FInal Exam

Hank Backer

Ethics and Technology

Final Exam

5/1/2008

It’s a valuable exercise to look at what we thought at the beginning of the semester and compare it to how we are thinking now.  This blog, and the Internet as a whole, is especially handy for just such a record keeping.  I’m personally surprised at what I originally posted on Cyborg Campfire.  It’s not as though what I was saying was wrong, but we really have seen a lot of differing views of technology, and this has really helped to deepen my understanding.  I can’t just say “cyborgs are bad” or that “the internet is good” anymore.  One really has to devote precise phrasing and judicious thought to talking about technology.

 

1.  Sincerity and Technology

 

In this blog, I quoted Robert Frost and applied what he said about the poetry to the Internet, and such social networking websites as Facebook and Myspace.  I don’t know how Robert Frost possibly got linked with Facebook in my head, but there it is, I wrote it.  I do stand by my contention that both of those websites are a “collection of dead selves,” and I think that’s rather fine phrasing.  And while I think my point still stands that it really is difficult to convey real, human emotion while writing on somebody’s Facebook wall, I applied this to the general category of technology, and I now know this to be incorrect.

 

After seeing a film like AI, it would be barbaric of me to say that David, while part of technology, is incapable of expressing sincerity.  David is sincere in almost all of his actions, much more so than most children.  He was much more sincere than Monica’s human son, who was often deceitful and maligning to David.  So, if a being of Artificial Intelligence was able to be created, bypassing the limitations that philosophers like Dreyfus have pointed out, then it’s very possible that the machine will be more sincere than the man: in fact, likely, as I seriously doubt that we would emphasize deceit and insincerity when creating Artificial Intelligence.  Why would we want to create a deceitful being?  But perhaps it’s unavoidable.

 

Isaac Asimov stands up for machines, as well.  Andrew Martin is very sincere in his efforts to become a man—and he doesn’t just succeed in becoming a man, he becomes an exemplary man.  Like David loves his mother, it seems obvious that in Asimov’s world, Andrew Martin loved Little Miss, as his last words were her name.  And yet again, humans turn out to be deceitful and conniving, especially the CEOs and politicians in Asimov’s world (which actually seems somewhat true to life).   The CEO of the company that created Andrew, through many generations, is thwarted by Andrew’s honest and sincere efforts.

 

So while this class didn’t change my mind about sincerity regarding websites like Facebook, it did deepen my understanding of the issue.  I still would hand write a letter to someone if I wanted to show my sincerest affection instead of writing an email, but something tells me Andrew Martin would feel the same way.  So technology as a whole cannot be considering insincere.  Even the Internet has sincere moments, and in our last classes, we discussed the game Second Life—perhaps there, too, some sincerity can be found.

 

2.  A Poem as a Blogpost?

 

I realize that my poem was horribly obscure and probably not useful to anyone, as far as philosophical discussion is concerned.  So I am going to kill the poem the surest way I know how—I’m going to talk about it.  Poems are much like jokes in that way, you know?

 

What I was trying to say in my poem is that if art survives, humanity is saved.  In Lyotard’s dialogue, “Can Thought Go on Without a Body,” the “He” speaker thinks that humanity will survive the sun’s inevitable death is to create Artificial Intelligence that is able to operate on some resource not dependent on our sun, as our whole way of life is.  In the poem, I imagined the robot surviving us, floating through space (the fact that the robot is gold is borrowed from Thomas Aquinas’s Golden Man, also discussed in class) with “little poetry chips, thousands of them, billions of poems on each chip!”

 

Now, it’s great that we have a robot that has billions of poems in its brain, but unless the robot is able to write new poems, while using the influences but in its own voice, then there is no forward motion, and humanity would be dead.  Unless the robot is able to move art forward, then everything in the robot’s brain is just an elaborate recording, which is great, if any extra-terrestrials were to find the robot, but still, it would be like saying dinosaurs are alive because we have their bones arranged correctly in museums.  If this proverbial robot were able to write a poem, though, then it seems like we would have fully succeeded in passing on our culture into a metal, more durable shell, and in a sense could say we survived.

 

This is supported by Andrew Martin’s character in “The Bicentennial Man.”  The first notion that there is something human-like about Andrew is that he’s able to make a beautiful wood carving for Little Miss, and he enjoys doing it—it makes his circuits flow more smoothly.  Lyotard and Asimov seems at odds, here, or at least the “He” from Lyotard’s dialogue.  “He” seems to think that the only qualification for humanity enduring is that we’ve made Artificial Intelligence.  However, here in Asimov’s story we’ve succeeded in doing this, but Andrew really has to work at becoming human—it takes the sacrifice of himself, whereas “He” would value the robots ability of preservation past the sun’s death for the preservation of humanity.

 

I tend to agree with Asimov rather than “He,” and Lyotard himself seems aware of this with his response to “He,” “She.”  Otherwise, humanity very much seems like the situation played out in “Robot Visions,” where all humanity has perished and it’s just robots living out a semblance of human life.  Sure there’s less negative aspects to life among robots, but with those negative aspects, humanity is also gone.