Leonardo

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. … [W]hat the O.C. Bible should've said is: 'Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.'

—frank herbert [1]

In 1851, Herman Melville published his most famous novel, Moby Dick. It is the story of the obsessive pursuit of a white whale, Moby Dick, by a ship's captain that ultimately results in the destruction of the ship, the captain and all aboard but one who lived to tell the tale. In many respects, the book is a description of what happens when human beings lose sight of their humanity or, more simply, surrender it to something else.

At their most basic, relationships between human beings for millennia were, and to some extent still are, characterized by a human-human interface. This is the result of one person interacting directly with another for the accomplishment of a particular task. This may expand to become a "team" effort to achieve a particular goal, or it may be a matter of dispute resolution. As time went on, it became clear that more and more tasks would require a "team" effort, and the need for the individual "genius" tended to blend into the background. In the fourth century BC, Plato noted that Socrates was fond of beginning many of his dialogues with the phrase "Know thyself"—a clear statement of the importance of the individual as the foundation of society. That statement in effect prefaced that what was going to happen next would be in its very essence both personal and human. It set the tone for what was to happen in much of Western civilization for the next 2,000 years.

From the later centuries BC to the eighteenth century, much social, cultural and commercial interaction could be described as stemming from a human-human interface enhanced by "occasional" technology created to meet a specific need. During this period of technological elaboration, the ability of individual humans to control the consequences of the technology was diminished almost imperceptibly, but steadily.

It was with the beginning of the Industrial Age that the social dynamic began to shift noticeably away from a human-human toward a human-machine interface. This initially was the result of the creation of machines intended to perform mundane tasks formerly done by human beings.

The key feature, however, was that even in the human-machine interface environment, a person in the affirmative exercise of their mental resources retained some vestiges of human control of the mechanical environment, although that control tended to be diminished in direct relation to the complexity of the technological response required by the problem at hand. For that reason, some conception of ethical behavior was never not present in this system. The process, while gradual, was also characterized by a certain tension between the traditional view of individuality and the "group."

In the nineteenth century, the socioeconomic structure of society underwent a transition under the influence of what can be termed a human-machine interface. This meant that technology became an even more elaborate extension of human activities.

In modern times, however, there has been a shift, both in terms of society and technology, with the result that both chronologically and philosophically, the issue for society now is one of cyberethics: the relationship between the ethical and legal systems that have been developed to serve humanity from ancient times to the present as expressed in our philosophical and ethical systems of thought and the judicial process as contrasted with the ability of computer-driven technology to operate outside those conventions with almost no limits [2].

It is in this context that the Space Age wrought its magic on the society that existed in the middle of the twentieth century, and, without much fanfare, created the machine-machine interface. The requirement for human action was steadily reduced in direct proportion to the increased ability of machines to communicate with each other and accomplish tasks. Humanity had driven the functioning of the system, yet control over the...