This is an abstract of a paper to be found at: http://www.iweb.net.au/~holmbase/Autop.htm
A short, comparative review of two books by two very different writers from the late twentieth century. Physicist, Robert McEachern’s evolutionary notion of bio-mechanistic symbiosis is presented as having commonality with philospher, Pierre Lévy’s revolutionary, ideas about collective intelligence. Both agree that what is new at the human-computer interface is the speed of interaction, feedback and reiteration.
Observational criterion established in Autopoietic Theory by Maturana and Varela could be used to evaluate the world wide web, the sum of all its components: human, machine and software, as an organism-like entity.
Cultural attitudes to sharing intelligent interaction with non-human intelligent entities are tempered by our understandings of virtuality. Lévy reminds us that all tools are virtual extensions of human capabilities. He warns that some of us may need to rethink our Descartian notions of self and other before we may effectively utilise human-machine symbiosis.
AH
