If we're really going to outsource walking -- as a professor in Germany proved earlier this year is possible (with the help of some electrodes) -- we'll end up automating all physical activity, from chewing to smiling. This is a dystopian future that Evan Selinger, associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, hopes we will never want.
Back in ancient Greece, Plato told the story of a man who gazed so intently at the stars that he walked right into a well. Supposedly, Thales was "so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet". Flash forward to today, and scientists have finally found a way for us to avoid the fate of an absent-minded professor. But before we get too excited about enhanced navigation, we should pause to consider why commercial applications might encourage us to embrace something awful: an alienated relation to our own embodiment.
As reported in WIRED.co.uk, Max Pfeiffer, a researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the University of Hanover in Germany, ran an experiment where he manipulated how students navigated through a park. By stimulating their sartorius muscles with electrical current, he directly guided their turns, nudging movements to the left and right. While this scenario sounds like Invasion of the Body Snatchers science fiction, apparently the combination of existing smartphone technology and electrodes is all that’s needed to inaugurate an innovative "pedestrian navigation paradigm".
Pfeiffer successfully assumed the role of an aggressive GPS device, but his prototype isn't ready to compete with Waze. Still, he's got a successful proof of concept on his hands, and this makes it hard to avoid speculating on what future, fully automated, consumer versions of the technology might be used for. Like all optimistic researchers, Pfeiffer and his collaborators imagine a range of socially beneficial applications.
Their vision revolves around three types of experience -- multi-tasking, dispensing precise geo-location information, and coordinating group movement -- which are embodied in several appealing scenarios: enhanced fitness (think of runners easily trying out new routes and optimising existing routines), novel sports (imagine coaches going beyond today's limits of merely proposing suggested game plays, and literally choreographing how their teams move), improved job performance (picture firefighters effortlessly zeroing in on danger zones), upgraded crowd control (envision concert goers immediately knowing how to find their seats in a large stadium and how to clear out in an orderly and calm manner if an emergency arises), and, of course, low transaction cost navigation.
A safe utopia, or automated dystopia
In order to truly get a handle on the significance of "actuated navigation," we need to do more than just imagine rosy possibilities. We've also got to confront the basic moral and political question of outsourcing and ask when delegating a task to a third party has hidden costs. To narrow down our focus, let's consider the case of guided strolling. On the plus side, Pfeiffer suggests that senior citizens will appreciate help returning home when they're feeling discombobulated, tourists will enjoy seeing more sights while freed up by the pedestrian version of cruise control, and friends, family, and co-workers will get more out of life by safely throwing themselves into engrossing, peripatetic conversation. But what about the potential downside?
Critics have identified several concerns with using current forms of GPS technology. They have reservations about devices that merely cue us with written instructions, verbal cues, and maps that update in real-time. Nicholas Carr warns of our susceptibility to automation bias and complacency, psychological outcomes that can lead people to do foolish things, like ignoring common sense and driving a car into a lake. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly lament that it's "dehumanising" to succumb to GPS orientation because it "trivialises the art of navigation" and leaves us without a rich sense of where we are and where we're going. Both of these issues are germane. But while, in principle, technical fixes can correct the mistakes that would erroneously guide zombified walkers into open sewer holes and oncoming traffic, the issue of orientation remains a more vexing existential and social problem.
Pfeiffer himself recognises this dilemma. He told WIRED.co.uk that he hopes his technology can help liberate people from the tyranny of walking around with their downcast eyes buried in smartphone maps. But he also admitted that "when freed from the responsibility of navigating…most of his volunteers wanted to check email as they walked." At stake, here, is the risk of unintentionally turning the current dream of autonomous vehicles into a model for locomotion writ large. While the hype surrounding driverless cars focuses on many intended benefits -- fewer accidents, greener environmental impact, less congestion, and furthering the shift to communal transportation -- we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that consumers are being wooed with utopian images of time-management. Freed from the burden of needing to concentrate on the road, we're sold on the hope of having more productive commutes. Instead of engaging in precarious (and often illegal) acts of distracted driving, we'll supposedly tend to our correspondence obligations in a calm and civilised way. Hallelujah, we'll text, email, and hop on social media in our "private office on wheels" just as though we were on a bus, train, or plane -- but, thankfully, without having to deal with pesky strangers!
