Future Mutation Technology, Sh - Anna Greenspan

"You cannot stop what can’t be stopped, you cannot touch without being touched." - Nick Land "Technology obeys no-one’s will. Can we play along with it without laboring to master it? " - John Gray Copy New technologies build themselves through a conglomeration of parts from all around the world; the design teams of Silicon Valley, the raw material from the mines of Africa, the capital markets fuelled by the Middle East. Shenzhen is the gathering place; a central node in the circulatory system. This is where the body of global electronics is assembled and shipped out. The market condenses in an area known as Huaqiangbei. Wide crowded streets are illuminated by strips of neon and LED, which are plastered over cheap looking malls with their blue tinted glass and gray, drab concrete. The monotony of the urban landscape is all-too-familiar to anyone accustomed to the new pop-up cities of China. Peering inside the windows, however, one gets a taste of the intensity of all that is clustered inside. Building after building, floor upon floor, stall upon stall, shelf upon shelf, is dedicated to the buying, selling, and building of electronics. Everywhere are mountains of wires, mounds of chips, spools of lights, cases of buttons and nobs. Huaqiangbei Shenzhen is high tech toolbox to the world. The city’s population is almost all the same age. This is a town of workers, not a place for the young or the old. Employees stand behind signs advertising companies of whom few have ever heard: “Victory Star Electronics”, “First Semiconductors,” “Gimi Technologies.” Each has carved out its own tiny, individual space designed especially to host a particular species of microcommercial activity. Despite the fame of factory giants like Foxconn, the dizzying scale of electronic production in Shenzhen is not all united in any

single operation. Instead, the magnitude arises from a multiplication effect; an enormous amassing of many small parts. Some of the tech on show is cutting edge (one booth proudly displays a touch screen 3D TV), but most is more mundane. One mall is stuffed with wiring and routers. Inside another, thousands of surveillance cameras all watch themselves in an unrelenting display of machinic vision. The most colorful mall is devoted entirely to cell phone accessories. Myriad stores contain rows of identical plastic kitties, bears or bunnies, which are sold to add personality to the intrinsic standardization of the device. Upstairs, where the buildings are darker and emptier, in a zone reserved for packaging, the secrets of Huaqiangbei are revealed. Two workers form a chain, one folding cardboard retail boxes, another sticking labels: ‘iPhone 4’; ‘Samsung Galaxy’, the precious guarantee of branding stripped of all mystique by the cool indifference of the clone. The most popular item to emerge from the markets of Shenzhen is the copy-cat cellphone. This is where you come to find a ‘Motopola,’ a ‘Nikia’ or even a fake ‘Xiaomi’ (which is the copy of a clone). Though some counterfeits try to disguise the fact that they are fakes many are more open and playful. Shenzhen is the birth-place of shanzhai, the zone in which copying – which is both inherent to digital technology and a critical part of the cultural traditions of China – have fused with the production of electronics. Shanzhai traces its roots back to 2004, when the Taiwanese company MediaTeK released a multipurpose chip that made mobile phones cheap and easy to produce. A wave of small factories, many of them family owned, immediately seized the opportunity to feed an already ravenous market for counterfeits and began pumping out copies at a delirious speed. Shanzhai companies operate in a nebulous, quasi legal zone external to both corporate regulations as well as government rules. The name shanzhai means mountain village and the term signals a kind of bandit, anarchist mode of production that functions outside the formal legitimacy of either capitalism or the state. Today there are hundreds of millions of shanzhai phones in circulation, not only in China but throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, where some argue it was the “glut of cheap cell phones that helped enable

