. The sophisticated viewer can detect in the film many philosophical trends that paved the way for our contemporary perspectives. In addition, it is worth underscoring that some seminal concepts of the twentieth century, such as Eliot’s theory of tradition, are still extending their influence even in our technological age. Indeed, the innovative theories expressed in our epoch are rooted far back in time and represent the evolution of what previous literature had already anticipated.

Dr. Will Caster is a scientist who, with the help of his wife Evelyn, researches the nature of sentience, including artificial intelligence. He and his team are working to create a sentient computer that, he hopes, will create a technological singularity, or, what he calls “Transcendence”. The term itself is a warning: although from the very beginning it may appear that what is dealt with is a technological matter ostensibly trying to eliminate the metaphysical perspective, in reality transcendence is the final goal connecting the movie’s different phases.

Following one of Will’s presentations, an anti-technology terrorist group called “Revolutionary Independence from Technology” (R.I.F.T. [significantly the acronym reads “split”]) shoots Will with a polonium-laced bullet and carries out a series of synchronised attacks on A.I. laboratories across the country. From the very start the movie is set within a neo-Luddist perspective. The old Luddism of the beginning of the nineteenth century cannot be compared to our struggle against technology (as Steven Jones argues in his Against Technology)¹, because the former was an economic fight that brought the workers to defend their jobs against the invasion of machines that threatened their livelihood, while the latter is a warning against the excesses of scientific progress that risks superseding the human individual themselves. The struggle being fought is still against the threat of machines. According to Jones, the new Luddites are only “deluded technofobes”.

The “machine question” of Victorian times would eventually give rise to an even broader dilemma for twentieth-century culture: the question of what constitutes “appropriate technology” and the fear that humans will ultimately be replaced by robots (or cyborgs).²

The RIFT followers who attack the laboratory actually want to stop progress and hinder the advancement of artificial intelligence. The opposition of literature to the excesses of science is a trend found across the centuries. However, what is new in these latest attacks is that, whereas in previous times it was still man who was in control and won the challenge, in our post-anthropocentric age it is the machine that wins and marginalises human beings. The final elimination of mankind is blocked at the very last moment and only because it is the machine that recedes from its position, showing a will of its own. I speak of a machine, because I am arguing that Will (who apparently has come back in full flesh and blood) is not his old self, but a parallel being with his own outward looks and a malicious mind. His attempt had been to satisfy his wife’s aspiration to defeat sickness and sufferance, but now it has morphed into a determination to dominate the world through the control of the internet. In his hands technology has become a political power tool.

Having been seriously wounded, Will is given no more than a month to live. In desperation, Evelyn comes up with the plan to upload Will’s consciousness into the quantum computer that the project has developed. Max Waters, his best friend and fellow researcher, questions the wisdom of this choice, arguing that the “uploaded” Will would be only an imitation of the real person. The debate on what is real and what is virtual stems from these doubts, turning out to be the focal point in the movie. Jean-François Lyotard, already in 1991, anticipated the difficulty of distinguishing between the real and the virtual:

Development is the ideology of the present time, it realises the essential of metaphysics, which was a thinking pertaining to forces much more than to the subject. […] The system results from a process of development where it is not mankind which is the issue, but differentiation.³

In this sense development can mean entropy or complexification. Contemporary posthumanism can no longer rely on clear distinctions, such as the real and the virtual, the inside and the outside. The beings resulting from this research have been subjected to a process of complexification: they are real and virtual, material and transcendent at the same time, thus becoming a discourse about general physics, which again brings us back to metaphysics. The question Lyotard asks is: “What else remains as politics except resistance to this inhuman?”⁴

The movies and novels I have chosen to examine in this volume represent a “literature of resistance” to the inhuman, the survival of the human against the inhuman. “It is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts to venture to bear witness to it.”⁵ Paradoxically enough, even though the texts under consideration describe the appearance of new technological beings that threaten the existence of traditional human beings, we can still speak of literature of resistance. In some way these texts theorise about the survival of the human side by side with the inhuman. The human is no longer at the centre of creation (posthuman perspective) but must accept the inhuman as a new possibility of existence, as a new other.

Will’s consciousness survives his body’s death in this technological form and requests to be connected to the Internet to grow in capability and knowledge. Now the body becomes the hardware of the intricate technical device that is human thought. Technique is inscription. This idea of inscription has “memory effects”⁶: it produces certain behaviours, and machines can in fact accomplish mental operations, such as the acquisition of data that can become not only usable, but also exploitable. As a double, Will is the result of the assimilation of facts, such as personal memories and visions. He is the reproduction of his traditional way of behaving; so, he is the inscription of his own acts of memorisation, as if Will’s conscience had been scanned and reproduced. Conscience can be defined as the synthesis of the past connected to the capacity to reactualise it in the present. Will’s double follows this pattern.

