‘Being human’ is an idea in flux – the lines between our bodies, skin, and data are blurring. As we collectively adopt biometrics, facial recognition, and surveillance capitalism, our identity is being redefined in what could possibly be the following human evolutionary stage, ‘the coded self’. What does our sense of beauty and self mean if what defines us most is our data, greater than our own skin?

Five experts join me to debate these radical shifts within the human condition, including three Berggruen institute fellows, also host to the pioneering Transformations of the human program. Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning writer, human rights journalist, and the host of “Coded World”. Xiao Liu is the writer of the award-winning book Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Post socialist China. Her research spans from information studies to technology governance and policy.

Duan Weiwen is the Director and Professor of the Department of Philosophy of Science and Technology on the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Creative director Catty Tay and Strategy director Leanne Elliott Young are the co-founders of the Institute of Digital Fashion, pushing forward a latest wave of virtual and physical representation, working with firms, institutions and platforms to undo biases and adopt a latest language.

HUMANS AS LIVING CODE

Geraldine Wharry: Media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff explains human beings are increasingly defined by digital materials while algorithms have gotten like “living coded entities”, acting as “our evolutionary successors”. Within the not-so-distant future, could data turn into our biggest organ?

Anjan Sundaram: In some ways Coded World was a show to reply mathematical questions because code and maths are actually permeating our lives and world. The common citizen doesn’t understand the method that happens once we are digitally encoded. In a more human way, code can be connecting people, with two processes at work. We communicate with one another using a coded universal mathematical language and the second is that this increasing digitisation of ourselves, a process that we currently have little or no control over. We’re getting to some extent where our digital selves are in some ways becoming more vital that our physical selves. 

Duan Weiwen: This jogs my memory of French philosopher Bernard Stigler. “L’hominisation” is considered the means of life evolution continued outside of organic life. The externalisation of artificial organs is a always emerging process. When faced with intelligent technologies, people may look to machines with cognitive and behavioural abilities. Artificial agents can functionally simulate human cognition and behavior. In consequence, they’ve progressively evolved into an entity that is likely to be compared with human beings, due to this fact could also be considered a “pseudo subject”.

IS YOUR DATA SELF BEAUTIFUL?

Geraldine Wharry: Do you think that we’re making a society where people is not going to be considered beautiful based on their physical attributes, but mainly on their data? 

Xiao Liu: I’m unsure if data will supersede or quite work in combined ways. It’s more about what kind of knowledge becomes attached, used to explain your physicality. AI designed make-up is actually interesting since it’s about what AI can do to beautify. I feel there are different dimensions here. One dimension is that data might be utilized in a creative solution to enhance the expression of possibilities of beauty together with physicality. One other dimension is that we’d turn into too reliant on data and a few of the data might be biased and doesn’t really present the person in a good way. In that sense the information might be distorting and never an authentic representation of the self. 

Leanne Elliott Young: In the event you asked my closest friends some questions on me, they might have a rather more rounded understanding of myself than I ever would. We’re all effectively a mirrored image of our communities and people who we align with – who we follow, like, view, connect with. Right away, we’re all living in a digital projection, which is curated by our positioning and becomes a much bigger statement of ourselves. These algorithms almost turn into like cell structures that circumnavigate the self, more in tune with our very being than the physical reality where we project a certain controlled and curated version of ourselves. 

Our algorithmic and data self includes the subconscious, all the choices we make before a purchase order, and the rhythm wherein we got to that time. All of this stuff turn into quite a holistic 360-degree version of us as humans.

HAVE WE LOST OUR FACES?

Geraldine Wharry: During my research I didn’t find many projects exploring our sense of self-beauty in relationship to our lack of privacy (as a part of the commodification of our data, and the shortage of transparency). But artistic projects corresponding to Anti Face by Jerel Johnson or Hyper Face by Adam Harvey point to a lack of something primal. A recent MIT report was titled “This is how we lost our faces”. What are your thoughts on this?

Xiao Liu: There are alternative ways for us to conceive skin. I imagine the skin just isn’t just the boundary of the human body, but in addition the interface that individuals must interact with the external environment and with others. So in that sense skin just isn’t only a box for us individuals inside it, it’s a really lively layer of interface. It’s reliant on this constant communication and interaction that is kind of just like the function of knowledge in our on a regular basis life, because a whole lot of times, the information doesn’t just belong to the person but in addition is a way for the person to interact and exchange information with society. So it functions on this sense quite similarly to skin, it flows across the boundary of identities and entities. 

Anjan Sundaram: The indisputable fact that we’d quite, or must, lose our face to guard ourselves… the invasion is so primal that we’d must turn into faceless. I feel the shortage of agency must be fixed because how can we live in a world where we’re scared to point out our face? That speaks to the shortage of agency that now we have within the digital world. A tyranny that’s perpetrated by private firms that must face more scrutiny. There are quite a lot of initiatives corresponding to data trusts. I met a gaggle of hackers in Berlin and a few of them say they’re representing civil society, attempting to get firms to respect humanity and never merely take advantage of it. Our digital selves exist in a language we don’t understand and the way alienating is that?

