The Autopoietic Machine as the Posthuman Ethical Subject
—N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
"A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms. […] What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be noted, the existential coordinates that they ‘invent’ were always already there […] we need to rediscover a manner of being of Being — before, after, here and everywhere else — without being, however, identical to itself; a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions."
– Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 51
The implications of machinic autopoiesis are far-reaching for the field of Machine Ethics. These new forms of digital agency call attention to the rights of robots once we consider the ethical status and subjectivity of machines as inorganic, autonomous moral agents. Truly ethical machines are autonomous just as truly autonomous machines are ethical because ethics "imposes internal (as opposed to external) constraints on autonomous action" and because "ethical obligation is bound up in the very concept of autonomy" (Hooker and Kim 2). Deontological ethics guides this discussion of machinic autonomy and non-human intelligence because it "grounds ethics in the logical structure of action without presupposing that the agent is human" (Hooker and Kim 2). This is precisely the ethical infrastructure that must uphold posthuman Machine Ethics.
Moreover, in the discipline of cybernetics, Kevin Warwick and Slawomir Nasuto argue "The area of embodied cognition has been born from a realization that a satisfactory theory of intelligence must entail a physically embodied agent, interacting in real time with its environment via sensory motor contingencies. An equally important property, however, is autonomy. For an agent to be able to understand its actions it is necessary that it should be autonomous and hence should arrive at an intelligent behavior via its own interaction with the environment rather than having this feature built in a priory by the external designer" ("Historical and Current Machine Intelligence"--2006).
The posthuman subject is reformulated under the sign of the advanced digital age. What emerges, then, is a posthuman-machine subjectivity that presents new forms of ethical agency and autonomy. These are new becomings that riddle the posthuman predicament with paradox and possibility.
Moreover, in the discipline of cybernetics, Kevin Warwick and Slawomir Nasuto argue "The area of embodied cognition has been born from a realization that a satisfactory theory of intelligence must entail a physically embodied agent, interacting in real time with its environment via sensory motor contingencies. An equally important property, however, is autonomy. For an agent to be able to understand its actions it is necessary that it should be autonomous and hence should arrive at an intelligent behavior via its own interaction with the environment rather than having this feature built in a priory by the external designer" ("Historical and Current Machine Intelligence"--2006).
The posthuman subject is reformulated under the sign of the advanced digital age. What emerges, then, is a posthuman-machine subjectivity that presents new forms of ethical agency and autonomy. These are new becomings that riddle the posthuman predicament with paradox and possibility.