by HELENE MIALET
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. For those who know him, Hawking may be able to communicate through his eyes; but for the rest of us, his sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer.
Today, January 8, is Hawking’s birthday, yet on this day it’s worth examining just who and what we are really celebrating: the man, the mind or … the machines?
Hawking has become a kind of a “brain in a vat.” 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. In some ways Hawking is, to borrow from Obi-Wan referring to Darth Vader, “more machine now than man.”
In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. 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. And indeed, because of his disability, Hawking embodies the mythical figure capable of grasping the ultimate laws of the universe with nothing but the sheer strength of his reasoning: He can’t move his body, so everything must be in his mind. What else would a theoretical physicist need?
But in another version of Hawking’s story, we notice that he 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. Hawking’s “genius,” far from being the product of his mind alone, is in fact profoundly located, material, and collective in nature.
As an anthropologist interested in science, technology, and its heroes, I conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of Hawking: He essentially became my “tribe.” For years, I followed him as he worked, resolved problems, produced theories, gave talks and participated in interviews and documentaries. I interviewed all the people around him: his nurses, personal assistants, students, colleagues and even the journalists. I lived and breathed the Hawking tribe.
What I discovered was that to understand Hawking, you had to understand the people and the machines without whom he would be unable to act and think; you had to understand the ways in which these entities augmented and amplified Hawking’s competencies. For example: The specialties of his students, which are spread across very different research fields, enable him to integrate diverse information and the different facets of a problem in a way that others cannot. His secretary provides him with a mental assistant many of us would never have, by sorting and arranging his data according to his interests and what he is able to process.
This is not just like exchanging ideas with colleagues or having someone sort our mail: This is multiplying the ideas and sorting the cues that drive our interactions with the world. 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’s condition makes necessary the mechanization (the hierarchization, standardization, and routinization) of his human-machine based environment. This extended body network – composed of machines and human beings – allows a simple yes or a no to become operational.
But there’s a complexity behind this simplicity, much like the way simple user interfaces we use everyday obscure the complex processes behind their use. Only in this case we’re talking about a human being — not a smartphone or computer screen.
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