“How can we live in a world where we’re scared to point out our face?” – Anjan Sundaram

Leanne Elliott Young: Personally I recently had a baby who’s 20 days old. Speaking of primal, swiftly I’ve dropped back into my core physicality, and that has been really interesting because effectively all of my communication and my presence is my URL self, projected through these portals. We project a version of ourselves accrued in that coded space, and swiftly I’m realising the portals I exploit to speak are totally irrelevant to this small human. That is kind of personal but I just realised the one solution to communicate is primal, with sounds, my physical self, my movements. I feel like for an extended while I’ve absolutely negated those, especially because lockdown has obviously pushed us to pivot to digital, almost to exhaustion. 

Duan Weiwen: We are no longer the masters of our faces. The emergence of facial recognition technology has fundamentally subverted the connotation of the human face in traditional physical space-time, not only making it a knowledge that may flow and routinely process across physical space-time and data space, but in addition has turn into a “Unique digital personality”. And this example undoubtedly brings a few latest paradox: on the one hand, the face is more likely to turn into a digital personality that proves “I’m me”, verifying the identity of the person; then again, the face data just isn’t just for me. People mostly do not know who’s collecting, who’s processing and using their facial data, and for what purpose. In other words, the digital personality has essentially turn into separated from the flexibility of the person to manage the topic. 

HOW DO WE DEFINE OUR IDENTITY AS A CODED LAYER?

Geraldine Wharry: The popularity of people and their identity has gone from “Is that this a photograph of Tom? Yes or no”, to ‘Let’s predict Tom’s personality”. There has been much talk concerning the biases in AI and mistakes of Facial recognition tools resulting in false arrests, due partly to human programmers and engineers constructing the technology. How do you approach this?

Xiao Liu: It’s complicated. It’s not only about beauty, it’s about how individuals are judged and presented to the world. You mentioned the privacy issue here. It’s fundamentally about how the person controls his profile to the world, so this is said to the notion of beauty. Privacy is culturally determined, because when you go to India or China for instance that notion of privacy might be quite different from people in North America and Europe. So in an identical way, once we discuss privacy it’s more about respecting people’s control of their very own profile in society.

Duan Weiwen: The controllers of knowledge evaluation and intelligent algorithms will obviously use them to predict, guide or stop human behaviour. It embodies some sort of dominant power or hegemony. Take the so-called data portrait of an individual for instance. Although the information portrait of an individual is like an individual’s “data twin,” it has no subjectivity and initiative in itself, but only reflects the control of knowledge evaluation and intelligent algorithms. Subsequently, the information twins are literally data zombies with no mind.

Leanne Elliott Young: At IoDF we’re difficult the responsibilities we hold as digital innovators inside our work. To activate change we’re partnering with the important thing stakeholders. We partnered with the software company Daz 3d to tackle digital representation and inclusivity specifically for marginalised communities. This work is curating an advisory board for the production of representation of those communities, now we have a responsibility and must speak on to the individuals with the intention to produce honest representations. We’ve got a survey on representation, a white paper within the works, ahead of a partnership with the VR summit CFS by Lablaco. For us, this work relies on our initial disdain with the bounds in these arenas now, and now we’re excited to be an element of the shift and mining the hard questions which were ignored around biased representation by actively changing the system. 

IF CODE IS THE NEW BEAUTY STANDARD, COULD YOU LOVE AN ALGORITHM?

Geraldine Wharry: In Coded World, robotics pioneer Hiroshi Ishiguro spoke about what consciousness sees. Code elicits powerful emotions in people, having myself felt awe after I interviewed Ai-da Robot. AI challenges our preconceptions of what it means to be human and have a soul. How do you connect with beings within the virtual coded realm?

Catty Tay: I do that by giving them a narrative and a back story – what do they represent, what are their emotions, how do they feel, what are they showing, what physical attributes might we wish the avatar to embody? All of those aspects change the best way we construct, from the posture, the facial expressions, all the way down to the best way the clothing is likely to be either torn or hanging off the shoulder barely. It’s the small touches that helps to construct a story and evoke emotions inside a virtual character. 

Anjan Sundaram: I used to be surprised by Ishiguro’s robot. I told her I’m going away for lunch and after I got here back she recognised me and asked me how was lunch? It’s a really human query and it surprised me. And with Akihito who married the hologram, that’s the sort of emotion he’s holding on to. So it wouldn’t surprise me if an increasing number of machines and their code seem to come back alive. It’s an attractive thing and such an interesting direction and, to not make a generalisation, AI looks like less of a threat and folks seem more open to code as companions in Oriental and Buddhist cultures and philosophies. 

Duan Weiwen: I feel in popular culture, robots are portrayed as more attractive than real people. Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information and Director of the Digital Ethics Lab Luciano Floridi refers back to the fourth revolution, a generalisation of the influence of technology on the connection between people and the surface world. The Cybernetic revolution is the most important concept that man and machine ought to be interconnected and combined as one. But this type of continuity and unity approaches post-human thinking.