On Collective Cyborg
Author: George Pór Issue: 2024-03-20
On Collective Cyborg
by George Pór
I’ve just listened to an inspiring podcast of Ross Dawson, The potential of Humans plus AI. His guests included one of my fave technosophers, Jerry Michalski. In a forum hosted by Ross, I wrote what follows.
That was a great podcast! I loved the questions that you asked. Besides the quality of the guests’ thinking, what tells an amazing podcast apart from a mediocre one is the space from which the questions come. (After sitting through some podcasts where i was submitted to clueless hosts, I became more selective about which invitation to accept.)
I particularly resonated with Jerry Michalski’s take on your cyborg question. He said,
“the other piece of being a better cyborg is not about being a lonely cyborg. But what does it mean to be in a collective of cyborgs? What does it mean to be in a cyborg space? What does it mean to co-inhabit cyborg intelligence with other people and other intelligences that are just going to get faster and better at this thing?”
I guess the “collective cyborg” is what I referred to as “superorganism.” There are more and more future-responsive techno-philosophers who are interpreting current trends along those lines.
But is that enough? What if we transposed Marx’s famous quote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,” to our present-day context?
Extrapolating our interpretation of the current “human x AI” trend to the collective level, isn’t the point to devise ways to test the “superorganism” hypothesis with some kind of action-oriented research? I believe it is and I welcome Expressions of Interest from those colleagues who want to help in carry it forward.
P.S. Collective sense makers, who are also “big picture” thinkers and action-oriented visionaries, do need to apply. Extra good points for having AI savvy and metamodern sensibility. Address it to george.por@gmail.com and include [EoS] with your name on the subject line.
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