Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh: The Organization As Locus of Technological Posthumanization

SAPIENT CIRCUITS AND DIGITALIZED FLESH: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization

Matthew E. Gladden

Published in the United States of America by Defragmenter Media in association with West Pole & Larkspur, imprints of Synthypnion Press LLC

Synthypnion Press LLC

Indianapolis, IN 46227

http://www.synthypnionpress.com

Copyright © 2016 Matthew E. Gladden

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, apart from those fair-use purposes permitted by law.

ISBN 978-1-944373-00-9 (print edition)

ISBN 978-1-944373-01-6 (ebook)

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July 2016

To all those persons working in organizations that are undergoing rapid technologization – that their humanity might be strengthened and never overshadowed by posthumanity

PREFACE

This book has emerged in response to the current lack of a comprehensive analysis making the methodologies and insights of posthumanist thought directly accessible and relevant for those who study or manage contemporary organizations. The best works on posthumanism already existing have typically appeared within fields such as literary criticism or bioethics that have little immediate application to organizational theory and management. Conversely, the many management texts exploring the impact of emerging technologies on organizational performance and change typically do so from a functional or strategic perspective that is highly practical in nature, and they do not extensively draw on (or even recognize) the underlying technologically facilitated transformation in the nature of human agency and our relationship to our environment that has deep ontological, phenomenological, psychological, aesthetic, ethical, legal, and political components and which posthumanist thought is analyzing with great fruitfulness.

This book is designed to address that lacuna in current scholarship by undertaking a systematic effort at building bridges between posthumanism and organizational theory and management. My hope is that this work will especially be of use to scholars and students of management who are interested in the posthumanizing role of emerging technologies, as well as managers who must understand the rapidly evolving sociotechnological dynamics that shape their organizations and make real-world decisions that affect the lives of many. The text may also be of value to science fiction writers and futurists who, for their own reasons, are working to develop imaginative and realistic visions of the ways in which human agency and organizations will be transformed through their encounter with new forms of artificial and hybrid human-synthetic agency.

This book provides a general conceptual framework that ties together many of the particular topics explored in journal articles and book chapters that I have published and lectures and conference presentations that I have delivered over the last couple of years. I am grateful to everyone who made possible those opportunities for dialogue and feedback. I am particularly thankful to the faculty, staff, and students of the universities and other research institutions where many of the ideas contained in this text were first presented, including those of Aarhus University, VERN´ University of Applied Sciences, the Jagiellonian University, the Facta Ficta Research Center, the Warsaw University of Technology, the University of Silesia in Katowice, the Centrum Informacji Naukowej i Biblioteka Akademicka (CINiBA) in Katowice, the Faculty of Humanities of the AGH University of Science and Technology, the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Digital Economy Lab of the University of Warsaw. I am also thankful to the editors and other personnel who made possible the publication of my earlier investigations into these topics, including those at the MIT Press, IOS Press, Ashgate Publishing, Creatio Fantastica, the Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Informatyka Ekonomiczna / Business Informatics, Annales: Ethics in Economic Life, the International Journal of Contemporary Management, and Fronda Lux. In particular, I offer my deepest gratitude to Krzysztof Maj, Ksenia Olkusz, Mateusz Zimnoch, Magdalena Szczepocka, Marco Nørskov, Johanna Seibt, Helena Dudycz, Natalia Juchniewicz, Renata Włoch, Mateusz Matyszkowicz, and Jerzy Kopański.

I am also thankful to many individuals who have been involved with the management and governance of organizations from whom I have learned so much, including Mariann M. Payne, Rita M. Rodriguez, Matthew R. Hummer, Harry A. Rissetto, Anthony F. Essaye, John G. Quigley, George R. Houston, Jr., Timothy Brown, S.J., Gerald J. Chojnacki, S.J., John C. Haughey, S.J., Thomas E. Scheye, Nancy L. Swartz, Rob Eby, Jillian Gobbo, Joseph A. McCartin, James T. Lamiell, Brad Kelly, Aisulu Raspayeva, Maria Ferrara, Keelan Downton, Laura Michener, Marley Moynahan, Kathryn Tucker, David Wilkins, John McKelvie, Kevin Flannery, Christian Lambert, Tessa Pulaski, Madeline Howard, Pamela Paniagua, Tom Rijntjes, Paweł Urbański, and Nathan Fouts.

