Page - (000011) - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

introduCtion I The seventeenth-century French architect, physician, anatomist and inven- tor Claude Perrault (1613–1688) is best known for designing the front of the Louvre Museum in Paris. But he left another legacy. Eleven years after his death, a small book was published entitled Recueil de plusieurs machines, de nouvelle invention (Collected Notes of a Number of Machines, of New Invention). The book contained a description for creating an advanced form of abacus, an ingenious calculating machine. This piece of equipment would, Perrault believed, be of great use to a ‘computer’  – a physical person who performs mathematical computations. In coining the term ‘computer’, therefore, he had in mind a physical person rather than an object. But history has a curious way of reassigning the use of language. For Perrault, the person was still the principal calculator, while his machine was a tool to help the user perform calculations. Though he believed the machine would have its uses, the person was clearly more capable. Time, however, has moved on! A half-decent office computer now per- forms more than a billion calculations every second, selecting data from many billions of items stored locally on computer disks or chips. As a result, for some kinds of tasks, the machine can outstrip its master. No longer is it appropriate to think of the physical person as the computer; instead, the term is more appropriately assigned to the machine. Moreover, until now, the two have been discrete entities. On the desk sits a machine  – an object. At the desk sits a person  – an agent. This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.