We'll view a short excerpt from Modern Times (since nearly everyone said they had never seen the film) and compare the sorts of questions/issues raised by the proliferation of industrial and information technologies.
There seems to be a theme of "freedom" and "liberation" running through the rhetoric of computing, captured in books like Negroponte's Being Digital, and slogans like Microsoft's "Where Do You Want To Go Today?" We talked last time about Moravec's language and his notion of "liberating" human minds. Can a technology be genuinely liberating? What test do you apply in determining whether something contributes to your freedom?
Our guest today is Tom Dean, and perhaps he'll say something about what drew him to computer science and how he sees some of these questions concerning technology.
Moravec's Mind Children, chapters 3-6
The assignment for today was to finish Mind Children with three questions in mind:
We'll begin with summaries and questions raised by each individual chapter, and then focus on common concerns. In addition to the "big" questions (e.g. Moravec's notion of "pattern identity" and "body identity" on pp. 117ff), there are a number of technical discussions we might have (e.g. about information theory and NP problems and the processing power of contemporary computers), and I hope we'll devote some time to talking about cellular automata in the form of Conway's "Life".
A Brief Introduction to Arendt's The Human Condition
In 1958, Hannah Arendt could write:
"The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him." (p. 10)
Arendt's book is largely: a defense of the idea that the human condition is intimately rather than incidentally bound to the earth; and an inquiry into whether/how the conditions of human existence (as discovered by science for example) can be said to "explain" what/who we are.
For Next Time:: 1) Based on today's discussion of the Robopet exercise, find a partner (or two) with whom to write a more formal response -- since there are so many questions in the exercise you'll want to choose those that you find most pressing; and 2) Read the first 50 pages of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, and try to figure out what she would have to say to Moravec or him to her.