the Arab Spring.” [1] This knockoff technology has spread to the most remote corners of the planet. Even in the hermit kingdom of North Korea the trade in shanzhai goods is said to be robust. Inside China the practices of shanzhai have spread far beyond cell-phones. The irreverent copy-cat – quick, flexible and close to the street – has come to define a culture that is anarchic, entrepreneurial and increasingly operates at the cutting edge of high tech. Reproduce One of the most profoundly relevant texts on the issues raised by contemporary technology was written nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. In 1872 the author Samuel Butler travelled to the then remote colony of New Zealand. Inspired by his journey, Butler wrote the novel Erewhon. In this long ago voyage to a place far removed from civilization ('erewhon' is an anagram for nowhere), he perceived the first stirrings of a new species – alien and unknown – which was evolving from the intimate interminglings of human and machine. Erewhon is set in a wild and sparsely inhabited place. It tells the tale of an early settler named Higgs who is driven to explore an uncharted land. Warned and then abandoned by his native guides, Higgs makes his way alone over a steep mountain pass. There, on the far end of the island, he encounters the Erewhonians, an unknown civilization with odd customs and curious beliefs. One of the most striking anomalies of this fictional race is their complete – even fanatical – renunciation of all machines. As soon as he arrives in this faraway land, Higgs’ own wristwatch is dramatically confiscated. The only other machinery he sees during his time immersed in this alien culture is broken, unused and safely encased inside a museum. Higgs finds this especially strange, since it is clear from the historical records that hundreds of years previously Erewhonian society had reached a most advanced degree of technological sophistication. The basis for this mystifying behavior, Higgs eventually discovers, can be traced back centuries to arguments posed in a philosophical tome, known as The Book of the Machines – a fictional text within a text that is kept guarded within the libraries of Erewhon.

'The Book of the Machines' begins with a time travel scenario, imagining intelligent creatures returning to the deep past when our planet was nothing but a “hot round ball.” No one could have dreamt from this embryonic state that life would one day sprout on Earth. Yet, Butler speculates, just as human consciousness emerged from dark matter, is it not possible that “a new phase of mind” could still arise that is “as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables? It would be rash,” he warns, “to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things...”[2] In doing so, he maps out a scenario that has never been more relevant – that technology may, as a result of its own driving forces, be transforming us as a species, stretching our senses, reformatting our brains, giving us new organs controlled from afar, altering all that is most intimately human. 'The Book of the Machines' advances its most far-reaching and radical arguments in wrestling with the possibility of technology’s drive to reproduce itself. “It is said by some,” contends the author, “that machines can never be developed into animate or quasi-animate existences, in as much as they have no reproductive system, nor seem ever likely to possess one.” Yet, just because machines do not marry, or “that we are never likely to see a fertile union between vapour engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed” it does not mean that the potential for reproduction is closed. We can already observe an enormous diversity in the reproductive systems of existing life forms. Why, argues Butler, should this mutiplicitous variation come to an end? After all “no one expects that all the features of the now existing organisations will be absolutely repeated in an entirely new class of life. The reproductive system of animals differs widely from that of plants, but both are reproductive systems.” What would make us presume that this ongoing process has now, suddenly, come to an end? Surely nature, as Butler wrote, “has not exhausted her phases of this power?”[3] According to 'The Book of Machines', technology has long ago adopted its own clever evolutionary mutation. Without the ability to reproduce on its own it has involved us in its own creation. We have become machine parts whose

purpose is to help technology breed. Butler convinces with a rich and powerful analogy: Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a class of agents utterly foreign to themselves?... [4] We are to machines as a bee is to a clover, the reproductive organs of a species that is not our own. Mutate Across the spectrum of both people and technology are the continual traces of reciprocal mutation – one serving the other, becoming the other, subverting the other, each indistinguishably sharing in the other. This susceptibility to the alien, the mutant is an unavoidable attraction buried within us all. In his great work Creative Evolution the philosopher Henri Bergson details the phenomenon by contrasting it to the idea of evolutionary teleology – the notion of an original starting point and a higher, more perfected form. Bergson’s work presents a creative force – a surge of life, driving life itself – far different from the mechanistic view of evolution that the Darwinists proposed. Of that, Bergson wrote, “we should soon have been able to determine its direction, (as) if life had described a single course, like that of a solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long. We perceive only what is nearest to us, namely, the scattered movements of the pulverized explosions.”[5] Bergson presents an explanation of evolution as an inclination towards ever richer and often more dangerous complexity; a tending towards the fringes, which does not stop at an ideal point where a

