Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

[Munger]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

I'll just leave this here:

Kiva Systems, the warehouse robot company, opened its new World Headquarters in North Reading, Massachusetts on May 24th. The company is expanding its capacity to meet the growing list of online retailers that want to give their robots a job. Singularity Hub was at the ribbon cutting ceremony, and we got a sneak peek behind Kiva’s manufacturing.



The celebration was kicked off by Kiva CEO and founder, Mick Mountz, who recounted the moment he first envisioned a robotic warehouse. At the time he was working for Webvan Group, an online grocery delivery service that eventually went under. The thought occurred to Mountz: What if the products could walk and talk on their own? He reasoned that a warehouse could vastly improve its efficiency if, rather than people going to pick the products, the products went to the people. Out of this idea was born an army of “picker” robots: short and squarish motors that retrieve merchandise racks and bring them to human pickers.

An area was setup so the guests–mostly Kiva customers, potential customers, partners, and academics–could see the robots in action. Like a colony of flattened and orange R2D2s, about 20 or 30 of their F-series robots scooted back-and-forth, constantly avoiding imminent collisions by inches. They almost seemed enthusiastic as they went about their work, picking up racks and toting them aimlessly around before realizing that no human pickers were to be found in the demonstration area. Undeterred, the robots would set the rack down and cheerfully go get another one as if to say, “C’mon, let’s get to work!”

And their robotic enthusiasm would be appropriate. In these times of tightened job markets, these blue collar bots have got the skills companies are looking for. The need for the 160,000-square foot North Reading facility speaks to Kiva’s growing success, and the growing presence of robotics inside e-commerce warehouse operations. Kiva, Mountz mentioned, has robots in 16 different US states and 4 countries worldwide. Customers are reporting that Kiva’s automated “pick, pack and ship” is increasing productivity six- to ten-fold. Next day shipping is becoming less impressive as realtime order fulfillment ships within 15 minutes. Named the 6th fastest growing company in the US by Inc. 500 two years ago, Kiva enables industry leaders such as The Gap, Staples, Saks 5th Avenue, Offce Depot, Crate and Barrel, and Walgreens to fulfill millions of orders per year. Kiva is currently in talks with the big fishes of e-commerce Amazon and Wal-Mart. It’s clear that the robotic warehouse has arrived and large e-commerce companies will no doubt suffer if they’re slow to adopt it.

Kiva robots come in two sizes. The standard F-bot in the middle can lift 1,000 lbs. The larger model lifts 3,000 lbs.



The breakthrough technology that is transforming warehouses allows a human picker to perform quickly and accurately with little or no training, all while standing in the same place. When an order is placed, a server assigns the merchandise to one of a number of pickers on the floor. A robot goes to the appropriate rack, screws itself in from underneath, then brings the rack to the picker. Upon reaching the picker a laser pointer above the picker’s head–part of the “light-to-light” system–will mark the bin that holds the merchandise. The picker grabs the merchandise, scans it, places it in another rack with a second lit up bin, and it’s off to packing. Hitting a button on the rack confirms the pick, and the robot rushes away to return the rack to storage.

As you can imagine the orders typically come pretty quickly, and the robots with them. A picker will often have a conga line of robot-driven racks feeding them merchandise. And that’s the whole idea. Without the need to walk up and down warehouse aisles the pickers can spend all of their time picking. See how easy it is in the video below.

The replenishment process works in reverse. A worker scans the product upon arrival and a robot fetches the rack. Again, the laser pointer will tell the worker which bin the product goes into, and then the drive unit’s off to return the replenished rack. The replenishment technology is smart and takes advantage of the constant mobility of the racks to squeeze even more efficiency into the warehouse. The system software tracks the frequency at which all of the products are ordered. The constant shuffling of racks allows the drive units to move the more popular products towards the outside of the storage floor and closer to the pickers. If you tracked suntan lotion, for example, you’d see it migrate outward during the summer months, and back in towards the floor center during the winter months.

I asked Scott Davis, Senior Manager of Quality Systems, if he thought the system had much room for improvement. With an emphatic yes he explained that not all Kiva customers are the same, that each has their own unique requirements for the system. As new customers present new requirements the system will be developed in unanticipated ways. Engineers are currently testing a new feature called the “hybrid highway,” where robots of different sizes will work together, crisscrossing on the same floor space. Right now the robots have to be in the same weight class to mingle.



