Tag: cybernetic bodies

Cybernetic Bodies Compared in Various Works

Before comparing and contrasting cybernetics and cyborgs amongst different pieces of literature or film, both terms must be defined.   “. . . cybernetics signaled that three powerful factors – information, control, and communication – were now operating jointly to bring about an unprecedented synthesis of the organic and the mechanical (Hayles, 18). Cybernetics combines control theory and the nascent theory of information to show how humanity communicates with the machines that will inevitably replace us one day. (Hayles, 18). A cyborg is defined by Hayles  as machines that have human consciousness, are brought into conjunction from technology, consist of informational pathways that connect the body to its prosthetic extensions, and essentially could be a human being. It could also be defined as a humanoid being that is part technology, part organic body (Hayles 9). The movie Stepford Wives, the play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), and the television show Black Mirror will be compared to assess their representation of cybernetic bodies.

Stepford Wives is a movie that takes place in Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna, the main character, and her family moved there from New York City. The town seems perfect at first, but  Joanna notices the women act differently over time. She later finds out that the gentlemen’s club has been making android duplicates of their wives to replace their wives with. In this movie, the cybernetic bodies are versions of their wives. They looked to remove imperfections that their wives possessed and make their only purpose in this world cooking, cleaning, sex, and taking care of the children. “. . . this ideal body, is not attainable by a human. . . These models individually can never embody the ideal since an ideal, by definition, can never be found in this world” (Davis 4). The husbands have created a perfect body, but had to remove a lot of human characteristics to do so. This seems eerily similar to sex slaves. Gender roles in this movie are prevalent as the husbands rule over the wives who only do stereotyped female housework. Regarding labor roles, the men work and make the money while their android wives stay at home and take care of the house. What is saddening is this is how females used to be treated in real life, and continue to experience some version of this treatment.

Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R) is a play about a world where all human labor is replaced with androids. The robots eventually revolt and kill all the humans except one. They have two versions of robots; a male and a female version. The males are made to do stereotypical males jobs, while the females are created to do stereotypical female jobs.  Domin, the boss of the plant, states that the robots they create will produce so much food and other essential materials that things will no longer have value (Čapek 26). Everyone will be able to take what they need and there would be no poverty. The humans benefit from the robot’s work, which in my opinion is considered slavery. Gender roles play a big part in this play as both human and android females are treated as less than their male counterparts. Helena and Nana are the only human females that are on the island where the robots are created. Nana is ignored and treated poorly. Helena is constantly interrupted by the male characters and is forced into marriage. Not only do the leaders of the company enslave robots, they enforce gender inequalities.

In Black Mirror, a woman loses her husband in a car accident. After wallowing in her sorrow for some time, her friend suggests she gets a cyborg version of her husband. She wants the robot to be exactly like her husband, and even gets emotional when the cyborg does not do something her husband used to do. Her version of a cybernetic body included all the imperfections her husband had as well as the good qualities he had. “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3). Her husband and the robot version essentially are the same in the fact that the cyborg was to fill the void in her life that her husband once filled. This supports the above claim that cyborgs should be treated like humans because they are intended to do the same thing a human would do. Although this episode did not deal with gender roles or labor roles, we can learn a lot about a view  that is not typically taken; that robots and humans are the equal.

Something interesting to think about is the difference between the androids created by the men in Stepford Wives and R.U.R., and the android created by the woman in Black Mirror. In Stepford Wives, the men desired to remove imperfections their wives have and make them cater to their ever need. The robots created in R.U.R. are made to do the work humans typically would do. A “condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (Haraway 292) is found in both these works. In Black Mirror, the android was created to be exactly like the human version of the woman’s dead husband. She even got mad at the android for not having some of the imperfections her husband had. It seems as if men create androids for their own personal benefits while women create androids to be like a human companion.

The question of, “Do we want robots as slaves or as humans?”, arises in all three of these works too. In Stepford Wives and R.U.R., the answer to this question is as slaves. The husbands created their cyborg wives to do exactly what they wanted them to do. In R.U.R., the humans created cyborgs to replace human laborers; essentially slavery. However, the answer for Black Mirror is as humans because the woman wanted to have her partner back exactly how he was when he was alive. Just like how men and women seemed to create robots differently, they also want to use them for different things. The men seem to want to use robots to benefit themselves. Women seem to want them to be just like a human.

 

Works Cited

“Be Right Back.” Directed by Owen Harris, written by Charlie Booker. Black Mirror, season 2, episode 1, Netflix, 11 Feb. 2013.  

Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossums universal robots). Wildside Press, 2012.

Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd Ed. Routledge, 2006.

Haraway, Donna. “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism late twentieth century.” Routledge, pp. 291-316.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman.” 1999,    doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226321394.001.0001.