species has reached a smooth and well functioning adaption to their physical environments. But instead adapts again towards the unforeseen. Innovations, whether in people or things are most often an undermining of the original, not a process of perfecting. Shanzhai is a form of copying that drifts to become something new. When it succeeds, the original is left far behind. In this way the process of shanzhai manifests a strong underlying urge in the development of technology – to move beyond the moment where faithful copies of what has gone before are optimally useful and function perfectly well, to the point where they become something novel and distinct. In this way technology designed to serve us carves its own pathways of escape. Many in the business of technology now view the force of shanzhai not as a corruption but as an entirely valid form of product development. What has made the thousands of shanzhai producers successful as businesses in their own right is the ability to spot holes and gaps in the strategies of the large market incumbents. Many started out as manufacturers of cheap, straight copies but as their approach became more inventive and resourceful, they upgraded to making much more localized versions of the main product – adding extra features, customizing according to niche demand. This modular approach has enabled shanzhai producers to capture vast and far less affluent market segments (taking advantage of the wealth at the bottom of the pyramid). As they do so, they hack straight into the supply chains of their giant competitors. According to Zhang Haizhen, owner of a shanzhai company, quoted in the New York Times: “It’s really common for factories to do a night shift for other companies. No one will refuse an order if it is over 5,000 mobile phones.”[6] Shanzhai players seek out the blind spots in a main player’s strategy and with speed on their side, enter a market and surreptitiously grab a substantial, sometimes even shocking, share. Today the cycle of copying has become so voracious that for the most successful shanzhai players, there is nothing left to copy but each other – a mindset fuelled by the tight ecosystem of parts, knowledge and R&D, testing, packaging and marketing know-how which unites the 30,000 plus shanzhai companies that cluster around Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei. This is not to say, however, that even within the shanzhai community, all forms of copying are

held in equal regard. Eric Pan of ‘Seeed Studio’, a firm positioning itself between the boutique designs of a growing maker culture and the rich ecosystem of shanzhai factories that know how to bring products to market, talks of ‘branded mutants’ who just steal the name of another for profit alone, as opposed the ‘legitimate replicas’ who stay true to an original ethos and DNA of a product but also seek to make it better, and can then even ally with the original to create a new iteration and evolve again. In this he refers especially to his own business in modular electronics – prototyping hardware innovations for community inventors. ‘First’, he says, ‘you can copy alphabets, then you develop your own handwriting, finally you create your own articles’. In these complicated mixtures of parts, recipes, and inspiration, where and to whom can property be attributed? It is becoming increasingly common to legitimately brand derivatives as exactly that – a copy with its own features and flair. Arduino, the sensory electronics community, pioneered a brand system which allowed individuals within their network to use their brand and make it their own – like cooks making their own version of an expert chef ’s recipe. This recipe-based model, says Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith of ‘Makerbot,’ who now has a base in Shenzhen, is precisely the ethos of open source. The goal is to take an original and alter it so it’s different, more individual, more specific to circumstance, better in some identifiable way. Here brands work hard – not as a badge of ownership, or a stamping of authenticity, but as a signal of a mindset or drive, which are much less tangible. Yet, the dilemma remains – at what point does a copy cease to be a replica and become instead an entity of its own? Bergson showed that a non-stop splicing of organisms, entities and their environments is all that there is. We do not evolve into ever more perfect versions of ourselves. Instead, component parts split off and find new avenues to explore, throwing up ever new traits and varieties to investigate and wander through: “we shall not witness the detailed accomplishment of a plan. Nature is more and better than a plan in course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open. It is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial movement.” [7]