The guidance system driving the robots is pretty smart too. An underneath camera watches for fiducias–stickers that map out the floor. Upon reaching these waypoints the server which tracks the robots tells it whether or not the road ahead is clear. The system is so precise that one robot class doesn’t have brakes–it glides to a stop. Because precision is so important, the fiducias are laser-mapped to their locations. But even then placement can be a little off. Doesn’t matter. The robots remember which fiducias are off and adjust their paths accordingly.

The Kiva system also allows customers to adjust to the terrain. “Our customers are enjoying something very novel about the Kiva solution, which is flexibility,” says Mountz. “Normally automation constrains you to some particular capacity. With Kiva everything is modular and mobile and portable.” He adds that customers “can start small and add to their Kiva systems as their business grows, thereby deferring capital investment and using their capital more efficiently.”
The mobility that Mountz mentions also allows the entire system to be moved once a business has outgrown the walls of its warehouse. “Last summer we moved an entire warehouse with a customer in a weekend. Didn’t miss a single order.”

A typical Kiva solution includes about 30 to 50 robots and will run customers $1 to $2 million depending on features. All of the Kiva robots are assembled and tested in the North Reading facility. They gave us a tour of the manufacturing floor, but because the technology is proprietary we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Like the robots, the humans that build them are working efficiently. Assembly is completed at a series of stations, each of which has a defined amount of time allotted to the task. If an assembler finishes a few minutes early he or she moves to another station to pitch in. The facility is also fully capable to test the brains that go into the bodies. A test lab area includes a simulated warehouse floor custom configured to the new customers needs. Hardware and software engineers collaborate here to test firmware, new rack designs as well as new picking and packing station designs. The real world test for the newbies is a 24-hour simulated run.

The ribbon cutting honors fell to Mountz. The stars of the show then marched like a graduating class one after the other through the cut ribbon. Their march–and the march of other robots–will continue from the manufacturing floor to warehouses across the world, with the purpose not to replace, but to help.
For now.

As time goes by our robotic co-workers are going to get smarter. And as they do, they’re going to want to update their resumes. Who knows, someday we humans may be out of the job altogether.

http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/28...uarters-video/

[c1ue]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

if 95% of the population lives in poverty, what can the remaining 5% buy? ans: pretty much anything they want.

If 95% of the population lives in poverty - there is a revolution within 5 years.

Even in those nations with extremely high levels of poverty - say Congo - the majority of those called in poverty are actually subsistence farmers.

95% poverty as defined by the story - urban poverty - simply cannot exist for any length of time as a society.

These are all from the last six months or so:

Looking at your links:

The TUG robot: in 2001 - 10 years ago - it was touted as costing $35,000:

http://www.post-gazette.com/business...on1025bnp2.asp

Each of the robots costs $35,000, a price that Thorne and Sobehart said was about a quarter of what it would cost for hospital employees to do the tasks. San Diego-based Pyxis makes a comparable product, Help Mate, which sells for about $159,000 and includes the cart and some other expanded features.

I could not find any more recent price, nor does the aethon.com website show prices, though the TUG robot cannot be bought stand alone. It must be part of a 'maintenance package' which ensures function and battery life. It should be noted that in 2001 - the robot was supposed to cost 1/4 to perform the same task as a hospital employee, and now 10 years later it is 1/3. Seems to imply a $50K or more cost.

Again - quite unclear how this 'robot' achieves significant cost savings given the minimum wage role it is replacing.

And again, a significant part of the cost savings is via offloading part of the labor: instead of a cafeteria person doing the offloading, the nurse gets to do it.

If nurses were already serving the actual meals, then the TUG is literally just replacing a person pushing a cart.

The SpeciMinder: This is the same device mesyn191 referred to earlier - a $50K self propelled cart.

The Pharmacy 'bot: This is more interesting.

Yet again, the problem is that removal of the human element removes some errors, but also removes error checking. The computer isn't going to question whether a given entry makes sense, nor do computers build up experience.

Sure, trial and error will eventually lead to a better software package, but then again you now introduce programmer error into the equation.

ARUP: This is interesting - and a very specialized case. A large number of mostly static specimens are used for testing, and organization and management of said large specimen pool is costly. Makes perfect sense.

