Philosophy 101D

Our final screening will be this Thursday at 7pm in Wohler Hall rm 24. Wohler is directly behind DKH.

We will be watching the documentary Love Machine by Peter Asaro and Doug Matejka. From the press release:

Love Machine considers the social and moral implications of building humanoid robots sophisticated enough to participate in social and emotional roles that are traditionally considered exclusively or even essentially human: friendship, sex and love. The film examines the actual technologies being developed in these directions, and discusses these issues with the people who are pursuing these technologies as well as those who seek to profit from them. It also confronts various social critics, commentators and philosophers of different perspectives in a effort to open a dialogue on what implications these technologies might have for human relationships in the future.

Among those interviewed are:

Roboticists:
Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University
Gill Pratt, Cynthia Breazeal, and Brian Scassellatti, MIT
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley.

Philosophers:
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University
Hubert Dreyfus, Univesity of California, Berkeley
Manuel DeLanda, Columbia University and Institute of Advanced Study-Princeton

Sex & Culture Commentators:
Carol Queen, Robert Morgan Lawrence and Lisa Palac
Ernest Green, Editor of Taboo Magazine

Childhood technology-use advocates:
Joan Almon, and Colleen Cordes

and the entrepreneurs building such products as the Sybian and Real Doll and others . . .

Click the link below to see all the videos shown during last week’s movie screening. Comments are appreciated!

Continue Reading »

I hope everyone remembered to read the Kline article “What is technology?” for tomorrow’s class. We will spend most of the time discussing that piece.

Also, please schedule an appointment with me if you’d like to talk about the midterm! I haven’t heard from anyone, so let me repeat: I will be grading the midterm with a very critical eye, so don’t expect an easy grade. I figure that I don’t grade the website material very harshly, and you have plenty of opportunities for extra credit, so I am allowed to be harsh on the tests. Whether you have a few clarification questions or you’d like me to go over a draft, please meet with me to discuss your work. My office hours are right after class, and I have a fairly open schedule if you want to make an appointment.

Also, one last anthropomorphism vid:

Because of class, I’ve been thinking about this movie lately, so I thought maybe we could talk about it.

Bicentennial Man is about a robot named Andrew that starts to display several human-like qualities and his quest to join humanity.

There are several scenes which illustrate the difference between human thought and computer thought.

In one scene, he carves a horse figurine out of driftwood for the little girl. The father asks where he got the horses design from. Andrew says that he didn’t get the designs from anywhere. He just saw the horse in his head, and chipped away the pieces of wood that wouldn’t be part of the statue. The family takes this as one of the many signs that Andrew is not a typical robot. Creating his own design takes creativity and intentionality.

Most of the comedy in the movie comes from Andrew’s initial lack of understanding jokes and language. When the oldest girl says that the chicken “sucks” or tells him to jump, he takes everything literally. When Andrew tries to tell jokes to the family, he rattles off the sentences without pausing between the set-up and punchline and without pausing for laughter. The semantic use of language and comedic timing are both qualities of the mind that only humans can have. Eventually, Andrew will learn to use both, but that’s only because in this fictional world, there’s “just something different” about him.

Has anyone else seen this movie?

To continue from a previous thread, here are two more videos showing machines in an anthropocentric light.

Here’s another commercial by Wes Anderson you may have seen before:

This next video is very special to me. It’s by David Cronenberg, and I will probably show it again in a future screening:

Respond to this thread by Tuesday for participation credit! Note: you aren’t required to respond to the prompts below. Feel free to speak your mind on any topic covered in class or in the readings. These prompts are just meant to stimulate discussion.

Prompts and Questions:

• We went over three different proofs of God’s existence in class. Are these arguments valid? Are they sound?
• Is Descartes’ solution to the mind/body problem satisfying? Why or why not?
• Is Descartes right to claim that I know my own thoughts more intimately than anything else? Is this really an indubitable foundation for knowledge?
• Is the will free? Does this affect our freedom?
• Is the Argument from Design a strong argument? Is it better than Descartes’ arguments?

We are a few weeks away from a discussion of technology, but I thought I’d flag this commercial for later discussion: