On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human
His entire body and identity have become the property of a collective human-machine network.
NASA / Flickr
HÉLÈNE MIALET | Wired Magazine
No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. His sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer.
Since being afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease) almost 50 years ago, his muscles have stopped working, though his mind and senses remain unaffected.
He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind.
Hawking is more “incorporated” than any other scientist, let alone human being. He is delegated across numerous other bodies: technicians, students, assistants, and of course, machines.
It is in some ways about a race not against, but with machines. It is in more ways the ultimate realization of Doug Engelbart’s early vision of augmenting human intellect through technology. But it is mostly about living our lives – and creating the heroes in them – through machines.
We Are All More Machines
Hawking isn’t just issuing remote commands and expressed desires, his entire body and even his entire identity have become the property of a collective human-machine network. He is what I call a distributed centered-subject: a brain in a vat, living through the world outside the vat.
Hawking’s persona, his disability, and his embodied network thus becomes a window on our machines, the nature of work, and even our representation of scientific heroes.
In fact, it’s precisely because of his disability that we get to see how all scientists work … and how the entire world will work one day.