Of course the other part of the equation is the common thread above: these are all medically related.

Perhaps the driving factor here isn't the progress of robotic automation so much as the advance of medical costs in the United States.

I'll just leave this here:

Another micro-mouse system.

You all should note that I built micro-mouse systems in 1989 - and the first micro-mouse university competition was held in 1979 with national contests still ongoing:

http://www.tic.ac.uk/micromouse/history.asp

Seeing a bunch of slightly fancified micromouse navigation systems being touted as evidence of the next generation of robots doesn't hold much water with me.

[necron99]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

All I can say is that economics is not (**gasp**, believe it or not) the sole and only motivator in our culture. (Yes, yes, heresy, I know.)

To spell things out, the motivation for adopting such heavily automated systems is for increased control and predictability, which owners and financiers like. They are often (not always, but often) willing to pay a little extra in up-front capital in order to lock in predictability and control in the long run, even though strictly speaking that is an uneconomic forward expenditure.

Believe me, I have held private-sector engineering jobs for 13 years and public-sector jobs for 4 years. The trend I have seen is towards increasing control. In the private sector you can't design anything yourself, it all has to be done with templates and based on previous designs etc. or your bosses will never approve it. I probably don't have to explain that you can't even sneeze at a government job without filling out 16 forms that are supposed to cover every single sneeze contingency in a standardized manner. Business and government, everybody is working (along different paths) towards the Henry Ford / Ray Kroc model which mandates that every transaction of the same type be standardized and identical, so that customers (and shareholders, and coworkers down the supply chain) can more easily predict exactly what to expect. The concept of "Accountability" is often abused, as the excuse to take decision-making power away from lower-tier workers. Everything must be standardized and done according to policy, no exceptions. Long before robots became even vaguely feasible to build, we were moving our business culture towards the repetitive, standardized procedures which robots just happen to excel at.

Another friend of mine, after reading _Manna_, sent me an article about how even legal firms are using software to sift through large volumes of deposition testimony these days. (The quote from the _Manna_ story was something about "even lawyers and engineers were using the headsets".) Of course you can't use software for everything that requires nuance, the software certainly isn't good enough to replace _all_ paralegals, but you can see how it leads towards a downsizing trend. Software and robotics can't replace everybody, but they can replace more and more people as they get more sophisticated.

With regards to training, at my current job I already have to watch about 12 hours of training videos per year (and watch them again every other year to keep my certification current). As human jobs become more and more limited and repetitive, it becomes easier and easier for a few trainers and video producers to automate the training process. Once again, we might never fire the very last trainer -- we probably can never get rid of the human element entirely -- but we will downsize more and more of them over time until the small number of high-powered experts remaining in those positions aren't a significant part of the work force. As jk implied, that's good for the people at the top, and they're the ones who make the business and financial decisions, so the workers at the bottom tend to matter less and less. Until the revolution.

So as far as revolution -- the story didn't say that 95% of the population "lives in poverty" simply because they don't have a job. Define poverty. The story specified that everyone was being shunted to free public housing, fed by automated farms and given medical care by robots. If you count those as economic benefits, that was supposed to be a relatively high standard of living. At that late stage of the story, the predominance of very sophisticated robots allowed the rich people to provide that standard of living to the poor at little marginal cost; essentially they were buying off the revolution on the cheap.

One might assume that if things like Internet and video games were also provided for free, most of those poor people wouldn't feel like they were impoverished at all. (Whether they actually _were_ impoverished, and/or deprived of basic human drive and spirit etc. due to ambition and opportunity being closed off from them -- is a totally open question and I think the main point of the story is to ask us if we feel that is satisfactory.) 80% of that 95% underclass would probably be perfectly happy in that situation as long as they could spend most of their day chatting on Facebook, watching movies on demand, and then maybe hit the gym or play sports once in awhile so as to remain attractive to the opposite sex. A small percentage of the population would have the Captain Kirk reaction to the situation -- "a cage is still a cage no matter how gilded the bars" -- but I doubt it'd be a majority. Especially after decades of acculturation to indoor living and Internet stimulation, which we are doing now. Clandestinely throw some contraceptives into the water supply and the bulk of the population could be warehoused and managed quite effectively for a long, long time without trouble, I think.

