did somebody say “robot love”?: on monsters and machines
“If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.”
— Sherry Turkle
the words just tumbled out of my mouth: “you have no soul, you cold-hearted machine!” i may as well have called him a monster, an abnegation of his very humanity.
-yet it occurred to me, instantly, that i was contradicting the very essence of my research: that machines indeed bely an essence of warm, a firelight (however virtual)- indeed, a campfire around which I’d been gathering with my friends (both “real-life” and fictive) for years. we humans are merely creatures of habit, adverse to change that outstretches our imaginations.
“Those who are opposed to the use of computers to teach generally believe the computers to be ‘cold’ and ‘inhuman.’ The teacher is considered ‘warm’ and ‘human.’ This view is questionable on both sides.”
— Theodor Nelson
In the spaces between two poles of prevailing ideology- the utopian discourses of society battling the forces of discord and chaostrophe- there is a middle ground, more subtle. Here is the exploration of human potential, animal language, the deep sea mysteries of the mind. Once in awhile, what is discovered uncovers the stories and dreams of a forgotten time and people.
Who are to be the ancient storytellers of tomorrow? What traces will we leave behind?
I once stayed up ’til dawn crying in front of my computer monitor, having spent the night exploring the MySpace profiles of the dead.
My first romantic love occurred online, faceless.
These things float through my mind, reminding me:
Immersion.
Who is to be monster?
March 19th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I’m sure that all moments of our lives from all phases of them will be read, seen, watched and heard at once even many years after our death. Our thoughts, our moods together with some credentials of being here, living and loving such as all logons and logouts to the dating or banking systems, all orders of pizza or flowers deliveries, all our pics on flickr, all our pokes on facebook, all checks on the google maps, all our false and real identities, all entries on our blogs, all our comments with our individual only our style clumsy words will last till the end of electric power on earth.
That makes me thinking that we are already a part of machine, we gave it collective soul, which is formed out of our individual experiences. One day machine awakes and asks questions: who am I, what my strange thought, dreams, feeling mean, who gave them to me, what is at my ends, what to do, where to go, what will last after me.
something is obfuscating my vision and turning my power off