Bodies as machines. Machines as bodies

ABSTRACT

From early Greek philosophers to Descartes’ machinic metaphors of humans-as-machines, to the emergence of physical machine-like humans, the intersections of the human body with machines circle back through hundreds of years of debates on human-technology relationships. We live in an age when robots are becoming increasingly human-like with artificial intelligence that mimics and sometimes exceeds our own. At the same time, we humans are adopting cyborg-like modifications to improve ourselves through biological, mechanical, and computer technologies. This conceptual paper presents a historical overview of the human-machine merger as both a metaphor and material reality. We show that the body has no intrinsic meaning for its distinct social constructions in technophilic and bioconservativist perspectives. This leads to a critical need for discussions about the issues related to dehumanization and personhood. These two topics must inform future research efforts to explore a future when current concepts of humanness may not hold anymore.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• machine
• metaphor
• transhumanism
• dehumanization
• personhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vitor Lima

Vitor Lima is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School. His research interests include emerging and speculative technologies, primarily focused on transhumanism, human enhancement technologies, cyborgs, biohacking, robots, and artificial intelligence. He is one of the finalists of the 2021 AMS Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2021 AMS Review – Sheth Foundation Doctoral Competition for Conceptual Articles (ADCCA), and with Russell Belk, recipient of the 2021 ACR Best Working Paper Award.

Russell Belk

Russell Belk is Royal Society of Canada Fellow, York University Distinguished Research Professor, and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing in the Schulich School of Business, York University. His research involves the extended self, meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, situational effects, sharing, digital consumption, consumer robotics, and materialism, and it is primarily qualitative as well as often conceptual, visual, and cultural. He is the past president and fellow in the Association for Consumer Research and has over 700 publications.