Stepford Wives. Produced by Edgar Scherick, directed by Bryan Forbes,      Palomar Pictures, 1975.

Cybernetic Bodies from Different Perspectives

In this class, we have reviewed multiple different perspectives on humanoid robots. In each of these, the robots, or androids, are portrayed differently. They exist for different reasons and each behave in different ways. What all of these robots have in common however, is that they all are not what they initially seem to be. In this essay, the cybernetic bodies from Stepford Wives, R.U.R., and Black Mirror will be compared.

Stepford Wives is set in the 1970’s in a suburban neighborhood. When Joanna Eberhart and her family move to the area, Joanna immediately realizes that there is something strange going on with the women in the town. All they seem to care about is doing housework. She realizes that the men behave strangely as well. They are all part of an association that meets every night. Joanna eventually discovers that the men have replaced all the women in Stepford with robot replicas. The men’s motive behind this is they want their women to be perfect housewives. They want them to be well-behaved, cook, clean, and take care of the children. The men don’t make exact physical replicas of the women, they enhance their features to make them more attractive. They want to have women that praise and worship them and always tell them that they look good. The cybernetic bodies in Stepford Wives are physical robot copies of the women they resemble, but they lose all of what they previously were. They hardly have emotions and all they care about is housework. This idea of having robots represented as women is interesting because as Hayles states, “feminist theorists have pointed out that it has historically been constructed as a white European male”. We’re used to seeing humanoid robots as white males so it’s a new concept to see them portrayed as women. 

R.U.R. is set in a dystopian future Europe where there exists a factory on an island dedicated to creating robot laborers. The only humans on the island are the men who run the factory. Helena, a female human, comes to the factory to attempt to liberate the robots. She feels that they are being oppressed by not being given a soul. One of the engineers eventually gives souls to a few robots which leads to their uprising against the humans. The only difference that could exist from one robot to another is sex. Female robots fulfill traditionally female roles such as secretaries while all the males are physical laborers. The initial motive behind creating these robots was so that humans would never need to worry about work again. The robots would handle all the labor while humans could relax and discuss philosophy. The robots in R.U.R. were never real people. The only resemblance they bear to humans is their physical appearance and their version of a soul. They are able to feel some sort of empathy, as shown in the ending of the play when two robots feel empathy towards one another when they’re each threatened with death, but they are not human at all.

The episode “Be Right Back” of Black Mirror is about Martha, a woman who loses her boyfriend Ash to a car accident. Devastated by her loss, she recreates his intelligence in a robot body. Based off of only his social media accounts and everything he had stored in his phone, a version of him is uploaded into a robot. This relates to Hayles’ observation that “the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”. Ash’s intelligence in seamlessly uploaded into an exact physical robot copy of himself. At first Martha is shocked and pleased with him, but she begins to realize that he isn’t the man she had once known. While parts of him still remain, such as his appearance and some of his personality, he has no depth or history at all. Martha tries to dispose of him, but eventually locks him in her attic. Martha’s motive behind creating this robot is so that she could have Ash with her, even after he was dead. When she realizes that the robot version of her late boyfriend is nothing like the real him, she is devastated. 

In each of these examples, robots are created to benefit humans in some way. In Stepford Wives, they are meant to please and praise the man that created them. In R.U.R., they are meant to replace all human labor so that mankind can reach their philosophical potential. In “Be Right Back”, the robot is meant to ease the suffering of grieving Martha. However, in each of these examples the robots do not completely fulfill their desired intention. The female robots in Stepford Wives start to malfunction, for example, Bobbie begins to repeat the same phrases and break plates. Once the robots in R.U.R. are given souls, they start a revolution and kill all humans except for one. In “Be Right Back”, the robot version of Ash does not have the depth and history that Martha remembers from the real Ash and she is distraught.

The robots in Stepford Wives, R.U.R., and “Be Right Back” all exist to better human existence. Initially, they all fulfill their potential but as the stories progress, they each begin to deviate from the original intention. The either begin to malfunction, start an uprising, or reveal that they are not what they once appeared to be. In all cases, they cost more than they were worth.

Works Cited:

  1. Hayles, Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman.” dropbox, https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u9yaj6wtcgm1d7/Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf?dl=0. Accessed 1 November 2017.
  2. Capek, Karel. R.U.R. 1921.
  3. Stepford Wives. Bryan Forbes. 1975. Film
  4. Be Right Back. Owen Harris. 2013. Television Episode

 

Cybernetic comparison

When envisioning the future, Society tends to look at the development of technology and how its influence will affect the human population over time. This vision is seen when describing any future world with androids and each individual creates specific similarity or differences in their viewpoint. By examining the works R.U.R, Stepford wives, and Black Mirror (season 2 episode 1) we can compare and contrast the androids.

