Month: June 2005

I still have a hard time imagining a human mind as separated from the body and from the natural, as a floating autopoetic code. For one, I don’t imagine such a type of projected immortal existence as pleasurable or advantageous for me (I actually like being ‘in’ this big happy/sad messy world and a cup of coffee is all I need for a jolt now and then).

Kurzweil, the AI (artifical intelligence) theorist, has a book called FANTASTIC VOYAGE, where he feels we now have the technologies needed to become immmortal. He imagines he will soon keep his body immortal as part and parcel for his immortal mind. As an AI researcher at Mirai Daigaku told me last week, Kurzweil is these days busily popping vitamins to preserve his body. But again, I can’t see the joy in being frozen physically or tweaked artificially by new intrusive technologies, although I know the argument that it already happens in much of western science/medicine and this is a logical progression. It seems such a life would be tedious and it seems non-stop intervention would be needed to maintain this kind of immortality.

I guess I can’t imagine not eventually aging–isn’t that sometimes a joy for humans, the returning to one’s feeble beginnings and facing death: is it always necessarily negative?

In sum, like some have mentioned in my graduate class, the egoism of such thinkers is somewhat blatant and narrow, as it seems to define life as something to be conquered and controlled. As long as their ideas remain self-focused, however, I see no harm in their choices. If such ideas were to be forced upon us as a society, then I would resist the idea more.

I am more in support of a theory of life as a cycle, with no exact end to be feared, thus we already have immortality in a natural sense, our bodies should return to the earth and return as whatever the earth found useful. We can help that cycle with technologies, slow that cycle with technologies, but I wonder if we should tamper with its overall shape/movement? Would that be true immortality then if we stop the cycle? Who would care for such entities? I am definitely not interested in being Kurzweil’s immortal babysitter! 😉

From class forum: I am still thinking (in media
res) through my argument here, but I think I can agree
with cyborg theorists that technologies (as we use the
more interactive ones more and more) become part of our
physical/mental selves and maybe this co-joining
strengthens us in some ways (we can ‘know’ facts
instantly via Internet search) but perhaps this same
bond weakens us at the same time physically (we get what
Donna Haraway calls ‘frighteningly inert’ (M&P, p.119)
and if the machines become so inter-dependent with us
and then were to lose their energy source (electricity
cuts, etc.); obviously we then lose a part of our new
(hybrid) selves: some would survive, some wouldn’t, in a
truly hybrid human/machine world.

No doubt, as you noted, we humans are often dramatically
resilient, and that is Andy Clark’s point in Nature’s
Cyborgs, really (Mod. 5 Interactivities revised #4).
That we alone have minds that are soft, plastic
(malleable/adaptable) and lately our developed
technologies are beginning to reflect
(complement/become) that adaptable and plastic side of
our thinking…he argues that eventually we won’t
distinguish between the human (skinbag) and the machine
(extension of our minds)
Source

But where does nature come into cyborg theory? We still
are far from controlling it; or I should say we control
it so poorly to the point of its and our destruction,
perhaps. I am interested in how nature will find its
balance in the interplay between man and machine. As we
get more immersed in higher interactive technologies,
will we forget to seek balance with the natural world?
Will we need that balance? I think we do and will…

I agree with Paula and Marianne that Nature vs. man’s
–and therefore technology’s–attempt to control it
(which seems to always fail in the end, too) runs
throughout the Science Fiction genre, and Donna Harwaway
mentions the omnipresence of Nature in SF
(see Murphie&Potts, pp.116-117):
Frankenstein’s beast comes to life from an electric
storm & rain permeates Blade Runner (also a film noir
motif–think Taxi Driver).

Westernized (highly technologized) people fear
‘unpredictable’ Nature because they can’t really control
it. Nature is not unpredictable at all, though, but a
natural movement toward some sort of balance, even if it
eventually excludes the pesky human race (probably needs
to…).

I believe those of us in the Western world have already
long ago reached that critical point where we can no
survive without our technologies of electricity, water
purification, sewage systems, antibiotics, etc. We are
cyborgs in this sense. Most westerners are no longer, as
members of the human race, physically strong. Some argue
this won’t matter; that we could upload ourselves as
binary code in a machine, but I disagree.

Ultimately the ones who’d probably best survive any
SF-esque catastrophe (viral or otherwise) wouldn’t be
the technologically complex people who wash their hands
with anti-bacterial soap, but rather those (the
majority) who still live a harsh, sustainable life of
daily physical struggle. Now I sound like a survivalist!
Maybe I am wrong, though…

Just rambling, but Nature, I think, seeks balance out of
the chaos, but sadly most tech-savvy humans don’t look
beyond their bank account. I place my bets that Nature will
get things back to where they need to be, with or without us.

I am very concerned about teaching
myself and my students to think much more critically
(and more importantly) creatively about all the data at
our fingertips and barraging us via new media.

I’ll give a talk in one week on creative thinking skills
at university–so this is big on my mind. To me,
creative thinking skills (CTS) are critical now. I
define CTS as similar to HOTS–higher order thinking
skills or meta-cognition skills, but also CTS are
integrated with ethics: i.e. does my idea of creating
new patterns with information (fancy words for a
creative thought and its potential creative
act/manifestation) benefit anyone more than another, who
might it benefit, why? Is that a good thing or
potentially harmful? In other words, thinking as best we
can about the potential impact of a creative idea/act
upon the individual and the society and the world is
more important than mere development of technology for
technology’s sake.

Not sure I make sense, but I agree with you that we need
to step outside of old-school scientific rationality and
logic and into searching for more complex analyses of
what technologies and humans are doing/will be doing to
this world.

As part of the Cultural and New Media Studies Class, I am to keep a journal of things I discover as I go through the week’s readings, providing links to anything that sparked my interest or sparked some sort of reaction in me.

This week the topic is Science Fictions and AI (artificial intelligence), something I have never been very interested in, as it reminds me of greasy-faced teenaged boys with short-sleeved plaid shirts and junkfood diets. Maybe this is because I used to be a waitress on the night shift in high school, and the place from midnight to 4AM was frequented by Dungeons and Dragons fans (bad tippers, always too immersed to think about reality).

Some short links to some bizarre stuff. To show my lack of awareness of how far computer animation has gone (although I was amazed by the Matrix Animation film released, was it 1 or 2 years ago?): There is actually a trend of people building virtual humans to suit their fantasies. There is book by Peter Plantec (his name seems virtual to me as well) to teach you how to build your very own virtual person, with software included. For info click here

The same website, http://www.kurzweilai.net/, provides many links to people deeply involved in the building artificial humans and they argue about what consciousness is and what thinking is and what it means to be ‘alive’…things that frankly seem quite scary (because I know so little about it and because I don’t like to think of a machine as human–I have enough guilt about stepping on ants and dandelions, sigh). Lastly, there is a virtual woman there, with whom you can have live chats (Internet Explorer only), called Ramona, who is the alter-ego of the web site’s creator, Ray Kurzweil. As I personally hate using IE (long live Mozilla!), I only bothered thus far to look at the videos of her performing at a Tech conference, under the Learn about Ramona section.

Here I want to rant a bit about Ramona: first, she looks like a transvestite trying to impersonate Monica Lewinsky, and the creators dress her in tight red pirate laced t-tops and fishnets: very ugly and unattractive (but obviously someone thinks she’s sexy…sigh). Also, she is given that stereotypical (can a virtual human be stereotyped, hmmm…) enormous, disproportionate upper half. I think these creators need to take a walk outside and think outside the box more in their aesthetic choices. But, of course, she may be the perfect virtual dream of someone (of many?)!

I thought it might be beneficial to view the very
different approaches toward Internet regulation between
the US (although I am not sure how applicable to Canada,
sorry, please help me out there) and Japan, where I
live. Iastericked the word p*rn to avoid those devious
spammers from plastering my blog with p*rn links…:-)!

Here’s a synopsis from a comparative study concerning
p*rn regulation on the Internet:

“Protecting children from accessing p*rnography in
cyberspace is a legitimate concern. To achieve this
purpose, the U.S. enacted special legislation to control
the content of cyberspace communications by imposing
potential liability on Network Service Providers and
users. However, this approach is very problematic given
the lack of consensus about what speech to permit and
what speech to punish. The U.S. approach is also likely
to lead to protracted litigation that stymies rather
than encourages reasonable resolution of the problem of
how to protect children from cyberp*rn.

On the other hand, the “voluntary” approach in Japan
that places all responsibility for online contents on
network users and absolves Network Service Providers may
do little to constrain the most controversial features
of networked computer communications. Moreover, relying
upon extralegal administrative guidance creates a
dangerous precedent in the field of speech, where truly
coercive government action should be subject to judicial
review in order to help preserve free speech.”

Full text

In sum, in the USA, over regulation leads to
protracted litigation. In Japan, self-regulation leads
to social pressure to conform, and may stymie legitimate
voices on the Internet, and no legal ramifications for
governmental “pressure.”

There are words such as “co-regulation” and
“light-handed regulation” buzzing about these days…Any
thoughts on these attempts to control free speech on the
Internet? By taking an extreme topic (cyber p*rn), we
can test ideas of regulation limits best.