Group Notes week 1/11/10 (Group B)
This week we talked a lot about where we can draw the lines between humans and machines. This discussion began with our look into cyborgs, where we talked about when and how we are cyborgs, looking at concepts like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program (in which humans were performing menial tasks that were outside of the range of computer possibilities, such as determining how to categorize recipes). Together we determined cyborgs as being composites of living and mechanical, hybrids of machine and organism, offsprings of militarism and capitalism, post-gender, neither public nor private, etc. This also lead into our discussion of avatars and how we behave and create our own avatars. Many people expressed the sentiment that due to the lack of options, WeeMee did not entice them to put effort into their avatar on that site. On the other end of the spectrum was our discussion of XBOX’s new program, Project Natal – where your avatar is literally you and whether or not that will make people feel more of a connection to their avatar or not.
After our discussion about our own experiences as cyborgs on the internet, we tackled Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In her essay, Haraway claimed that the various types of politics, including post-modernism and third-wave feminism, needed to deal with technology. Haraway argued that technology opens the doors for new types of politics and possibilities and is not necessarily oppressive to the "natural." The second reading, Norbert Wiener's "Men, Machines, and the World About," explores what he calls "a new industrial revolution" in which machines are starting to replace human efforts in menial tasks. In order to take full advantage of the benefits, we must take the time to understand the machine and its qualities. Wiener's article also points out that whether or not it's immediately recognizable, there is a revolution in Cybernetics that offers up a new way to think about machines. Different even, from the way in which Wiener himself had initially thought about machines during his work with the anti-aircraft gun.
On Thursday we discussed where to draw the line between human and machine, or if that line even existed, with reference to Turing and Hayles readings. We debated whether emotion could be the defining point or if even emotions could be reduced to basic biological programming, not that uncommon from the programming that could be created in a computer. Another potentially defining aspect was the idea of creativity. If a human creates a machine to make random patterns with colors and lines, is the machine creating art? (READ MORE ABOUT MACHINES MAKING ART) How do we define art? Does it only count as art if you are consciously trying to create something or can it be a random collection of colors and lines? Much of our debate came back to the concept of anti-essentialism, or the idea that humans are not defined by some inborn essence, but instead by their behavior. If a machine were to mimic that behavior, could we classify it as ‘human?’
Key Words
Cyborg: Cybernetic Organism, or organism that features both natural and artificial systems (wikipedia). Refer to list made in class (first paragraph of this post).
Cybernetics: interactions revolving around communication and various control systems (e.g. feedback loops)
Post-Modernism: a large/theoretical movement or cultural shift where there was much more questioning about linear narratives, more attention to plurality, more fluidity in how people thought about identity and selfhood.
Want to learn more about post-modernism??? Visit http:/
Third-Wave Feminism: Involved more women of color and women from the queer community, who believed previous feminism to be mean "white women"/ involved affinity politics where everyone is believed to have multiple identities and to move between these identities - For more information go tohttp:/
Posthuman: a concept with no clear-cut separation between the human and the post-human, but an acknowledgment of a neglect of embodiment and opportunity to put embodiment back into the discourse - http:/
Anti-Essentialism: the idea that humans are not defined by some inborn essence, but instead by their behavior.
Late capitalism: [seeking sources]
Further Reading
In the near future, will we even need to put on pants to go to work? An interview with Communications Professor Byron Reeves about avatars in the workplace.
http:/
We often spoke about human cyborgs, but what about animal ones? Military research hopes to develop insect cyborgs soon.
http:/
Films, for various reason, cannot be embedded in this page, so we're not even going to try. But, perusing Netflix recently, I came across a film that I found eerily reminiscent of Julie's quick info session on the new sex robot. The film is a Naoyukie Tomomatsu film entitled "Rojin to rabudoru" or Maid-Droid in English. It's a film in which an aging man tries to reprogram his robot maid to gratify him sexually. This aging man begins to fall in love with the robot, discovering that her batteries are running out permanently. it seemed a good contrast to the anarchic, apocalyptic discussion we were having about cyborgs and robots. This filmic space is a world in which miscegenation (if that is the proper term) between humans and robots is feasible. here, robots with emotions are not scary or killing people... as long as you discount the secondary plot of the film which has Japanes police trying to find a robotic serial rapist... O_o
Last updated 445 days ago by Julie Levin Russo