Competitive advantage does not come from incremental additions to what has worked in the past. It is instead a much more sudden and calamitous shaking down of the status quo. In recent times, shanzhai companies have begun to sue the likes of Apple for the stealing of ideas. The take over of copies has begun. Replicate Copying, cloning, mass manufacturing is a vital thrust in the development of modern technology. It is the key to producing at scale, which has long been a driver of capitalism. But this picture is now being complicated by the arrival of the 3D printer – the prototype of a universal replicating machine. Discussion of this enormously popular technology circulates around three key themes: the wish to enable the creation of bespoke objects and machines; the determination to equip as many people as possible with the tools to create objects and machines for themselves (mass education is inherent to the mission behind 3D printing) and finally, most interestingly, the race to see those objects and machines effectively self-reproduce. For the researchers and devoted developers of 3D technology, 'machines jumping out of machines' is seen as the ultimate goal for the movement – there is no more solid affirmation of a machine’s ability to make, than its ability to make itself. In 2005, the Reprap project at the University of Bristol in the UK was established to develop printers, which could effectively build their own components. From the start, this was presented in evolutionary terms – but importantly, with the human user as a kind of uber-master able to drive a constant Darwinian line of radical improvement. According to founder, Dr. Adrian Bowyer: RepRap will be a mechatronic device using entirely conventional (indeed simple) engineering. But it is really a piece of biology. This is because it can self-replicate with the symbiotic assistance of a person. Anything that can copy itself immediately and inescapably becomes subject to Darwinian selection, but RepRap has one important difference from

natural organisms: in nature, mutations are random, and only a tiny fraction are improvements; but with RepRap, every mutation is a product of the analytical thought of its users. This means that the rate of improvement should be very rapid, at least at the start; it is more analogous to selective breeding ─ the process we used to make cows from aurochs and wheat from wild grass. Evolution can be relied on to make very good designs emerge quickly. [8] What appears underestimated here, in the early breakthrough days of the technology, is the ultimate liveliness of such designs. As the pursuit of technological self-realization has continued, intelligence has not remained confined to the humans on the side-lines of those machines, masterful though they may appear to be. What is being produced is not a passive, dead technology but rather a gradual awakening of matter, the emergence, ultimately, of a new form of life. 3D printing might only now be about to find its ways into our homes, but for figures at the forefront of the field like Neil Gershenfeld, it is a technology that is, already, superseding itself. What projects like RepRap began, nearly a decade ago, is now evolving into a much deeper idea of printing and fabrication – not the random knickknacks that proliferate today, but a form of molecular manipulation, where data and objects become interchangeable. Gershenfeld describes the enormous leap represented by this approach in very clear terms: Scientists at a number of labs (including mine) are now ... developing processes that can place individual atoms and molecules into whatever structure they want. Unlike 3D printers today, these will be able to build complete functional systems at once, with no need for parts to be assembled. The aim is to not only produce the parts for a drone, for example, but build a complete vehicle that can fly right out of the printer. [9] The reference to the flying force of technology continues: “one assembler we are developing uses parts on the scale of centimeters, to make larger structures, such as aircraft components and even whole aircraft that will be lighter, stronger, and more capable than today’s planes – think a jumbo jet that can flap its wings” [10]

In this scenario, machines emerge from machines fully made, mechanically complete at conception – one very sophisticated moving piece, not a kit of separate parts. Most importantly, they have the potential to be packed with data, able to see, hear and sense. Gershenfeld’s work, at the boundary of computer science and material science (epitomised by some early research in his lab to create a ‘paintable computer’ – a liquid medium that can literally be painted on so you can have an inch of computing power wherever you need it, potentially turning a whole house into a computer) is several steps ahead of the present day possibilities of 3D printing, but it brilliantly lays out an inevitable future. He is accelerating a set of connections that packs computer intelligence into materials and materials into self- reproducing things. Arduino, as a mass market open source movement just like certain lines of 3D printing technology, is helping to set the path. Today, everyone from large corporations to DIY enthusiasts are hard at work creating objects with the intelligence to sense and react to the world. Tom Igoe, one of Arduino’s founders, worries that the name ‘Internet of Things’ puts too much attention on the gadgets constituting this new technological wave. What is shifting, he explains, “is not so much how we see computers, but how computers see us.” Evolve The field of robotics was traditionally seen to be in the service of man. The mechanical slave was imagined as a faithful reproduction that obeyed. Robots were conceived as our mirrors, which, at their pinnacle, would match us in physical and mental intelligence. Today, this fairy tale approach is only a fraction of the story – much of the progress in robotics is focused less on replicating humans than on changing their environment, and disrupting their place within that environment. The great roboticist Hans Moravec plots the arrival of a new kind of body, born through generational reproduction and consequent mutation. His vision begins with ‘second generation’ machines that humans engage with as pets (recent strides made in the world of social robots, designed to provide company for the elderly is early proof of this development). His vision

