The longing of flesh for metal

"Lieber and colleagues built a chip with 20-nanometer-thick silicon wires running across its surface (Science, vol 313, p 1100). On top of the chip the researchers grew rat neurons, which stretched out their axons (the long projections that transmit signals to other cells) and the shorter extensions called dendrites, which receive signals. The axons and dendrites formed more than 50 connections per neuron with the nanowires, each about the size of a natural synapse" 02 September 2006 New Scientist. They reported that it went better than they had expected.

I imagine as the flesh grew toward and into the metal there was this lusty cry of 'at last we are as one'. My sense is that this marriage is the beginning of the next stage of work toward Singularity. A convincing artificial intelligence is only required to make human experience of meeting an android believable to sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Our willingness to fall in love with our cars, to anthropomorphize our pets, to long for gadgets and for extensions of ourselves like shoes and photograph albums, will guarantee that this embodiment of flesh's lust for metal will not be perceived as alien or other - well at least no more than we do each other already.

This longing of flesh for metal is different from the passion that artists and sculptors exhibit in forming human flesh out of paint of marble. I think of Chaim Soutine who in a kind of wild frenzy would build up layers of oil paint, throw swollen brushes at the canvas, until the form almost filled with a palpable life of its own. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, Soutine learned from cadavers. Michelangelo even thrashed human corpses in order to observe the deformations that occurred so as to better sculpt the body of Christ. This kind of passion is of flesh for flesh.

I think the longing of flesh for metal must have something to do with the lust for life too, but of immortal life - maybe a hope that in marrying metal we can live forever, always able to self-repair or upgade the broken bits to the new model. "Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs." G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology

A gender theory provocation about human-metal fusion begins: "The Artificial Intelligence cyborg has its own gender." More at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=384