Joan Gordon’s lecture titled “Down in the Uncanny Valley with Monsters, Hopeful and Otherwise” concerned itself with the human/animal interface. I enjoyed the lecture and was glad to have to opportunity to hear Gordon speak on a subject I previously had limited knowledge about. Gordon seemed to be unsure of the future regarding the amborg, at a crossroad between optimism and discouragement.
Gordon started by defining the phrase “amborg,” which allows us to abandon the bulky term “human/animal interface.” In the lecture Grodon quotes Harraway, who expands on this idea, “amborg, like cyborg, is a hopeful word that is meant to acknowledge flows more than divisions.” The amborg considers the shared gaze between human and animal as an exchange rather than a demonstration or hierarchical power. Science fiction allows thinkers, authors, and readers to imagine a future of ambiguous-beings with a shared and mutual experience, rather than the mutually exclusive categories of “human” and “animal.” In this dialogue journal, I hope to explore the idea of amborg in the contexts of science fictio...
Andy Clark strongly argues for the theory that computers have the potential for being intelligent beings in his work “Mindware: Meat Machines.” The support Clark uses to defend his claims states the similar comparison of humans and machines using an array of symbols to perform functions. The main argument of his work can be interpreted as follows:
To begin, in the short story “The Pedestrian” by Rad Bradbury, technology is worshipped and this shows that mankind has come to a point where society loses its humanity. Bradbury reveals that the character, Mr. Leonard Mead, who is least associated with technology is the most humane. The author does this by describing the “little
Zak, Steven. “Ethics and Animals.” Taking Sides: Science, Technology, and Society. Gilford: Dushkin Publishing Group, 2007
One of the major technological advancements in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is the development of robots. The Mechanical Hound, a fierce creature that seems to have powers greater than human ones, “represent[s] the whole technological society for Montag” (Kerr). This creature was created to catch criminals a...
... notice bradbury uses “mechanical hound”, its goes to show that technology has performed so many actions, but without human emotion. Rather technology is taking the life out of existence of human essence.
In “Don’t anthropomorphize inky the octopus”, Jacob Brogan offer an answer to us—anthropomorphism. That is, human tend to interpret animals by “turning them into distorted mirrors of our own experience and expectation” (Don’t, 23,24). The escape of the octopus, Broman illustrates, is anthropomorphized by the human as “breaking out of animal aquarium”, “reminiscent of Finding Nemo”, “a magician like Houdini” for our own plights. We don’t want to know and care what exactly how octopus thinks and how he finds the way to escape; we focus on how to reflect our willingness on their behaviors. Instead of anthropomorphizing them in human terms, Brogan logically demonstrates, we should understand these creatures by their own cognition, their emotion, their complexity even if they are different than us in some
In his poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace," published in 1968, Richard Brautigan places the reader in a future realm: a sparkling utopia "where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony" (1). He draws us in by juxtaposing images of nature, man and machine that challenge us to imagine this new world. In essence, Brautigan's poem is a supplication for that dream world, but to the modern reader it can be a land of irony.
Victor was aware of their stares upon his magnificent creature and he didn’t hesitate to stop them and boast about his creation. “I have created life outside of the womb and I name myself father of this beautiful creature,” exclaimed Victor. With the crowd forming, Victor instructed the creature to perform basic activities. Although the creature did not possess language he was able to perform activities by following subtle cues given by Victor. Victor ended the show with a flash of the creature’s smile and the crowd cheered loudly. Never had they seen such a gigantic figure appear so affable— a human that size was typically frightening. Victor noticed how much his creature intrigued ones passing by. Their feedback on the small show put on in the middle of the street gave Victor an idea. He noticed the crowds interest in beings who appeared different and began pondering the idea of how he could showcase his creation along with other monstrosities.
“How do you tell what are real things from what aren’t real things?” (Aldiss 446). Since antiquity, the human mind has been intrigued by artificial intelligence; hence, such rapid growth of computer science has raised many issues concerning the isolation of the human mind. The novella “Super-toys
According to Descartes, non-human animals are automata, which imply that their behavior is completely explicable with regards to physical mechanisms (Kirk, 2011). The philosopher explored the concept of a machine that looked and behaved like a human being. Following his attempts to unmask such a machine, Descartes concluded that no machine could behave like a human being and that characteristically explaining human behavior needed something beyond the phy...
How do we know that we are human and, if we are human, what does it mean to be human? These two philosophical inquiries are explored in great depth in Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner", and of course the text of Philip K. Dick's wonderful novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on which the film is based. Most would agree that these themes exist in the novel, but a handful of critics and academics have some doubt as to their presence in the film. If one examines both the film and the text, one will realize that they both serve to support the same motifs, but do so in different fashions. Many critics argue that the awesome visuals overwhelm the contents of the plot and theme, but I argue that the visuals depicting Los Angeles in the year 2019 help to advance the themes. Viewers often miss the human side of the story or lack there of, and may object to the strong visuals for this reason. It can be argued that the visuals serve to portray a dehumanized world where only subtle signs of humanity's existence are dispersed throughout, where existentialist notions such as what being human is and what being human means are not easily answered.
Haraway’s cyborg is a blending of both materiality and imagination, pleasure and responsibility, reality and the utopian dream of a world without gender and, maybe, without end. We are all hybrids of machine and organism. The cyborg is our ontology, a creature in a post-gender world with "no origin story in the...
Harroway, Donna . "Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience." English 387 Course Pack. Regina: Professor J. Battis, 2009. 304-311. Print.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a Steven Spielberg science fiction drama film, which tells the story of a younger generation robot, David, who yearns for his human mother’s love. David’s character stimulates the mind-body question. What is the connection between our “minds” and our bodies? It is apparent that we are personified entities, but also, that we embrace “more” than just our bodies. “Human persons are physical, embodied beings and an important feature of God’s intended design for human life” (Cortez, 70).
Haraway, Donna. `A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's', Socialist Reivew, Vol. 15, No. 80, 1985