The point of the story is not that everything will come true exactly as predicted. The point of the story is that forces in our society, including technology and automation, but also including class stratification, are driving us in that direction. So we're supposed to think about whether we really like where we're going. C1ue apparently doesn't like the destination of that journey, no argument there. So the question is what are we all doing to take the leadership role and choose a different path?

[flintlock]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

Humans bring problems with them that robots do not.


As far as the result of high urban unemployment and poverty. Anyone read the latest Drudge headlines? Gangs, riots, teens running amok!

[c1ue]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

So as far as revolution -- the story didn't say that 95% of the population "lives in poverty" simply because they don't have a job. Define poverty. The story specified that everyone was being shunted to free public housing, fed by automated farms and given medical care by robots. If you count those as economic benefits, that was supposed to be a relatively high standard of living. At that late stage of the story, the predominance of very sophisticated robots allowed the rich people to provide that standard of living to the poor at little marginal cost; essentially they were buying off the revolution on the cheap.

One might assume that if things like Internet and video games were also provided for free, most of those poor people wouldn't feel like they were impoverished at all.

This line of thinking might be more credible if it hadn't been used previously: see Industrial Revolution ; Urbanization/Fencing off of rural commons ; Feudalism ; Roman latifundia ; etc etc.

In every case, the excuse used was that the hoi polloi being ground up in whatever ongoing process lived better than his parents.

And while this was true in a certain sense - what was equally true was that in every case, the greater overall affluence from technological/societal/economic/productivity gains was in fact largely consumed by the upper class.

[necron99]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

So I am not sure if we are actually disagreeing.

This line of thinking might be more credible if it hadn't been used previously: see Industrial Revolution ; Urbanization/Fencing off of rural commons ; Feudalism ; Roman latifundia ; etc etc.
In every case, the excuse used was that the hoi polloi being ground up in whatever ongoing process lived better than his parents.
And while this was true in a certain sense - what was equally true was that in every case, the greater overall affluence from technological/societal/economic/productivity gains was in fact largely consumed by the upper class.

The story wasn't meant to suggest -- and I certainly didn't mean to suggest -- that penning up the lower classes would be something desirable. I think it's pretty clear from the _Manna_ story that the author considers that outcome a dystopia, because he contrasts it with the "Australia Project" where automation is used to serve human goals and freedoms; in the last few chapters, a paradisical high-tech Australia (believe it or not) is explicitly contrasted with the fenced-in U.S. society where humans have become prisoners of the machines.
I don't think the author would assert that the proles could be penned up forever, either. I myself find it likely that, eventually, something (e.g., peak oil / some other peak resource; plague, etc.) would throw a monkeywrench into the system and people would revolt rather than just sit there in their cells when the system started breaking down. (But granted, the author does seem to imply that the caging of the proles might be a long-term result.)

Again, the writer of the story (Marshall Brain) likes to deal in societal directions. He's saying that forces in our society are pushing us in this direction, of unemployment and powerlessness, and we should think about how to change course. We may never arrive at the fenced-in dystopia of the unemployed surplus proles. But if we allow society to proceed for a long time in that direction, there may well be some kind of breakdown or revolt as C1ue seems to be asserting, which would overturn the whole system. The point is the illogic of waste, if I may quote Star Trek again. If we see our societies heading down this path, and we don't like the endpoint for whatever reason (leads to revolution, kills freedom, etc., whatever reason) then we should change the path before we actually get to the endpoint. Even if the reducto-ad-absurdium endpoint is literally impossible to achieve, it's still a bad direction.

Again, given the contrast to the high-tech paradisical Australia in the story, I don't think the author is even asserting that automation itself leads us inevitably towards unemployment. In the story, the technology does no more and no less than what we design it for. Our own human usage of the technology, what we as a nation decide to do with it, moves the society towards either the dystopia or the utopia.

[c1ue]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

Again, the writer of the story (Marshall Brain) likes to deal in societal directions. He's saying that forces in our society are pushing us in this direction, of unemployment and powerlessness, and we should think about how to change course.

Fair enough - the comment I raised above was in response to jtabeb's assertion that food, entertainment, and medical care constitute the sum of societal achievement.