I am also most grateful to everyone associated with Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, especially Douglas M. McCabe and Edwin Schmierer; to Serge Pukas, Paulina Krystosiak, Jacek Koronacki, and everyone affiliated with the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and to Nicole Cunningham for her friendship and example as an author. Whatever clarity and intelligibility are reflected in this text, I owe to Sarah Stern and her editorial tutelage; I appreciate her unbounded patience with my delay in the completion of other writing projects which, because of this one, remain unfinished.

I am especially thankful to those scholars who are forging innovative links between posthumanist thought and various aspects of human life whom I have had the opportunity to hear present their research and with whom I have enjoyed valuable conversations about many of these questions – especially Bartosz Kłoda-Staniecko, Agata Kowalewska, Krzysztof Maj, and Magdalena Szczepocka.

As always, I am deeply thankful to my parents, my brother, and other relatives and friends for the support they have provided throughout my research, and I offer my heartfelt thanks to my wife for her sound advice and continual encouragement. And, especially, I am grateful to Terry R. Armstrong and Gasper Lo Biondo, S.J., who have shaped me as a manager, a colleague, and a student of organizations; without them I would never have embarked upon the paths that have led to the preparation of this book. I am grateful to them and to all of the individuals whom I have mentioned; responsibility for the flaws and limitations that remain in this work after their generous input is mine alone.

Matthew E. Gladden

Pruszków, June 6, 2016

INTRODUCTION: The Posthumanized Organization as a Synergism of Human, Synthetic, and Hybrid Agents

The realities of contemporary organizational life are rapidly catching up with the visions long explored by science fiction writers and futurists. Many of us can now expect to experience during our working lives a world in which ‘ordinary’ human beings labor alongside artificial general intelligences, social robots, sapient networks, nanorobotic swarms, and human beings with genetically engineered capacities and neurocybernetic implants. A world in which a robot boss is embraced by its human subordinates because it is more empathetic, fair, honest, intelligent, and creative than its human predecessor. A customized product and marketing campaign designed for a single human consumer by an AI that can deduce the consumer’s deepest fears and desires. Artificial life-forms that function as self-contained ‘businesses’ by gathering resources from the environment, transforming them into products, and selling them to consumers, all without the involvement of any human beings. Intelligent, evolvable bioelectronic viruses that can infect an organization’s information infrastructure by moving effortlessly back and forth between human employees and their computers. Corporate espionage conducted by hacking into the video stream of a rival CEO’s robotic eye. An office building or manufacturing facility or orbiting satellite or tropical resort where an organization’s employees gather every day to work but which exists only as a persistent virtual world experienced using immersive multisensory VR. Employees who engage their colleagues as avatars within virtual environments, without knowing or caring whether a particular coworker is a ‘normal’ human being, uploaded human mind, social robot, or artificial general intelligence. Different classes and subclasses of ‘metahuman’ and ‘parahuman’ employees and customers who have been genetically engineered to possess radically nonhuman types of minds and bodies. Human workers who no longer own the intellectual property rights to their own thoughts, dreams, or memories, because they were produced with the assistance of neuroprosthetic implants or cognitive enhancement software provided by their employer. Human beings who are unable to quit their jobs because they rely on their employers for a lifetime supply of antivirus updates, immunosuppressive drugs, or physical maintenance for their full cyborg body. Human workers whose invasive neural interfaces allow them to dwell permanently within virtual worlds and whose physical bodies must be cared for by their employer’s biomedical support division. Neurocybernetically linked human workers who lose their personal identity and merge to form a hive mind whose members share collective sensations, emotions, and volitions. A vast, tangled, digital-physical ecosystem in which an organization’s human and synthetic employees, buildings, vehicles, manufacturing equipment, databases, products, and customers are all cybernetically linked through their participation in the ‘Internet of Being.’

Such possibilities terrify some of us just as they exhilarate others. Because of the ongoing rapid technological developments taking place in many fields, these hypothetical scenarios present all who are involved with the study or management of organizations with complex ethical, legal, and operational questions whose thoughtful consideration cannot easily be further delayed.