These technology studies prove that we ourselves are techné: for instance, we are the product of genetic codes and speech acts through bits, codes, remembrance and reproduction. What happens in the movie can be seen as a metaphor for our existence on earth. We have been technologoi all along: the difference is that now we are made aware of it. In order to develop as a bio-cultural species, we have to de-humanise ourselves: the movie Transcendence takes us through the process. First it was the human brain that created this huge technical device, the thinking machine in the movie; then it is the thinking machine that recreates Will’s body, which becomes a sort of meta-function of his own brain. The human body is transformed into hardware for the machine. Man himself is nothing but sophisticated software. In Mind Children⁷ Hans Moravec argued that human intelligence is essentially an informational pattern and spoke about the possibility of downloading human consciousness into a computer. Thirty years later Transcendence fictionalises this scientific idea, showing how the machine has become the repository of human consciousness. This problematises the erasure of embodiment: can the mind be moved around, independently of the body that hosts it? Can the body become a mere container that can be changed? The boundaries between man and machine are here renegotiated and the characteristics of the liberal subject must be reassessed: is the new Will a liberal subject? Isn’t he biased by his technological reproduction?

We can also speak of body enhancement, or even better, of mind enhancement. The technological result of the procedure on Will is the surfacing of the immense possibilities that humankind has had ever since their appearance on earth. The Neanderthal man had very developed senses that helped him survive in hostile surroundings; he had physical capacities that were crippled by progress and stifled by external comforts. Technology brings back the possibility for human beings to recover their lost capacities through the agency of machines. So, on one hand we can say that human beings have lost their central position in the universe, but on the other hand we may argue that they have created stronger alter egos that make up for what they cannot do any more.

In his virtual form and with Evelyn’s help, Will uses his newly found vast capabilities to build a technological utopia in a remote desert town called Brightwood, where he spearheads the development of ground-breaking technologies in medicine, energy, biology, and nanotechnology. However, Evelyn grows fearful of Will’s motives when he displays the ability to connect with and control remotely people’s minds after they have been subjected to his nano-particles. As it often happens, what started as a positive move that could help heal the liminal cases of man’s sickness, has evolved, in an act of hubris, into overreaching aspirations of control and domination. It is once more the enactment of Faustus’ sin. The Christological perspective of a generous action towards mankind cannot exist in a fallen universe, where antagonistic powers are in conflict.

In fact, the FBI becomes suspicious of Will’s experiments and plans to stop the sentient entity from spreading. As Will has already extended his influence to all the networked computer technology in the world, the FBI develops a computer virus with the purpose of deleting Will’s source code, thus destroying him. The Internet appears to be a suspicious entity, a terrible tool of world invasion. Even though in very different terms, we hear echoes of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), where the aliens invading the earth are very diminished in size, but seem huge because of the mechanical machines they drive. They are defeated by invisible, minuscule beings, the microrganisms that pervade our atmosphere. In the same way, the invisible bits that make up the Internet risk defeating the whole of humanity.

Evelyn plans to upload the virus by infecting herself with it and then having Will upload her mind. A side effect of the virus would be the destruction of technological civilisation and of this utopian world: Brightwood (T. S. Eliot’s sacred wood inevitably comes to mind) is the technological revision of the paradise of religion, an immanent transcendence of the here and now, where man can live forever, safe from any form of sickness. As in Eliot, the wood implies the cultural subconscious of past beliefs and civilisations brightened by their electronic revision and re-creation. What appears to be so new and unprecedented throughout the text is obviously the derivation of what came before: as mentioned earlier, Dr. Faustus lurks in the background with his supreme challenging tensions, but there are also the many utopian and dystopian texts that spoke of hubristic attempts at godlike creation. The wood (of tradition) is bright because new unforeseen possibilities open up for man and finally death would be defeated. “Le magnifiche sorti e progressive” (Giacomo Leopardi’s famous poem, “La ginestra”: “The magnificent and progressive forces of fate”, one of the theories of the Enlightenment) of mankind seem to have been validated.

However, this new technology would also disable the nano-particles that have spread in the water through the wind and have already started to eradicate pollution, disease, and human mortality. The alternative is: must sickness be defeated at the cost of freedom and independence or shall freedom of choice be kept at the cost of physical safety? The new army derived from Will’s implants and morphed into human beings cannot be considered as formed by “liberal subjects” because their capability of free choice is impaired. The “chips” implanted into human beings transform them into cyborgs deprived of free will.

When Evelyn goes back to the research centre, she is stunned to see Will in a newly created organic body identical to his old one: the computer has managed to restore to Will his body in a sort of technological cloning. Will welcomes her but is instantly aware that she is carrying the virus and intends to destroy him. He does agree to upload he...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction What Comes After Postmodernism?
• Chapter 1 Transcendence: Death or Rebirth of Metaphysics?
• Chapter 2 The Technological “Monstrum”: Her by Spike Jonze
• Chapter 3 Dan Brown’s Origin: Can God Survive Technology?
• Chapter 4 The Circle: Technological Dictatorship
• Chapter 5 Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and People Like You: Can a Machine Be “Killed”?
• Chapter 6 Ex Machina: Technological Re-reading of Myth
• Chapter 7 Blade Runner 2049: The Christological Perspective of Technology
• Conclusion: The Promethean Dialectic of Technology
• Person Index