You'll note that the above minus medical care yields food and entertainment: the modern version of 'bread and circuses'. Only the bread for the Roman mob won't be provided for by slave labor in Egypt, it will be provided for by the slave technology via a combination of genetics and robotics.

Yes, the Roman model lasted quite some time - the Republic lasted 500 years or so.

The 'bread and circuses' era, however, as described by Juventus around 100 AD, however, preceded political anarchy by only 100 or so years.

We may never arrive at the fenced-in dystopia of the unemployed surplus proles.

I don't know about that. It can be argued that most of the African American ex-slave population of the United States has been in this state for decades.

But if we allow society to proceed for a long time in that direction, there may well be some kind of breakdown or revolt as C1ue seems to be asserting, which would overturn the whole system. The point is the illogic of waste, if I may quote Star Trek again. If we see our societies heading down this path, and we don't like the endpoint for whatever reason (leads to revolution, kills freedom, etc., whatever reason) then we should change the path before we actually get to the endpoint. Even if the reducto-ad-absurdium endpoint is literally impossible to achieve, it's still a bad direction.

Again, given the contrast to the high-tech paradisical Australia in the story, I don't think the author is even asserting that automation itself leads us inevitably towards unemployment. In the story, the technology does no more and no less than what we design it for. Our own human usage of the technology, what we as a nation decide to do with it, moves the society towards either the dystopia or the utopia.

The problem with the 'magic' Australia solution is that it has literally never happened before.

Seriously.

Tyranny and/or chaos has been the result of societal breakdown every single time since recorded human history.

[Scot]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

Humans bring problems with them that robots do not.

Yep. It isn't high wages that keep American employers from hiring American workers. It's everything else that comes with hiring an American.

Consider this: regulators are now talking about charging CEOs with crimes for the illegal activities of their employees EVEN IF THEY HAD NO IDEA THE EMPLOYEES WERE INVOLVED IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITY.

So not only do you have to worry about things like the threat of strikes or lawsuits for some perceived slight, you now have to worry about going to jail for a crime one of your workers committed that you weren't even aware of.

[reggie]

Re: Is everyone becoming economically irrelevant?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8399963.stm

I think it's worth considering that all the menial jobs are being taken over by computers and robots.

Only so many people seem to have the capacity to go into university and develop skills to make these computers and robots.

Where does that leave everyone else?

The next shoe to drop are robots that can take over menial manufacturing jobs. At that time, China will be in big big trouble

Thanks to "great" thinkers like Norbert Weiner, Stafford Beer & Ross Asby, et al., Humanity & Information are disassociating. As this continues, the long tail of humanity loses leverage.

"It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together".

Norbert Weiner
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Here is something else that's relevant to this thread...

Issue Seven: Religion Online & Techno-Spiritualism
http://www.cybersociology.com/files/...posthuman.html

Book Review by nat muller

N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.

In her new book How We Became Posthuman N. Katherine Hayles (http://www.english.ucla.edu/HAYLES) addresses the question of how information lost its body. The incentive for the book was Hayles being shocked into awareness after reading Hans Moravec's book Mind Children, wherein he envisions the possibility of downloading human consciousness into a computer. Such a scenario regards human consciousness as informational patterns, which can be materialised and dematerialised at any chosen location. Whether this materialisation takes places in an organic body or a silicon body is of no consequence. The locus of human subjectivity thus becomes the disembodied mind, again re-enacting that same old Cartesian split our culture just cannot seem to rid itself of.

Hayles is worried about prevailing scientific and cultural discourses which render the body as excess "meat", and view consciousness as entirely separated from the body. She is eager to bring the body back into the picture in order to demonstrate that there is an interactive dynamic between seemingly disembodied information, and the material substrates which carry and convey them. In her book she sets out to examine how information came to be treated as a disembodied entity. This leads her to research the history of cybernetics through scientific and literary texts: moving from historical accounts about the legendary Macy Conferences on cybernetics (1945-1960) to the SF-novels of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson, to Rodney Brooks' artificial life experiments. Hayles weaves a dense narrative wherein scientific and cultural discourses interlace.

