Thoughts everyone?

So good bye lovely philosophy classmates and friendly Allen Hall dwellers.  May we meet again soon on the Internet to discuss ethics, or perhaps via a risky, interpersoanl interaction.

Have an excellent Holiday(s) of your choosing, get some rest, and enjoy non-dorm food while it lasts.  I enjoyed getting to know you all throughout our longwinded/longtyped disagreements.

PS — If KeepOn is ever mass marketed, please let me know.  I really, really want one : )

The reason for bringing up this question here is because I think that a machine and a corporation bear many great similarities–both are ‘designed’ entities.  While I know this is a far stretch scenario for now, I do think we need to consider these questions.

In the case that machines do reach a point where they can pass the Turing game, and they do, at the very least, emulate humanity; should we not grant them the same rights and responsibilities as a human?

This, then, raises the question of whether we should grant ‘personhood’ to so-called ‘artifacts,’ which, I would argue, also include corporate bodies.  To be honest, my initial inclination is to say that machines possessing primarily humanistic qualities should be treated as equal to human in the eyes of the law and society, while corporate bodies should not be allowed such priviledge.  However, I cannot seem to clearly articulate my reasoning as to why, as it seems that it would only make sense to allow a corporate body, if it proves it carries humanistic traits, the priviledge of ‘personhood’.

I suppose scale does play hell with this scenario, as a corporation is capable of reach beyond the scope of a single person or machine, however, it doesn’t seem ‘fair’ to impose a regulation based on such an analog, and imprecise distinction.

Here’s a scenario to play with:

Let us consider the legal case of a charge of manslaughter.  For the case of the robot, a single (or maybe a few) people are accidentally killed during its routine operation.  If we are to consider the machine to be autonomous, and self running, the machine must meet justice for what has happened, regardless of intent.  Simply imprisoning a machine will do little to ‘punish’ it, and nor will it ‘fix’ the problem. How should this case proceed?

As a parallel case, let us consider a corporation which inadvertently causes the deaths of a few tens or hundreds of people (to compensate for scale of existence).  In this case, the corporate body, if treated as a person, must be held accountable for what has happened.  However, much like a machine, we cannot expect to incarcerate a corporate body.  Again, how should this case proceed, and how would it compare to the proceedings in a human case and to a robot case?

Granted, these questions seem to bring our legal structure and proceedings into question more than the comparison of machine, corporation, and person; but I do still think this is an apt place to begin discussion.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. Our results have been published in Nature.

 

How’s this for sharing values?

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

What do you guys think about the use of cognitive enhancing drugs? The BoingBoing guys talked about this earlier in the semester, and Nature just published this (already controversial) article arguing for their use and acceptance.

What implications does this have?  Going back to the book Dan mentioned in class a while back, Nudge, about how our surrounds impact all our choices, I think this has a huge impact.  Not to side with a Nazi, but Heidegger was right about enframing.  Living in this technological world does impact the way that we think.  Expanding that to a moral context, our technological surroundings impact what we ought to do by changing what we can do.  The possiblity of a “curtosy call” or a quick email changes our societal obligations and expectations.

But Nudge has something to say about Jenkinson’s Collaboration that goes beyond the social realm and says something about cognition.  The way food in a cafeteria is arranged, for example, impacts the choices we make.  If healthier food is in the front and we see it first, we tend to eat healthier (consider that when your first stop in Allen is the desert counter and perhaps veer left to the fruit instead).  In that same way, if machines are around, they impact our choices.  Having a music-making machine, like in Jenkinson’s article, changes the type of music he made.  Jenkinson romanticizes that a little in saying the machine should also get credit for the music produced, but from the Nudge perspective the inspiration  for the music was the machine.  He goes so far as to say that the person making music on a computer is a “machine user-artist” (170).  To me, that’s like saying, “he’s not a pianist, he’s a piano user-player.”  It seems wordy and unnecesary to make such statements.

Then Jenkinson makes a jump to the island of conclusions that is nearly impossible to follow.  He says that music frees us from “the problem of bodily death” (171).  He says that the goal of an artist is to encode himself in his work which becomes an envoy of the self, therefore surviving past the death of the body.  As machines’ involvement in the artistic process increases, our work serves as a dual envoy of both creators, we begin to feel both inferior to and jealous of machines.  I cannot deny that my word processor changes the writing process, but I cannot agree that producing a novel makes me feel any less afraid of death.  I would like to finish a novel by the time I die because it is one of my goals, but it in no way changes the nausea  I experience when I consider being dead.  As a creative person, I appreciate the romanticized view of leaving part of oneself in art, but even if I agreed with that premise, my fears about death remain.