R.U.R describes a world in constant war but mainly focuses on the main setting of the android factory. The main character Helena comes to give the robots human rights but is shocked to discover that they have no soul. The robots are used for various labor and tasks and are only given a gender to satisfy specific roles. The “female” robots have jobs that would be typical of the time period; The “male” robots take dominant roles. The robots are beginning to gain perceived differences and hierarchy before they even know what is happening. Haraway elaborates on how the differences in gender roles affect how one is treated and viewed and society (Haraway, 2009).

In Stepford Wives, the husbands replace their wives with their ideal versions of the women. The wives become complacent and only strive for their husband’s happiness. Not only is the personality adjusted but the woman’s looks as well. The android woman has larger breasts and tiny waists to become the man’s perfect woman. Just like in R.U.R., the society creates a specific hierarchy as described by Haraway, the woman are treated as second-class citizens with no rights (Haraway, 2009)

Thirdly in Black Mirror the wife essentially replaces her dead husband (Ash) with a cybernetic copy of him. He is unable to become the real person she desires him to imitate (Black Mirror, Season 2 ep. 1). The cybernetic enhancements of the android allow for it to heal and pick up reactions of its host and how to interpret them. Davis describes how the use of technology can be used to help those with disabilities or even improve one’s own quality of life (Davis, 2010). The “Ash” is an improvement upon certain biological features that inhibit as human beings such as healing or recognizing facial patterns correlating to specific behaviors.

A cybernetic organism is the integration of machine and organic life. Upon investigation, each of the literary and film pieces mentioned above the desire for a cyborg is greatly increasing. When looking at the effect a cyborg can have on a population it can be quite diverse such as the woman in Stepford Wives and Ash in Black Mirror. The android has the objective to please their respective owner but quite differently. In Stepford, they wives lost all of their individuality and became mindless beings (Stepford Wives, 1975). Ash on the hand, he was developed to become a replacement and have the personality of the deceased (Black Mirror, Season 2 ep. 1). The androids are only developed to become a certain specific ideal that the specific society wants or views to be appropriate. Each individual piece put into the cybernetic organism influences the outcome of their actions and the possible change in the main directive.

Cybernetic Organisms

A cybernetic organism, also known as a cyborg, is a being with organic and mechanical body parts. Most of the modern day cyborgs are created from humans with a disability. Their disability is then corrected with a mechanical addition. However, author Karel Čapek, director Bryan Forbes, and director Owen Harris all have another prediction about the development of cybernetic organisms. In his play Rossum’s Universal Robots Čapek discusses the fight for survival. In Bryan Forbes’ movie Stepford Wives the men form a private organization dedicated to the replacement of their wives. They take samples over a four-month period and carefully craft an android of their wife that eventually kills and replaces her. In Owen Harris’ T.V. show Black Mirror the purpose of an android is to replace the dearly departed. They are either meant to further the grieving process or bypass it altogether. According to Hayles, the separation of body and mind is impossible therefore making the development of Androids difficult. The creation of androids stems from the creation of cyborgs; the total dismemberment of the human consciousness transplanted into an inorganic body.

Although none of these works truly delves into the art of cyborgs, they do provide a representation of the end goal of total mechanics. A cyborg is truly an intermediary step between human and android. In his movie Stepford Wives Bryan Forbes portrays the process of human replacement. The men within this movie wish to have the “perfect wife”; a woman, who cooks, cleans, cares for the children, and dotes on them without a complaint. The main character Joanna and her friend Bobbi investigate why all the women in Stepford are perfect examples of a housewife. The androids are incredibly lifelike and the only true distinguishing factor is their lack of individuality that can be passed off as a demographic. Also there are point within the movie when these robots glitch and repeat themselves. When Joanna stabs android Bobbi to see if she bleeds, the robot states, “Joanna! How could you do a thing like that? When I was just going to give you coffee! When I was just going to give you coffee! How could you do a thing like that? I thought we were friends! I thought we were friends,” indicating damage to her wiring (Forbes 1975). The voices and looks of these women have been transplanted into inorganic beings. The men in the secret organization have succeeded in replication the physicality of their wives but failed in the replication of their personalities; Hayles argument hold true for this work, because they had failed at separating the mind from the body. The women had their personalities and human nature stolen from them by egotistical and selfish men. Perhaps the further development and analysis of androids and their consciousness will lead to the development of a more advanced being.

