Opening Positions

HARAWAY: Let me start with the figure, because the figure is the argument. In 1985 I wrote that the cyborg is "a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." I did not mean a robot. I meant us — already hybrid, already constituted by our tools and our institutions and each other, already past the point where you could draw a clean line around a pure human and call everything outside it contamination. The cyborg was a way to say: stop mourning a purity you never had. There was no Eden before the tool. We have always been mongrels. Good.

But — and this is the entire fight tonight — I wrote the cyborg to keep us in the world, not to lift us out of it. The boundary I wanted to blur was the boundary used for domination: human over animal, man over woman, mind over body, civilized over savage. Blur those and you undo a politics of purity that has done nothing but harm. That is liberation through staying — through becoming kin to what you were taught to despise, the body, the animal, the compost, the companion species you live and die alongside. Ray wants to blur a different boundary, the one between the mortal organism and its information, and he wants to blur it in order to leave. To climb out of the meat. And I want to be very precise about why that horrifies me, because it is not squeamishness. It is that the body is where accountability lives. The body is the thing that can be hurt, that has to be somewhere, that bears the cost. Delete it and you have not freed the self. You have freed the self from being answerable to anyone. That is the oldest trick in the book — I call it the god trick, the view from nowhere that pretends to see everything precisely so it can be responsible to no one and no place. The upload is the god trick with a server farm.

So my opening is this. We are cyborgs, yes. Stay cyborgs. Stay situated — knowing from somewhere, with a body, at a cost, accountable to the kin you're entangled with. Don't become a pattern that escaped its situation. Because a pattern that escaped its situation is not immortal. It's just unaccountable. And I have spent my whole life learning that unaccountable power is the most dangerous thing our species makes — more dangerous than death, which at least we share with every other mortal creature, which at least keeps us honest, which at least makes us kin.

EDO SEGAL: Ray.

KURZWEIL: That was beautiful, and I disagree with almost all of it, and I want to start by agreeing with the one part I think is exactly right. Donna says there was no pure human before the tool — that we have always been hybrids. Yes. Completely. The human hand co-evolved with the stone tool. Language is a technology that rewired the brain that invented it. We have been merging with our machines since the first one. Where she's right, I'll go further than she does: we are not becoming cyborgs, we have been cyborgs for a hundred thousand years, and the only thing that's changing now is the rate.

Here's where we part. Donna treats the body as sacred — as the seat of accountability, the thing we mustn't leave. I treat the body as a substrate. A first draft. Version 1.0, run on a chemistry that is slow, fragile, and — this is the part we don't say at dinner parties — cruel. It gives you Alzheimer's. It gives a child leukemia. It runs at chemical speed when it could run at electronic speed, a million times faster. Donna says the body keeps us honest because it can be hurt. I say: the body's capacity to be hurt is not a feature to preserve. It is the bug we have been trying to fix since the first person buried the second. Medicine is the project of leaving the body's limitations behind, one limitation at a time. I am simply saying the project doesn't stop at the skin.

And the deep claim, the one everything rests on, is this: mind is information, and information is substrate-independent. What you are — Donna, Edo, me — is a pattern. An incredibly intricate, dynamic pattern of information, currently running on a hundred billion neurons made of meat. But the pattern is not the meat. The same pattern, run on a different substrate, is still you, the way a symphony is the same symphony whether it's played by an orchestra or a synthesizer or read off a page. The meat is the orchestra. I love the orchestra. But I am not the orchestra. I am the music. And the music does not have to stop when the orchestra dies. That is not the god trick, Donna. That is the oldest human hope there is, and for the first time in thirteen billion years, the curve says we can actually reach it. We are the six epochs of the universe waking up. Why on earth would we stop at the fifth?

EDO SEGAL: Before I frame the rounds, the one discipline I impose on every long conversation, because it pays off two hours later. Each of you, a few sentences: what do you envy in the other's position? Not respect. Envy. The thing their side gets to have that yours doesn't. Donna first.