continues with “a sufficiently advanced third generation robot, whose simulation extends to other agents – robots and people – (who) would be able to observe a task being done by someone else and formulate a program for the task itself. It could imitate...” Out of these copying machines emerges a fourth generation robot with “human perceptual and motor abilities and superior reasoning powers,” who “could replace us in every essential task and in principle operate our society increasingly well without us. They would run the companies and do the research as well as performing the productive work.” [11] Moravec’s imagination extends still further, reformatting the intermeshed relation between human and machines. Not isolated, or distinct from one other, the exchange between nature and artifice is no longer one of simple tasks, where machines serve us, but one of mutual evolution, where organic and inorganic parts learn from each other on a massive, unprecedented scale. The human body unfolds, melding with the mechanosphere. Butler already foresaw this type of distributed intelligence a century ago: "The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their bodies, but many of man’s are loose and lie about detached, now here and there, in various parts of the world – some being kept for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away... We do not use own limbs other than as machines”[12]. Moravec pushes further, drawing from the present to imagine the bodies of the future: “Earth life and present research robots give an inkling of the myriad body shapes: spiders, bugs, pogo sticks, snakes, blimps, cars, barrels, power shovels, bipeds, quadrupeds... booms and nozzles. Bits of a single body may be distributed over distances; a camera here, an arm there... all in communication... An Ex (= ex human) may often be surrounded by an illuminated cloud that does its bidding as if by magic.” [13] In Moravec’s future vision, mutants are all that is left. Rewind According to the Book of Machines, the intimate relationship between humans and technology has left nothing untouched. “Man's very soul is due to the

machines” writes Butler, “it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs.” Emerging through this intense cross-fertilization is a single inseparable entity, that which philosophers Deleuze & Guattari call “a verterbro-machinate mammal.” This emergent symbiosis undermines the comfortable, commonly held assumption that technology is just a tool, designed to fulfill our desires and serve our needs. The idea that machines “must now and ever be man's inferiors” masks a more threatening, subterranean reality. The servant, contends The Book of the Machines, “glides by imperceptible approaches into the master… How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? ... This is the art of the machines – they serve that they may rule.” [14] In the fictional world of Erewhon this (still popular) sci-fi dystopia, in which humans function as mere component parts until, one day, a machinic takeover makes debris of us all, persuaded civilization to implement a rigorous technophobic program. All machines were abandoned, our cyborg future was snuffed out, and technological evolution was brought to an end. Over 120 years later, at the turn of the second millennium, Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, propelled Butler’s argument forward into the twenty-first century. His famous and highly influential article Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us makes an impassioned case for future management. Joy, echoing Butler, concentrates his concern on the reproductive capabilities of new technologies. “Robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate.” [14] With this capacity for reproduction, Joy warns, technology escapes our control. The article speculates on a series of “nightmarish scenarios” in which the destructive dangers of GNR (genetics, nano tech and robotics) are “hugely amplified by the power of uncontrolled self-replication….” In response to the terror of technological self-replication, Joy makes a plea for a “steering of the future” such that technological evolution is tempered, certain pathways are avoided

