A Response to Andrey Mir's "What will be the ultimate form of Human Replay"?

A debate on the fate of humankind

[My response to this post by Andre Mir]

Let me begin by saying how much I welcome this debate with Andrey Mir. I’ve always been an enthusiastic supporter of Karl Popper’s principle that we learn through criticism. And debate is a fine vehicle for that.

But why the need for debate with Andrey Mir? Because, although I think Andrey Mir’s publications about media and their impact are the best we have going these days, which means very impressive and valuable indeed, I do disagree strongly with his view that what I have termed “human replay” will reverse in not too long into “human replacement,” certainly a lamentable prospect in which we are replaced by the very media we invent, which in my view have evolved, and are evolving, into ever more human-like function.

To be clear, I think Andrey has done a fine job explaining my “anthropotropic” theory of media evolution, which I came up with and developed in my doctoral dissertation “Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution” in 1978, and published as a book in 2017. Our species began with the full range of sight, hearing, touch, etc we still walk around with today. But we were limited by these very biological functions — we could only see and here as far as our eyesight and earshot, and the moment we spoke a word it vanished. So we invented technologies that could extend our eyes and ears across time and space, which is what writing on cave walls, on paper, and in Morse Code via telegraph did. But once we invented and mastered those media, we yearned to have our cake and it eat, too — we wanted both the extension and our full biological functions. So the telegraph gave way to telephone (which conveyed spoken words with the same electronic immediacy as the telegraph), and then the video-phone (aka Facetime), etc. That is the essence of what I mean by “human replay”.

The title of Andre’s excellent book is The Digital Reversal (here’s my review). Reversal is the fourth of Marshall McLuhan’s four “Laws of the Media” — aka the tetrad — and explores in this final stage how the technology or element that has been mapped ultimately “reverses” or “flips into” something which both resembles this technology or element and at the same time is very different. Radio (instantaneous sound across great distances) reverses into television (instantaneous images and sound across great distances) which, as Andrey correctly notes, I indicated in 1978 would in turn reverse into holography (three-dimensional images and sound across great distances). See my “Tetrad ‘Wheels’ of Cultural Evolution” (a paper I presented at the 1978 Tetrad Conference with Marshall McLuhan that I organized) for more on these evolutions of media.

Seeking to apply reversal to what I say in Human Replay is happening to media and technology in general, Andrey says “human replay” will flip into “human replacement”. That reversal adheres to the laws of the media in that it is closely related to human replay and is also something very different. Further, it has the McLuhanesque linguistic advantage of sharing the same first word and the first five letters of the second word of human replay. So human replay reverses into human replacement.

So why do I have issues with it?

Here’s the reason:

Intrinsic to the tetrad is that the instances or substantiations of the second, third, and fourth spokes of the tetrad wheel are multiple. As Andrey rightly notes, not only did television reverse into holography, it reversed into the Internet, which indeed has been vastly more important in our society. You could add to this list of reversals: the smartphone. And if we wanted to focus on specific aspects of television, we could note that television which began as broadcasting reversed into cable which reversed into streaming (which retrieved reading as many chapters of a book as we wished anytime) as the tetrad wheel rolled forward.

So what else, other than humanoid extensions of our senses and our being that are so like us, even better at survival than us, that they will replace us, might human replay reverse into?

What about human beings who have lifelike extensions built into them, just as some people now have titanium hips, as I do? As Buckminster Fuller noted even before McLuhan, eyeglasses are extensions of our eyes. Are people who use eyeglasses or have titanium hips in some way less human? As far as I can tell, from personal experience and observation of many others, not at all.

But let’s say human replay does reverse into androids that have all of our characteristics -- why insist or be sure that such androids will replace us? Just as we have books, newspapers, radio, podcasts, television, the Internet, et al, all existing side by side, what would prevent androids and humans from cohabitating our world and beyond? In fact, Isaac Asimov describes such a galaxy and beyond, inhabited by sentient robots and humans.

And, of course, there’s always the possibility that we will encounter other sentient beings, which humans and androids can reverse into living with. The point of all this is that, as Jim Bishop observed, “the future is opaque”. It’s not so much that we can’t see it, or can’t see it clearly, it’s that the future admits to so many possibilities. Andrey Mir may be right that “human replay” will flip into Arnold Schwarzenegger knocking on my door, looking for Sarah Connor, but I’m guessing “human replay” will flip into one of the many more hospitable reversals, and the Terminator was defeated in the end, anyway.

Over to you, Andrey …