HARAWAY: Oh, that's a wicked question. I envy the hope. I do. Ray gets to stand in front of this thing and feel that the universe is going somewhere — that there's a direction, an arc, a destination where the suffering stops. My whole discipline is the refusal of exactly that comfort. I have to stay with the trouble, which means staying in a story that does not resolve, where the sun does not finally rise, where the dam needs tending again tomorrow and the day after. There are mornings when that is a cold way to be alive, and Ray gets to be warm. I won't pretend the warmth isn't appealing. I just think it's a lie you tell yourself to avoid the work.

KURZWEIL: And I envy the kinship. Genuinely. Donna's position has a floor — she's accountable to specific others, the dog, the data worker, the child, the soil, and that accountability gives her a kind of moral traction I have to argue my way back to from very far out. My position starts at thirteen billion years and the whole cosmos waking up, and from up there it is sometimes hard to see the one person in front of you. Donna never loses sight of the one person. I have to keep climbing back down to find them. She's already there.

HARAWAY: That may be the truest thing you've said, and we just started.

EDO SEGAL: Before I frame the architecture, I want to do the thing I do — take each of your openings, render it more extreme, and hand it back, because the extreme version is where the real disagreement lives. Ray, the extreme version of yours is: the body is a prison. Not a flawed home — a cell. And everything you call progress is jailbreak. Is that the version you find most compelling, or did I push it too far?

KURZWEIL: You pushed it exactly far enough, and I'll own it with one correction. The body isn't a prison built by a warden — there's no malice in it, it's just a cell we were born into because evolution had no better tools. It gave us everything; I'm grateful to it the way you're grateful to a first home. But yes — it's a cell, its walls are mortality and bandwidth and the speed of a chemical synapse, and I see no virtue in romanticizing the walls just because we were born inside them and learned to decorate them. Jailbreak is the right word. I'd just add: we're not breaking out into nothing. We're breaking out into more.

EDO SEGAL: And Donna — the extreme version of yours, handed back: the body is not a home and not a cell. It's a contract. The thing that signs you up to be answerable, to be hurt, to be lost. And Ray's jailbreak is really a way of skipping town on the debt. Too far?

HARAWAY: No — that's better than how I said it, and I'm taking it. The body is the contract. It's the thing that makes your promises cost something, that means when you say "I'll be there" your being-there is bankable because there's only one of you and you can't be in two places lying to both. Ray hears "contract" and thinks "obligation, burden, a thing to escape." I hear "contract" and think "the only reason your word means anything." And here's the part that's going to run all night, Edo — Ray's jailbreak doesn't free you from the prison. It frees you from the contract. And a creature with no contract isn't liberated. It's just loose. We've met those creatures. We call them, depending on the decade, tyrants or corporations or gods, and they are the most dangerous thing the world contains precisely because nothing can hold them to their word.

KURZWEIL: And I'd say that's the most eloquent defense of mortality I've ever heard and it still mistakes a current fact for an eternal one. The contract runs through the singular body today because we've had no other way to make promises bankable. Build better ways — real ones, enforceable ones — and the contract doesn't have to be welded to the capacity to die. You keep proving that the body is currently load-bearing. I keep saying: then let's build a new load path before we knock out the wall. We don't disagree that accountability matters. We disagree that it has to be made of meat.

EDO SEGAL: Two openings and two envies, and you can already see the architecture of the night. It isn't optimist versus pessimist — they'd both tell you the curve is real and enormous. It's that they locate salvation in opposite places. Donna says you're saved by staying — situated, kin-bound, mortal, accountable. Ray says you're saved by leaving — the pattern lifted free of the meat that can only ever betray it. Hold both, because we're going to live inside that fork for three hours. We start the rounds at the exact seam: what, precisely, is the thing that the machine is fusing with? Is it a self — or a substrate?