I have a problem with Jenkinson’s writing.  The further you get into the article, the less need he feels to explain any of his premises with examples or explainations.  That entire last paragraph needs expanding.  I’m not saying I disagree with everything, but frankly the arguement is unwarrented.

However, I have a really quick request from Tim. He is starting a new project called IDEALS @ UIUC, where Allen Hall students upload work they do in unit one courses into a database that other future students have access to. If you are interested in participating in this program, visit the website and see whats up!

If you want to upload your papers for future classes, you need to fill out a form granting UIUC the right to archive your intellectual property. You can get this form, print out a copy, and turn it in here. If you have any question, contact Tim McDonough at timmcdonou at gmail.com

I found this article really stiking, perhaps because I’m a musician, but most of what Jenkinson has to say is excellent (when it doesn’t come off as just slightly elitist).  Anyways, as I was reading it and nodding my head furiously, I thought of a bunch of artists and just random examples that sort of related to what he had to say, so I thought I would share those with you today.  First up, Mr. Bird!

“I feel like it is a deliberate creative process to hear a sound in my head and then rummage around for the object that makes that sound. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the object itself gets assigned a mystical value and must be on a song, though I know most listeners could not care less whether we use a Telefunken mic or a 30-year-old calf skin drum head… perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players”- Andrew Bird (taken from the NY Times blog Measure for Measure)

As we see, Andrew Bird follows along the lines of what Jenkinson has to say; he ascribes a lot of character to his violin, his guitar, and even to the bare basic things of recording like microphones, tape reels, etc.  These things add something that he alone obviously could not.  Just because he is the one putting the instruments and mics in place does not make him the priveleged user, however.  He is in fact, perhaps just another tool, the one that puts everything in place and orchestrates it all.  Indeed, he plays a vital part in the making of songs, but ultimately, every tool involved is just as pertinent to the song as the next (including himself).

“This is why I decided to start in Nashville with the basics - voice and guitar - because it’s easy to lose your rudder in overdub realm”- Also Andrew Bird

Again, we see that Andrew Bird acknowledges the studio (overdub realm) as almost its own entity, in that it’s easy to lose direction.  In fact, things are bound to lose some direction in the studio.  “Recording is full of counterintuitive stuff like this, so you can see how quickly the original sentiment of a song can get derailed.” - Again, Andrew Bird

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According to Wikipedia, on a radio show in 2003 to publicise the release of Hail to the Thief, Yorke remarked that he would rather make a record just with a computer than with only an acoustic guitar.

Here, I think the implication is that Yorke can pull more sounds out of a computer than he can out of an acoustic guitar.  I think that goes to say that the computer is a more versatile tool and would thus serve a greater role in the system of tools that would define Yorke’s songs.  This is a great example of the collaboration of artist and machine.

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“…we gave absolutely no thought to what we were doing, whatsoever. This music is unblemished by any expectations of a specific result, on our part. The three of us simply got together to hear what music had to say that week. We had fun together and this is the record of that fun.” - John Frusciante

This was said of Frusciante (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) about the recording of a side project called Automatic Writing II.  Really, I think this is the best example of what Jenkinson wrote about.  No explanation needed.

This idea of the cyborg, however, of eliminating awareness of gender, doesn’t seem like the way to solve the heated interactions between men and women. By replacing sexual reproduction with “replication,” and “organic sex role specialization” with “optimal genetic strategies” seems not to blend humanity with machine, but rather to throw away all humanity for only the machine. Since we can’t be machines, this replacement only results in a poor attempt to imitate a being completely and utterly different from us, both in makeup and cognitive capacity, which translates to the destruction of ourselves. Haraway discusses a few ideologies in the beginning of her manifesto, among them biological determinism and technological determinism. Biological Determinism rejects monotheistic thought that man lords above the animals and the earth, celebrating the blend between humans and animals, given that we are really not so different. Technological Determinism accepts the blend between humans and machines, revealing how blurred the lines have become between man and machine: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This very quote describes how inherently bad Technological Determinism is for humanity, and how they function as an inverted relationship: when one gains strength, the other loses it. Should we all alter ourselves to emulate the qualities of a cyborg, we would lose touch with our humanity.