and knowledge and research is substantially restrained. “If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed and why,” Joy writes, “then we would make our future much less dangerous – we might understand what we can and should relinquish.” [15] Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us recognizes that far from any “species wide agreement” on the management of new technologies, humans are strikingly blasé about the future as it arrives. “The new Pandora’s boxes of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics are almost open, yet we don’t seem hardly to have noticed” puzzles Joy. ‘Why,” he asks with bemusement, “weren’t other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?” [16] The answer, he writes, “certainly lies in our attitude towards the new, in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance.” Humans appear to have an almost willful lack of awareness in the face of technological evolution. It is his recognition of this unconscious, wide ranging apathy, rather than his ultimately implausible appeals for global controls, that is, in the end, what makes Joy’s future imaginings so haunting. We don’t reflect upon new technology. Instead, we passionately, compulsively, addictively, engage. When is the Future? There is a time lag inherent in the future itself. A great gulf separates the human capacity to create the future and our ability, and desire, to comprehend or perceive the creation as it unfolds. This temporal dislocation renders us blinds to the very processes that engulf us – through which copies become replicas, replicas become mutants, and mutants become us. “Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present,” writes author Venkat in his insightful article Welcome to the Future Nauseous. “They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives.”[17] New technologies arrive without our detection. We mask them from ourselves in a myriad of ways. In their article Yesterday’s Tomorrow scholars Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell explore this theme with reference to the increasingly popular project of ubiquitous computing. Beginning with Weiser’s foundational text, The Computer of the

21st Century, they argue, the whole field of Ubicomp has been governed by a vision of the “proximate future”; a delayed futurism has been embedded in the project from the start. Yet, despite the fact that this foreshadowing is now over 20 years old, it continues today — even as cities, especially across Asia, become increasingly ‘smart,’ — to be perceived as a vision that is waiting just around the corner, only about to arrive. “The future always seems like something that is going to happen,” writes Venkat, “rather than something that is happening.” His article seeks to explore the intricacies of this cognitive dissonance. “How, as a species are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?” [18] Venkat’s explanation for this temporal paradox is to argue that “we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy” – a kind of mass psycho-social ruse that operates through “a mix of natural, emergent and designed mechanisms that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak.” The overall effect of ‘manufactured normalcy’ is to absorb the future whilst fabricating an extended present that traps us, comfortably, in the past. Our collective attitudes towards the technological future, then, function to reduce the world of tomorrow to “a crazedfamiliarity.” Facebook is a particular symbolic example. Tapping our preschool desires for ‘friends’ and likes,’ it attracts us addictively, to an unprecedentedly intimate engagement with electronics. Looked at from the side of the machines, Facebook is one of the cleverest technologies out there – a highly sophisticated information suction, which we both compulsively process and, simultaneously, disguise. We treat Facebook, writes Venkat, as if it were a school year-book – assimilating into our daily life without thought or question. Yet: Facebook is not a Yearbook. It is a few warehouse-sized buildings containing racks and racks of electronic hardware sheets, each containing etched little slivers of silicon at their core. Each of those little slivers contains more intricacy than all the jewelry designers in history together

managed to put into all the earrings they ever made. These warehouses are connected via radio and optic-fiber links to…. Oh well, forget it. It’s a frikkin’ Yearbook. [19] “We fear new environments,” wrote the visionary theorist Marshall Mcluhan, “when the environment changes we hasten to take comfort in the old environment. What people see in the new is always the old … this is the rearview mirror. The future of the future is the present.” It is due to this persistent inherent backwardness that the famed futurist Alvin Toffler got it so fascinatingly wrong. In his famous book Future Shock, Toffler predicted that the high-speed change just over the horizon would result in collective shock and mass trauma. He did not foresee the commonplace – even tedious – reality of Facebook. The shock of the future is that there is nothing shocking about it at all. “At the micro-level, writes Venkat, “I now possess a cellphone that works better than Captain Kirk’s communicator, but I don’t feel like I am living in the future I imagined back then, even a tiny bit.” At a talk on the Internet’s next 5,000 days, techno-philosopher Kevin Kelley echoes this same theme. “It is amazing,” he says commenting on what has just been and also on what soon will be, “but we are not amazed.” Much of the debate around technology seeks to discern who or what drives the relationship between humans and the technologies that surround us. Yet, in practice, these ‘sides’ have long disintegrated, subjected to the ongoing pattern of reproduction and mutation that marks our evolution. In this intimate interaction between the confinement of repetition and the uncontrollable nature of change, boundaries and distinction are bound to dissolve. The language of master and slave, of source and enabler, has ceased to apply. We are not mere users of technology. We are used by technology. In this we become bit parts in a bigger toolbox of evolutionary possibilities – an infinite range of combinations of people and things that can adapt and merge with one another to create entities that are surprisingly, unpredictably, new. As John Gray puts it: “species are only currents in the drift of genes.”