THE ONGOING POSTHUMANIZATION OF ORGANIZATIONS

It is widely acknowledged that the nature of human organizations is undergoing a profound transformation. Historic approaches to long-term strategic planning are increasingly being rendered obsolete by intensifying forces of globalized competition, rising worker mobility, and the breathtaking pace of technological change that is driving organizations of all types to devote growing resources to activities like online commerce, social media, cloud computing, data mining, and the development of artificially intelligent tools.[1] Rich bodies of scholarship and best practices have been formulated to guide organizations in grappling with such change. However, while such analyses are of great practical value for informing decision-making in areas like marketing, sales, logistics, and finance, they have barely begun to plumb the deeper forces which – at an ontological and phenomenological level – are reshaping human beings’ capacity and desire to join with one another in the organized pursuit of shared goals.

Among the more noteworthy forces driving such change are those which can be collectively described as processes of posthumanization.[2] The dynamics of posthumanization are rewriting long-accepted rules about the kinds of entities that can serve as members of organizations, the sorts of structures that organizations can adopt to facilitate and regulate their internal activities, and the range of roles that organizations can play in their broader environment. One critical manifestation of posthumanization is seen in the changing nature of intelligent agency within our world. For millennia, organizations were fashioned and led by intelligent agents in the form of human beings – sometimes assisted by intelligent (though not sapient) agents in the form of dogs, horses, and other kinds of domesticated animals that filled specialized roles in support of their human caretakers. In many human societies, over the last century the role of animals as intelligent agents participating in the work of organizations has declined, while a new form of intelligent agent has emerged to take on roles critical to organizations’ successful functioning: namely, computerized systems that are capable of collecting and processing information and then selecting and pursuing a course of action.

The conceptual and functional distinction between the sort of ‘bioagency’ exercised by human beings and the ‘synthetic agency’ exercised by such electronic computerized systems was originally quite clear.[3] However, the array of intelligent agency present and active in organizations is now undergoing a rapid evolution, thanks to the emergence of new technologies for social robotics, artificial intelligence, artificial life, neurocybernetic augmentation, and genetic engineering.[4] Through our increasingly intimate integration of computerized devices into our cognitive processes and bodies, human agency is taking on aspects traditionally seen in artificial agents; the notion of the ‘cyborg’ is no longer simply a concept found in science fiction but – to a greater or lesser degree – an accurate description of ourselves and the people we meet around us every day.[5] At the same time, developments in the fields of robotics and AI are creating synthetic systems that possess levels of sociality, imagination, emotion, legal and moral responsibility, and metabolic processes resembling those which had previously been seen only in biological entities like human beings.[6]

Within organizations, information will be gathered and communicated, strategic decisions made, and actions undertaken by a kaleidoscopic web of intelligent agents which together form a complex cybernetic network. Such entities may include ‘natural’ human beings who have not been biotechnologically modified; human beings possessing neuroprosthetic implants that provide extensive sensory, motor, and cognitive enhancement;[7] human beings whose physical structures and biological processes have been intentionally sculpted through genetic engineering;[8] human beings who spend all of their time dwelling in virtual worlds;[9] virtualized entities resulting from a process of ‘mind uploading’;[10] artificial general intelligences;[11] social robots;[12] decentralized nanorobotic swarms;[13] artificial organic or electronic life-forms,[14] including virtual or physical robots that evolve through processes of mutation and natural selection;[15] sentient or sapient networks;[16] and ‘hive minds’ comprising groups of diverse agents linked in such a way that they can share collective sensory experiences, emotions, and volitions.[17]

At the forefront of efforts to understand and consciously shape this integration of biological and artificial agents are those diverse bodies of thought and practice that constitute the phenomenon of posthumanism. And yet, while insights and methodologies from the field of posthumanism have been advantageously applied to many other spheres of human activity, there have so far been very few explicit links made between posthumanism and the work of integrating posthumanized agents to form effective organizations. In this book, we endeavor to inform and enhance contemporary approaches to the design and operation of organizations by fashioning such a bridge between posthumanist thought and the fields of organizational theory and management. This task is approached at three different levels, moving from the more abstract sphere of basic investigations into the nature of posthumanism to the more concrete sphere of formulating tools for analysis and management in a posthumanized context.

THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF POSTHUMANISM

In Part One of this book, "A Typology of Posthumanism," we consider the nature of posthumanization and the many phenomena that have been described as forms of ‘posthumanism,’ in order to situate organizational posthumanism within a broader theoretical context. The array of activities that have been described as ‘posthumanist’ is quite diverse, ranging from literary criticism of Renaissance texts[18] and efforts by military research agencies to develop futuristic technologies for human enhancement[19] to spiritual movements and specific styles of performance art.[20] The question thus arises of whether these phenomena share anything in common at all – and if so, what is their shared dynamic and what are the characteristics that distinguish these different forms of posthumanism.

Much excellent work has been carried out by Ferrando, Herbrechter, Birnbacher, Miah, Miller, and others that explores the conceptual foundations of posthumanism. However, among such studies it can be noted that those research articles which are especially comprehensive and systematic in scope[21] must often – due to space limitations – refrain from exploring any particular form of posthumanism in depth. Meanwhile, the book-length analyses of posthumanism that are exceptionally thorough and detailed in their approach often focus on a single aspect of posthumanism rather than attempting to survey the phenomenon as a whole.[22] Moreover, existing analyses of posthumanism tend to emerge from fields such as critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy of technology, and bioethics; from the perspective of someone who is interested in organizational theory and management, it takes considerable work to extract meaningful insights from such studies and reinterpret and apply them in ways relevant to organizational life.[23]

Part One of this book attempts to synthesize and advance such existing analyses of posthumanism in a way that lays a conceptual foundation for understanding the varied processes of posthumanization that are relevant to specific topics in organizational theory and management. We begin by formulating a comprehensive typology that can be used to classify existing and future forms of posthumanism. The framework suggests that a given form of posthumanism can be classified either as analytic or synthetic and as either theoretical or practical. An analytic posthumanism understands ‘posthumanity’ as a sociotechnological reality that already exists in the contemporary world, such as the nonanthropocentric outlook found among some present-day evolutionary biologists, secular humanists, or animal-rights advocates that tends to minimize the distinctions between human beings and other biological species. A synthetic posthumanism is quite different: it understands ‘posthumanity’ as a collection of hypothetical future entities – such as full-body cyborgs or genetically engineered human beings – whose creation can either be intentionally realized or prevented, depending on whether humanity decides to develop and deploy particular technologies. A theoretical form of posthumanism is one that primarily seeks to develop new knowledge or cultivate new ways of understanding reality; posthumanist thought and study occurring on university campuses (and especially within the humanities) are often of this sort. Finally, a practical posthumanism seeks primarily to bring about some social, political, economic, or technological change in the world: efforts to develop new cryonics technologies or to engineer transhumanist genetic enhancements may be of this kind.

Arranging the properties of analytic/synthetic and theoretical/practical as two orthogonal axes creates a grid that can be used to categorize a form of posthumanism into one of four quadrants or as a hybrid posthumanism spanning all quadrants. We argue that analytic theoretical forms of posthumanism can collectively be understood as constituting a ‘posthumanism of critique’; synthetic theoretical posthumanisms, a ‘posthumanism of imagination’; analytic practical posthumanisms, a ‘posthumanism of conversion’; synthetic practical posthumanisms, a ‘posthumanism of control’; and hybrid posthumanisms uniting all four elements as a ‘posthumanism of production.’

Having developed this framework, we employ it to sift through a wide range of phenomena that have been identified as ‘posthumanist’ in the scholarly literature or popular discourse and to categorize them according to the framework’s criteria. The phenomena thus classified include critical, cultural, philosophical, sociopolitical, and popular (or ‘commercial’) posthumanism; science fiction; techno-idealism; multiple forms of metahumanism and neohumanism; antihumanism; prehumanism; feminist new materialism; the posthumanities; and biopolitical posthumanism, including bioconservatism and transhumanism.[24] Given its notable presence in the popular consciousness, special attention is devoted to transhumanism, and three specialized sub-typologies are discussed for distinguishing different forms of transhumanism. Part One concludes by considering the form of organizational posthumanism developed in this book and classifying it as a form of hybrid posthumanism that spans all four quadrants of the framework.