Through a process of seriation (a term taken from archaeological anthropology wherein the developments of artefacts are traced through replication and innovation). Hayles wants to entangle abstract form and material particularity in her text, so that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception that matter and information are separate (23). However, such literary strategies do not always contribute to the strength and the lucidity of her argument. This is perhaps due to the fact that Hayles has taken her archaeological trope a bit too literally, and has excavated several essays she had written in 1990 (Chapter 4) and 1993 (Chapter 2, Chapter 8) and turned them into chapters. The replication part of the seriation strategy works well here, but I am not too sure whether there is too much innovation involved here. Though the scientific chapters and literary chapters are incorporated in the same "body" of the book, there is still a clear division between them. Structurally they do not really make up part of the same system, since the literary texts still seem somehow subordinate to the scientific ones. Their function is to illustrate, rather than instantiate. The chapter sequence re-enacts this logic: scientific chapters are followed by literary ones and not the other way round.

Nevertheless, this doesn't diminish Hayles' fascinating account of how science and culture have privileged the abstract as the Real, and have downplayed materiality. She identifies 3 major chronological stages, where she respectively addresses 3 central questions: how did information lose its body, how did the cyborg become an icon, and how did we become Posthuman. The first stage covers the period from 1945 to 1960 (Macy conferences on Cybernetics). This is the foundational era of cybernetics where people such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann and Gregory Bateson play a starring role. Our current state of virtuality is a product of historical factors and decisions, which started out at the first Macy conferences. Wiener and Shannon theorised information as something devoid of meaning. This had to effect that information was decontextualised (read disembodied). Not everyone agreed with this point of view. Donald MacKay for example, wanted to get meaning back into information. However, this meant that context (read embodiment) should be taken into account, and that information should be treated as something specific and situated. Situatedness means that universalisation and quantification become near to impossible. Scientists didn't like to walk the murky paths of the specific…no wonder Wiener and Shannon's voice prevailed.

Hayles calls the second stage (1960-1980) one of reflexivity. Whereas in the first wave of cybernetics humans and machines were perceived as analogous, and embodiment was discarded, the second wave emphasised the latter. Reseachers such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela re-introduced the notion of the observer, as constructing an abstract notion of information in order to make sense of the world. Thus here information does become specific to what the observer makes out of it. For example, Maturana states that systems always behave as they should, for they operate in accord with their structure at the very moment. For example, if my car doesn't start in the morning, I (the observer) experience this as an error because my car doesn't behave according to a certain pattern of expectation. But actually my car is behaving in accord with its structure at that very moment. It is the observer who perceives this structure as broken or malfunctioning. Here the novels of Philip K. Dick are used to exemplify the role of the observer in the construction of reality. In contradistinction to Maturana and Varela, who utilised the domain of the observer to recuperate everyday notions of cause and effect and even establish a sense of reality; Dick uses it to estrange every consensus on reality.

The last stage where we find ourselves in now, is that of virtuality. Hayles rightly critiques the contemporary belief that the body is primarily a discursive and linguistic construction. She blames post-modern theory for concentrating on discourse rather than on embodiment, and thus highlights once again how seriation functions. This is to say, post-modern theory replicates once again the Cartesian mind/body split, wherein philosophy cannot conceptualise itself as having a body. She draws an interesting distinction between "body" and "embodiment", the former being an abstract idealised form, a discursive universal construct. Embodiment, on the other hand, is always contextual, enmeshed with the specifics of place, time, etc. Experiences of embodiment are always imbricated within a culture, it never coincides fully with the abstract pure ide a of the body. No wonder then that theorists writing on corpo/reality choose to avoid (again!!) the messy specificity of embodiment, and prefer to write (like Foucault) on the universality of the body. The third wave is typified by the different developments in the field of artificial life. As Hayles points out, some researchers choose to concentrate on screen simulations (like Thomas S. Ray's Tierra program), and thus on disembodiment. While others, like Rodney Brooks (mobots) emphasise the importance of physicality and environmental interaction.

What becomes clear at the end of Hayles' narrative is that the future of human subjectivity need not necessarily be contained in a silicon vessel as Moravec predicts, but that other alternatives are available as well. I fully support Hayles' project to promote the contention that human beings are first and foremost embodied, and that embodiment - and the actions deriving thereof - are located and specific. However, the aspiration of distancing oneself from "disembodied" universalising discourses proves difficult. Perhaps seriation isn't the most effective strategy, since an archaeological trope reeks always more of the replication of things past than innovation.