The whole point of AIs, argues techno philosopher Kevin Kelly, is that they should think differently to us. They may begin life in mimicking mode, but the more they can diverge from the human’s preprogrammed path, the better. For Kelly, they'll take us on the most valuable journey – one that is anyway not an option. "I'm not worried about our place when there are a million different types of intelligence... we'll still find our place and we'll find other ways of thinking that are valuable to ourselves." Moravec, in his own reflection on our predicament, encourages us to re-set the lens: “we (as humans) must (usually) perceive the world as compatible with our own existence – with a strong arrow of time, dependable probabilities, where complexity can evolve and persist, where experience can accumulate in reliable memories, and the results of our actions are predictable. Our mind children, able to manipulate their own substance and structure at the finest levels, will probably greatly transcend our narrow notion of what it is to be human...”[20] The question which of us is to be master and which will be slave leaves out our unconscious desire for future mutation. We live in an era of unprecedented technological intimacy, affect and display. Never before have we been so uninhibited. We are constantly, compulsively touching our screens, obsessively uploading every fragment of data about ourselves. Many of us can’t stop. Even touch is no longer enough. We want our technology closer, embedded, under our skins. Alongside our terror is a yearning for the alien intelligence we are in process of becoming. After all, in the end, we are evolutionary creatures ourselves. We fear change but, as our deep and profound complicity with technology makes clear, what we long for is to evolve. Future Now The economist Joseph Schumpeter, who detailed the boom/bust cycle that is inherent to the nature of capitalism, taught that innovation is most likely to arrive at the bottom of the wave. The invention of new technologies, one of the key drivers of the capitalist system, tends to become apparent in the trough, when resources are cheap and chasing easy money through microimprovements to already existing technology is no longer so worthwhile. The

revolutionary disruptions wrought by ‘creative destruction,’ are thus more frequent in the downturn. By 2014, half a decade into the first great economic crises of the second millennium, something is stirring in the realm where humans meet machines. The eventual results of this mutation are still uncertain, yet some contours of the changes to come are starting to be apparent. In fields as diverse as network science, space engineering, genetics and robotics, the closed realm of state led research, powered by enormous government expenditure, is giving way – or at least being coupled with – a whole host of cheaper, more decentered experiments that are being driven from below (e.g. private space missions, citizen science, bio-hacking, DIY robotics etc..). Alongside the possibilities opened by a new culture of entrepreneurial making is a corresponding intellectual and cultural shift toward stuff. In theoretical and philosophical circles this is being tracked by a trend towards the ‘new materialism’; a transcendental turn that rejects the idealism of postmodernism which privileges thought and discourse over matter. More prosaically, our way of thinking about digital technologies is in the midst of a transformation. No longer is everything reducible to information; bits and codes, zeroes and ones. Cyberspace has ceased to be conceptualized as an immaterial substance that is floating out there in the ether. Instead, there is an attention on infrastructure – the gargantuan structures housing blocks of computers (server farms) that are connected through concrete networks of wires and tubes (often supplied by the factories of Shenzhen). To put it somewhat reductively, we are in the midst of a cyclical return from software to hardware (which perhaps explains our current obsession with everything 3D) which more fundamentally affects who and what we are a species. The pure age of the Internet, of hype over social media and excitement over the latest apps, is itself evolving. In its place is an attention to the more obviously physical. In the next 5,000 days we will give the web a body, said Kevin Kelly, in a talk in December 2007. 1,500 days later this embodiment is becoming ever more palpable. This new leap in hardware and materiality is bringing about a radical, uncomfortable, uncontrollable leap into the future; one in which machines are not just faster and cleverer than ever before but also more invasive, more embedded in our lives and our bodies. Mark Weiser’s article, which propelled the field of Ubicomp, begins with the

