Robbie: This surprisingly moving short film takes on a core theme of popular cyberculture - the possibility of machinic sentience and the questions advanced artificial intelligence raise about what it means to be human.
A vacuum-cleaning robot actress who doesn’t do hallucinogenics or nudity? Gumdrop will cheer you up after Robbie. She raises many of the same questions, but this time there are differences - literally - of voice and of embeddedness in the human world. For once, the vision of a posthuman future is not dystopic..
True Skin:
‘No-one wants to be entirely organic. No-one wants to get sick, or old, or die. My only choice was to enhance.’ In the future-world of True Skin, synthetic enhancement is normal, and the boundary between human and machinic body has been erased. Where Robbie and Gumdrop look at the human in the robot, True Skin considers the robotic in the human. In particular, you might want to think about the final scene of the movie in which another core sci-fi fantasy - memory backup - is drawn on.
Ideas and interpretations
Bostrom (2005) ‘Transhumanist values’ reproduced from Review of Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 4, May (2005) http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.html
Transhumanism is very different from the more critical modes of posthumanism that were touched on last week, in the Badmington article in particular. Where critical posthumanists see posthumanism primarily as a philosophical stance which, among other things, draws attention to the inequalities and injustices often wrought in the name of ‘the human’, transhumanists in general see ‘human values’ as a good, though incomplete, project. For transhumanists, ‘humanity’ is a temporary, flawed condition: the future of human evolution is in the direction of a post-human future state in which technological progress has freed us from the inconveniences of limited lifespan, sickness, misery and intellectual limitation.
The transhumanist declaration (2009) useful as an additional summary of the transhumanist position.
Hayles, N K (2011) Wrestling with transhumanism. http://www.metanexus.net/essay/ h-wrestling-transhumanism
N Katherine Hayles (Duke University), author of the influential 1999 text How we became posthuman, here constructs a challenge to transhumanism which presents a useful contrast to the Bostrom text; even if you don’t want to delve too much into the advanced reading this week, we’d recommend you read the opening part, simply for the critique Hayles provides of the transhumanist position.
Hayles argues that the framework within which transhumanism considers the future of human evolution and technological advance is ‘too narrow and ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to be fully up to the task’. Via a critical reading of some classic works of science fiction, she argues that we need a more nuanced, and more politically defensible, series of perspectives than those offered by the theorists and proponents of transhumanist philosophy. The first part of the essay explores some of the problems with the individualistic focus of transhumanism, while the second half uses the literary perspective to more fully explore the issues at stake.
Perspectives on education
System upgrade: realising the vision for UK education (2012) EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme. http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/TELtaster.pdf
(The link is to a taster document for the full report, which you will find here).
This report may seem a long way from the sci-fi fantasies and far-fetched human futures envisioned in our other readings and films this week. However, it is presented here as a chance to look at how the themes of enhancement, transformation and technological advance - so important to the literatures and imaginaries of transhumanism - occur and recur, generally unquestioned, across the more everyday literatures of online education.
This reading is a summary of the report from a large, recent UK research programme (2007-12) which was explicitly concerned with the technological enhancement of learning. There is much in the report which is unexceptionable. However, in reading it, you should consider what vision for education and technology is being forged here.
Carr, M. (2008) Is Google making us stupid? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
This final reading pulls together many of the themes we’ve touched on over the period of the course. It’s an interesting one to read alongside the ‘TEL’ report above, thinking about how relations between the human and the technological are differently worked in each. If the TEL report creates a vision in which technology is under individual or societal control (technology in the TEL report is ‘harnessed’, ‘utilised’, ‘developed’, ‘employed’ in the interests of enhancement), in the Carr article it is human faculties which are under the control of the technology. For Carr, our media environments develop their own logic, to which we adapt socially and physiologically. In a return to a now familiar theme, ‘human nature’ and ‘human being’ is ‘made’ in response to technological shift. Yet this ‘making’ of the human is far from the vision of empowerment and enhancement that we have seen in the readings on transhumanism, and in the vision of education and technology that we saw presented in the TEL report.
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