Cyborg’s eye

The most physically advanced androids seen are the ones developed in the television series Black Mirror. Owen Harris examines the physical replication of the human body focusing on details. These androids were created to aid in the process of grieving the loss of a loved one. The program implemented a three level system. The first level created a textual Artificial intelligence based on online posts and emails, and it would reply using the deceased’s mannerisms. The next step is using audio and video recordings to recreate the deceased’s voice, and through that as well as the textual data, the A.I. was able to speak as the person would. The last step is the total physical and mental recreation of the deceased. The A.I. would be transplanted into an inorganic body that must then be taught to behave physically and mentally like the deceased. The main character Martha purchases this android to replace her dead husband Ash only to discover that his true personality is not present. The A.I. attempts to capture Ash’s physicality and mentality exactly and in that obsession loses the illusion. It is too compliant in her demands and has no true identity. There is no true emphasis on gender roles within this work. It also does not support Hayles skepticism. Although the A.I. eventually joins with an inorganic body, it was developed beforehand. The consciousness was separately developed using information provided by Martha and Ash’s social media. However, this consciousness lacks the true nature of a human.

The closest the androids came to being human was in the play R.U.R. These beings are fully functioning intelligent androids. Some of these android’s had their temperaments been altered by lead developer Dr. Gall. His soul purpose was to give them a bit of independence. Dr. Gall states, “I transformed them into people… In some ways they’re already superior to us,” indicating that the addition of consciousness and desire are what makes us human (Čapek 57). By changing the robot’s temperament, Dr. Gall gave the robots a personality, and the freedom to develop an identity of their own. It was hard to distinguish these robots from humans because their bodies were made identically to that of an organic human, and thus with the addition of consciousness they were fundamentally human. Both male and female robots were created for the sole purpose of filling gender roles: The women as secretaries and supporters and the men as leaders. The androids desires to be human overshadowed their superior intellect and lead them to cause the extinction of the human race; the robot men revolted with the support of their female counterparts. The mind and body was not separated within this text. The development of a personality requires time and experience, and in order to experience things one must have a body.

Hayles argument for the total dismemberment of the human consciousness holds true for these three works. Although the A.I. in Black Mirror was created separately from the body, it failed at the basic task of authentic humanness. The androids in Stepford Wives were all programed the same and had no identity; there was barely even a consciousness involved in their programing. R.U.R was the work that came the closest to the development of a cybernetic organism. These androids had the behavior, personalities, and desires of a human but a mechanical makeup. Both R.U.R. and Stepford Wives placed an emphasis on gender roles and stereotyping. The women were expected to be housewives or secretaries while the men did everything else. According to Hayles the consciousness cannot be removed from the body without alteration, and the emphasis on gender is a part of the cybernetic development of the human race. The robots withheld the understanding that humans kill and conquer the lesser beings, and like humans imitated that behavior. They also understand the societal placement of gender roles and heterosexual behavior. The men and women robots create couples. The androids’ identity and temperaments are one with their bodies’, men and women alike. Similarly to humans, their consciousness cannot be removed without killing them. Hayles states, “machines can maintain homeostasis using feedback loops. Feedback loops had long been exploited to increase the stability of mechanical systems,” suggesting that all the androids need to be human is stability (Hayles 8). Rossum’s androids are the representatives of human kind. The total dismemberment of the human consciousness and transplantation into an inorganic body is still impossible. The human consciousness is one with the body and removing that would be to remove an extension of that which makes us people.

With additional analysis of the human consciousness, perhaps the eventual separation of mind and body is possible. The electrochemical connections in the brain can be imitated by technology; however the authenticity of these connections must be enhanced. Artificial intelligence is a major step in developing the human consciousness without a body. These A.I.s still have glitches that need to be fixed and once they are perfected, they may surpass the awareness and human intelligence similarly to that of Rossum’s robots. The day the human mind can be separated from the body is the day the human race will stop dying. This development will allow those who die early a second chance at life with a synthetic body, similarly to the purpose of the android in Black Mirror. The addition of a human consciousness to an inorganic vessel will create the first true cybernetic organism. Gender has no real effect on these developments. The biological makeup of the human mind is not significantly different between genders.

Comparing Cybernetic Bodies

Using the article by Hayles as your guide, write a 5-7 paragraph blog post comparing the representation of cybernetic bodies in Stepford Wives, R.U.R, and Black Mirror. Make sure to pay particular attention to gender and labor roles, going back to the work of Haraway and Davis. This must include direct quotes in MLA format with in text citations.

This is worth 5% of your grade.

These posts will be graded on the following scale:

  • A = An engaging, thought-provoking post that shows attention to detail and comprehension of the text. Grammar and mechanics must be practically perfect (edit carefully!). Direct evidence from the text with a citation must be included.
  • B = An accurate summary and well-composed question that may contain a small, but not catastrophic, misreading or errors in grammar and mechanics.
  • C = A sloppy post that shows little effort and does not include the elements listed above.
  • D = A post that is a day late, or difficult to read, or phrased in a way that students would be unable to respond.
  • F = A post that is a week late, contains numerous errors, and does not contribute to the conversation. Or the post does not exist.