What Pfeiffer's subversive subjects show is that a designer's intentions alone don't determine how consumers use technology. In a world where social and professional expectations pressure people to regularly go online, folks will be tempted to exploit newly found openings in their schedules to satisfy the always-on, no freedom to be off requirement. And when industries get a sense that people have more time on their hands to attend to work-related activities like checking email, they'll ratchet up their expectations for how productive their employees need to be. Such pressure disincentivises us from pursing balanced lives and makes a mockery of the cliché that if you don't like a technology, simply don't use it. Indeed, just as historical decisions about building infrastructure to support an automotive culture have made it untenable for many people in the United States to walk or ride their bicycles to work, shifts in the digital ecosystem can make it harder for us to take an enjoyable stroll.
The prospect of being further chained to our devices certainly is disturbing. But the thought of outsourcing our physical abilities just to free up attention also raises a more disconcerting problem -- one with deep psychological and metaphysical consequences. "Actuated navigation" isn't just a process that turns voluntary into involuntary behaviour. You see, if done habitually, it's an invitation to dissociate from our physicality and objectify our incarnate bodies as mere commodities. To see why this is the case, we need to consider some basic ways bodies and technologies interact.
Bodies, of course, come in various shapes and sizes and have different abilities. Many people rely on prosthetics to move, such as canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and artificial limbs. These can be deeply embodied tools that expand a person's sense of agency -- especially when society commits to the resources needed for them to be widely accessible and used effectively, and embraces a sense of justice that makes it abundantly clear that it's wrong to hassle anyone for relying on them.
Let's think about this in what philosophers call phenomenological terms. As the French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously argues, a blind person can't use a cane to see colours. The act of tapping just can't reveal how grey a street looks. But the technology can expand perceptual abilities by "extending the scope and active radius of touch and providing a parallel to sight". Indeed, the person who becomes expert at using a cane experiences the stick as a direct extension of her being -- more like a sense organ that's attuned to the world, than an external object that requires attention-grabbing, mechanical movements to master.
In a similar way, a seasoned driver feels that a car is an extension of herself. She gets in, cranks up the tunes, navigates on the highway while singing along, and arrives at her destination delighted that she became one with the vehicle and intuitively exhibited skill. By contrast, a beginner's journey involves deliberating about all kinds of things and feeling a pronounced sense of separateness. Beyond needing to pause to consider who gets the right of way at a junction, she needs to engage in all kinds of abstract reflections -- like explicitly focusing on putting her hands on the 9-3 position before starting to drive.
The prosthetic and driving examples show that we're quite adept at using technology to expand our embodied relation to the world, and with it, our senses of identity. In a suburban area, for example, it's easier for the person who owns or leases a car to see herself as independent than it is for someone who depends on public transportation and is subservient to a schedule that other people set. While this particular case may be objectionable from a moral point of view (not everyone can afford to opt-out of public transportation, and it may be environmentally wrong not to use it), the basic phenomenology of enlarged capacities shows that it's a mistake to see so-called cyborgian fusions as inherently alienating.
The question, then, is what's the difference between outsourcing walking and getting around with the help of a cane or car. That's easy to answer in the case of malicious hacking. If a third party engaged in a version of Pfeiffer's experiment that enabled her to take over our body and move us in directions that we didn't want to go, our autonomy would be violated. But if we freely choose a destination and actuated navigation helped us get there straightaway without any imposed stops, our autonomy would be respected.
Transhumanists who yearn for the day we can upload our consciousness into machines may endorse this attitude. But the rest of will feel diminished by autopilot dualism. It literally makes us cogs in the machine of our own life.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/20/the-future-of-walking
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