APPLYING POSTHUMANIST THOUGHT TO ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY AND MANAGEMENT

In Part Two, "Organizational Posthumanism," the manners in which posthumanist insights can be applied to the theory and practice of organizational management are explored in more detail. We sketch out one way of fashioning posthumanist methodologies into a coherent management approach and chart out the potential scope of such a field. At its heart, the organizational posthumanism formulated in this text is a pragmatic approach to analyzing, understanding, creating, and managing organizations that is attuned to the intensifying processes of technological posthumanization and which employs a post-dualistic and post-anthropocentric perspective that can aid in recognizing challenges caused by the forces of posthumanization and developing innovative strategies for appropriately harnessing those forces.

Organizational posthumanism does not naïvely embrace all forms of posthumanization; unlike some strains of transhumanist thought, it does not presume that all emerging technologies for genetic engineering or nanorobotics are inherently beneficial and free from grave dangers. But at the same time, organizational posthumanism does not directly join bioconservatism in attempting to block the development of particular technologies deemed to be hazardous or destructive. Instead, organizational posthumanism focuses on analyzing posthumanizing technologies that are already available or whose development is expected in order to assess their (potential) impact on organizations and develop strategies for utilizing such technologies in ways that are ethical, impactful, and efficient. Organizational posthumanism recognizes that emerging technologies are likely to possess both benign and harmful applications, and the role of a manager as such is to identify and creatively exploit the beneficial aspects of a technology within a particular organizational context while simultaneously avoiding or ameliorating the technology’s more detrimental effects.[25]

Indeed, like critical posthumanism and other forms of analytic posthumanism, organizational posthumanism recognizes that to a certain degree the world as a whole has already become ‘posthumanized’ through nontechnological processes: for example, regardless of whether a particular organization decides to acquire and exploit technologies for social robotics and neuroenhancement, the organization must account for the fact that its pool of (potential) employees, customers, and other stakeholders includes a growing number of individuals who, in different fashions and for varying reasons, possess increasingly nonanthropocentric and nondualistic ways of viewing reality. Thus engaging the realities of posthumanization is something that every contemporary organization must do of necessity; the only question is the extent to which an organization does so consciously and with a coherent strategy.

In order to develop an adequate framework for identifying the aspects of organizations that our study must address, we turn to fields like organizational architecture, enterprise architecture, and organizational design. When organizations are viewed through the lens of these disciplines, the relevance of six key elements becomes apparent: the forces of posthumanization are expected to increasingly expand and transform the kinds of agent-members, personnel structures, information systems, processes and activities, physical and virtual spaces, and external ecosystems that organizations are able (or required) to utilize.[26] We argue that in each of these six areas, three different kinds of posthumanizing technologies will create new opportunities, threats, and exigencies that drive organizational change. The first kind is technologies for human augmentation and enhancement, which include many forms of neuroprosthetics, implantable computing, genetic engineering, and life extension.[27] The second is technologies for synthetic agency, which include artificial intelligence, artificial life, and diverse forms of robotics such as social, nano-, soft, and evolutionary robotics.[28] The third kind is technologies for digital-physical ecosystems and networks, which create new kinds of environments that human, artificial, and hybrid agents can inhabit and infrastructure through which they can interact. Such technologies might create persistent immersive virtual worlds and cybernetic networks whose topologies allow their agent-members to form collective hive minds.[29]

MANAGING THE TRANSFORMATION AND FUNCTIONAL CONVERGENCE OF HUMAN AND ARTIFICIAL AGENTS

Part Two thus sketches the contours of organizational posthumanism as a field that can allow management theorists to understand the forces of posthumanization that are impacting organizations and for management practitioners to anticipate and shape them. However, before attempting to apply such insights to the task of creating organizational designs and enterprise architectures for particular organizations, it would be helpful to have at one’s disposal a more concrete guide for assessing the technological posthumanization of particular groups of agents, such as those comprising the (potential) stakeholders of an organization. To that end, in Part Three of the book, we formulate "The Posthuman Management Matrix," a conceptual tool for analyzing and managing the behavior of agents within organizations where the boundaries between human beings and computers are becoming increasingly blurred.

Within the schema of this Matrix, an organization’s employees and consumers can include two different kinds of agents (human and artificial agents), and the characteristics possessed by a specific agent belong to one of two sets (‘anthropic’ or ‘computronic’ characteristics). The model thus defines four different types of possible entities that might serve as organizational participants and stakeholders. The phrase ‘human agents