Heroes
are a very important part of every society.
They act as a focal point for the members of a society to be inspired to
do special good things with their lives.
Most of the time, heroes are thought of as individuals who save other
people from danger. Wartime generals and
wartime civilians, as well as ordinary people who go out of their way and
sometimes risk their lives in order to save others from danger. Some real-life heroes are heroes, not because
of feats of physical protection, but because of their work in some special
peacetime activity: sports, the arts, the sciences, the intellectual world in
general, government, law, community activism, social work, and business. These are all areas where those who excel can
act as an inspiration for other people, and thus become their heroes. There are also mythological heroes: imaginary
people who, in the stories of polytheistic religions, interact with gods and
frequently perform amazing fantastic feats.
There are folk heroes who are real people that have performed important
feats in their real lives, but who frequently have their life stories stretched
and amplified into legendary proportions.
Then there are fantasy heroes that aren’t real people and aren’t
attached to any community religious beliefs.
Fantasy heroes are entirely fabricated by one or more writers and
frequently have unusual superhuman abilities.
The
one thing that all these heroes have in common is that they are, at core,
human. Of course, one may say, they are
human. What else would they be? Actually, it is true that we sometimes
ascribe the term hero to dogs who save their masters from different
catastrophic situations. Mostly though,
the term hero has been reserved for humans.
Nevertheless, in our modern age, other complex behavioral entities are
being developed to do some beneficial, even heroic tasks, for humans. In the online magazine, New Atlas (Gizmag),
there is an article about some very interesting robots that are being developed
to improve human health. In the article,
“World’s first ciliary micro-robots could change the way we take medicine”
(9/19/16) by Lynda Delacey, we learn that some South Korean scientists have
developed some super fast-moving micro-robots that move directly through the
blood stream to bring medicine to those organs for which the medicine has been
designated. No more concerns about an
overdose. No more concerns about
systemic reactions to the medicine like nausea or like debilitating the immune
systems. These micro-robots eliminate
the protective reactions of the body in dealing with foreign chemicals being
introduced inside it. These micro-robots,
that are the size of paramecium and that have methods of transportation similar
to paramecium, are carrying out the heroic task of configuring the delivery of
medicine to a patient in such a way as to eliminate harmful side effects.
The
micro-robot discussed in this article is an improvement over previous micro-robots
because of its speed, its range of movement, and its potential to carry
payloads that weigh more to the organs targeted. After the micro-robots have completed their
mission, South Korean scientists plan for them to simply dissolve. Self-immolation after they have carried out
their noble cause.
What
these micro-robots are doing is taking a difficult journey in a human body in
order to improve that human’s health.
Preventing a secondary reaction in the body, which reaction can
sometimes be as bad as the original health issue. Preventing the body from turning against
itself. But the journey of the
micro-robot has an element of a soldier carrying out a mission behind enemy
lines during a war or a relief convoy bringing supplies to civilians during a
war. Perhaps, soon we will have robots
that can perform tasks like this. Robots
that carry out secret missions for armies where most or all of the soldiers are
robots. Robots that lead relief convoys
of self-driving trucks to bring supplies to civilians that are trapped behind
enemy lines. Tasks that have traditional
elicited great admiration in bystanders who have observed them. Tasks that have frequently led the people who
carry out these tasks to be called heroes.
Performing extraordinary tasks for the benefit of people.
But
robots tend to routinize tasks. And in
so doing, robots tend to trivialize tasks.
All the glory will leave a heroic task when robots do it, precisely
because they are simply programmed to do it.
They have no choice. They lack a
coherent sense of self to help them to make and refine decisions that are
unique to their particular life situation.
A heroic task is considered heroic precisely because a person chooses to
do something that is unusually good, often at great risk to himself.
A
decision to perform a heroic task is not simply based on defined discrete
signals in a brain telling a person that a certain task is the appropriate task
to perform under certain circumstances.
This is because a person is not a machine, and there are flowing
blendable continual intangible elements that have to be present in his nature
to perform a heroic task, and, if they are present, they have to be primed for
action. This is why, in real life, there
aren’t many heroes. And because there
aren’t many, this is why heroes are so valued and cherished.
Heroes
are always putting some aspects of their being at risk. If not their lives, their reputations. Cultural heroes put their reputation at risk. Many artists, composers and writers were
laughed at and berated until later on in their lives or after they died, and
only then were they appreciated. Many
inventors were laughed at in the initial trials of their inventions, until the
inventions became convincingly successful.
A
robot does not have the kind of coherent sense of self to maintain a
consciousness that can make heroic decisions.
But as modern technology puts order in the world and makes life more
frictionless, there seem to be fewer and fewer situations where heroic
decisions are required. More and more
conflict situations either occur anonymously with suicide bombers or remotely
with air strikes and drones. And most people
today are too numb and jaded as a result of the sensory distortion from modern
technology to either make significant cultural innovations or to be impacted by
them.
But
robots are not heroes. Micro-robots may
soon be able to get rid of a lot of human discomfort by regularly getting rid
of the side effects that the medicines that they carry to their target organs
normally bring. But by bypassing the
global defenses of the human body, they are, in effect, shutting down the
integrity of a body’s response to protect itself against foreign invasion. If an immune system is debilitated, it is
because it is in the process of defending a body’s integrity. And ultimately the integrity, the coherence
of a person’s sense of self. The immune
system may become debilitated from the delivery of certain medicines, but the
sense of self may become strengthened.
In effect, a person becomes his own hero.
Probably,
there are many readers who feel that temporarily losing control of one’s body
and not becoming a hero is a small price to pay for getting rid of the
discomfort produced by many modern medicines.
And in today’s world, anything that helps to relieve a person of the
terrible side effects of these medicines is considered a real plus. I am only trying to point out that a very
important if subtle price will be paid by people who resort to micro-robots to
relieve themselves of the discomfort that comes with certain medical
treatments.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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