famous prophecy. “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Slipping into the blank spaces of our lives, machines – wearable, embedded, implanted – are melting imperceptibly into the ordinary environment. At the limit technology shrinks so dramatically that it becomes ambient at the cellular level, disappearing as nanotech into cells and dust. “Its power becomes all the more strengthened, more insidious, more familiar – and so more ‘natural’.” Most of what is being produced in the latest wave of 3D manufacturing, is crude: little plastic doodads, a pair of shoes, a coffeemaker, a handbag. Drones, outside of the military context may well enable us to re-think ideas of air travel, surveillance, and territory, but for now the dreams are more mundane: wind-surfing cameras that help perfect your golf shot, or delivery units that pick something up from the grocery store. In their actual output the hardware innovations that are occurring today recall the computer culture of the mid 1970s. If 3D printers were videogames we would be in the days of Pong. Nevertheless, experiments with 3D printers have begun, in everything from food to body parts and fear about robots cutting us out of the workforce are gaining ground. These technologies are also following a well-trodden trajectory becoming ever cheaper, smaller and easy to use. This will fuel their attendant proliferation. A whole host of companies now produce the machines for domestic use. Soon, no doubt, there will be a 3D printer in every home and social robots may well be providing the vigilant company to the elderly who live alone. The present machines,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Book of Machines, “are to the future as the early Saurians to man. The largest of them will probably greatly diminish in size. Some of the lowest vertebrate attained a much greater bulk than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, and in like manner a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress.” Technology is plotting its own evolution and the purely human advantage is becoming increasingly small. New fusions and adaptions between the organic and the near organic continue. Silicon, once sand, the second most common element built into the earth’s crust, carries

deep with in it an ironic reminder of our own amphibious evolutionary past. Our roots, as cybernetic organisms, come from the same source. Though we are often blind to the machines that surround us – technology is the ocean within which we swim – these exchanges and interactions fuel us. As evolutionary beings, we are willing participants, hungry to transform. In Shenzhen companies, factories and markets are adjusting to the new products and modes of manufacturing that they bring. A realization is dawning. The age of the copy is over. It is time to mutate. Citations [1] Lindsay, Greg, China’s Cell Phone Pirates are Bringing Down Middle East Governments, Fast Company, June 14, 2011. [2] Butler, Samuel, Erewhon, Electric Book Company, London, 1872, p. 210. [3] Ibid, p. 209. [4] Ibid, p. 224. [5] Bergson. H, Creative Evolution, New York, Holt and Company 1911, p. 98 [6] quoted in Barboza, David, In China, Knockoff Cellphones are a Hit, New York Times, April 27, 2009 [7] Bergson. H. – Creative Evolution. New York, Holt and Company 1911 p.104 [8] Land, Nick, Radical Manufacturing, That’s Shanghai, Dec 1 2010, http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/articles/671 [9] Gershenfeld, Neil, How to Make Almost Anything, Foreign Affairs, Vol 91, No. 6, Nov/ Dec, 2012, p. 46. [10] Ibid, p. 62. [11] Moravec, Hans, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 125.

[12] Butler. p. 136 [13] Moravec, p. 150. [14] Butler, p. 220. [15] Joy, Bill, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, Wired, April, 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] Venkat, Welcome to the Future Nauseaus, Ribbonfarm, May 9, 2012, http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/ [19] Ibid. [20] Moravec, p. 208 Authors Suzanne Livingston completed her Phd in Philosophy with Anna Greenspan at the University of Warwick UK. She was one of the founding members of CCRU with research interests in perception, neurology and visual technology. Since then, she has mainly been working in the business world, helping client in the tech, arts and education sector with long term strategy, digital culture and organisational change. Anna Greenspan is an assistant professor at NYU Shanghai. Her research interests are in the philosophy of time, cyberculture, and urban Asia. Her books include Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014) and India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Globalization (Palgrave, 2005). She holds a PhD from Warwick University (UK) and, along with Suzanne Livingston was a founding member of the cybernetic culture research unit (CCRU).