Philosophical notes…
On Ex Machina
“Because if that [Turing] test is passed, you are dead center of the greatest scientific event in the history of man. ”
“If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods.”
This is an exchange between two of the main characters in Ex Machina. A superb thriller, the film explores a range of ethical implications concerning the human ability to transcend itself through technological innovation. In this case, it focused upon the Turing Test, and the possibility of creating a conscious machine. Early on, the two characters cited above touch on what is in my mind a crucial ambiguity in the philosophy of technology. It goes back to Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates cites writing's divine origins. Central to my recent work has been this question of the problematic way in which technique implies transcendence in philosophical discourse. With this problem in focus, I have aimed to provide an alternative approach to basic aspects of technique, such as writing in books. In any case, Ex Machina maintained a philosophical ambition worth noting alongside its coldly narrated suspense.
On Drones
“What does Francis Fukuyama do after the end of history? In his leisure hours, he puts together little drones in his garage and then proudly exhibits them on his blog. He is part of an rapidly developing subculture: that of the homemade drone. Following in the footsteps of the model enthusiasts of the 1960s, there today exists a whole little community of amateurs who buy or construct drones at the cost of a few hundred dollars. With their microcameras on board, these machines make it possible to produce unofficial little films, some of which are strikingly beautiful. I am thinking in particular of a flight over New York in which, once over the Brooklyn Bridge, the camera scans the facades of the skyline, ending up by gliding past the flame on the Statue of Liberty. Proof enough of the validity of Walter Benjamin’s thesis that technology, today used for death-dealing purposes, may eventually recover its emancipating potential and readopt the playful and aesthetic aspirations that secretly inspire it.”
Grégoire Chamayou "Theorizing the Drone," - http://wp.me/p4KhvY-4me
Longreads blog posted this interesting excerpt of four chapters from Chamayou's book A Theory of the Drone. The article contrasts the logic of the kamikaze and drone as follows: "The drone and the kamikaze stand in contrast as two opposed forms of moral sensibility, two forms of ethos that reflect each other but are each other’s antithesis and nightmare." And yes, Francis Fukuyama really is a drone hobbyist - http://on.ft.com/1EG4PyU. For another take on critical aesthetics of drone practices, the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne, was displaying the "Untitled (Drone)" series by Trevor Paglen. The works can be seen on his website here, but really need to be seen in person to appreciate their scale.
On Freedom Regained
“Gazzaniga is interested in how complexity provides a way of understanding how minds operate in ways that can’t be either predicted or understood by only studying brain processes. Mind and consciousness are ‘emergent properties’ which arise out of nothing more than brain processes, because the complex organization of these processes creates new properties which are not found at the fundamental physical level. This explains how it can be that beliefs, desires and intentions can actually change things, without us having to think that they are mysterious, non-physical things.... This is one of the most important scientific facts we need to bear in mind when thinking about free will. Too often it can seem that, if brains are the engines of thought, then thoughts themselves cannot change anything. Complexity theory shows us how this can be false, without the need to postulate any strange, weird, supernatural or non-physical will or soul. It shows that the idea that thoughts, beliefs and desires can cause things to happen is not outmoded metaphysics, but bang up-to-date science.”
Julian Baggini "Freedom Regained," - http://wp.me/p4rWb7-jR
On Free Will
“Commitment, public or private, to human dignity should not entail perpetuating fictions about free will, even if we need to ward off the counter-mythology of mechanical models of agency. And behind all these discussions stands the need to remind ourselves to go on being surprised, puzzled and prompted by what we take for granted about action itself – initiating events in the world – and language: speech that makes things different. No philosophy, politics or sociology worth the name will survive without that surprise; without at least a faint taste of Golding’s potatoes.”
Rowan Williams, "Can We Ever Be in Charge of Our Own Lives," - http://www.newstatesman.com/node/227255
On University Specialization
“In late-18th- and early-19th-century Germany, readers troubled by the huge increase in printed material felt imperiled by a veritable ‘plague’ of books circulating among the reading public. Deep concerns about what counted as authoritative knowledge made writers and intellectuals anxious as they heard and read increasingly pointed critiques of universities as outmoded guilds that needed to justify their existence in an age of easily accessible information. Philosophers and thinkers like J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm von Humboldt were the first to embrace and argue for the idea of a renewed university with specialized academic knowledge as its organizing system... Specialized academic knowledge, Wissenschaft, was not simply an ideology imposed by the vague rationalizing imperatives of modernity. It was a normative and ethical framework that valorized particular intellectual goods (the never-ending production of knowledge and the ability to perceive the relationships of various sciences) and inculcated particular virtues (rigor, collaboration, intellectual imagination, industriousness, responsibility, and a critical disposition). Academic knowledge tied epistemology to ethics. It formed people and grounded knowledge in a community that could sustain, cultivate, and evaluate it. And it gave rise to great achievements, from the first well-funded and organized laboratories to large philology projects used to this day.”
Chad Wellmon, "In Defense of Specialization," - http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Specialization/229023/
"Academic knowledge tied epistemology to ethics."
On William James' Pragmatism
“[William] James’s pragmatism insisted that philosophy could still have life-and-death significance. Philosophy D addressed an array of existentially loaded topics, the kind that most academics assiduously avoid: truth, God, evil, suffering, death, and the meaning of life. This was not some dry PowerPoint presentation. ‘The man of genius,’ Emerson tells us, ‘inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.’ That is what James tried to do: encourage his students to wrestle with life’s most difficult questions. And to do so — bravely — on their own terms. This didn’t mean that students were just left to fend for themselves. Far from it. James was unusually close to them and one of the few professors who entertained questions when he lectured. His students loved him for it.”
"The Curse of Credentials," - http://www.chroniclecareers.com/article/The-Curse-of-Credentials/228999/
On APIs
“What’s bizarre here is that these lines of code directly control real humans. The Uber API dispatches a human to drive from point A to point B. And the 99designs Tasks API dispatches a human to convert an image into a vector logo (black, white and color). Humans are on the verge of becoming literal cogs in a machine, completely anonymized behind an API. And the companies that control those APIs have strong incentives to drive down the cost of executing those API methods... As the software layer gets thicker, the gap between Below the API jobs and Above the API jobs widens. And economic incentives will push Above the API engineers to automate the jobs Below the API: self-driving cars and drone delivery are certainly on the way. The gap in training and social groups above and below could mean that new automation technology causes sudden, large-scale unemployment and a surge in demand for subsidized training. I hope we’re ready.”
Peter Reinhardt, "Replacing Middle Management with APIs" - http://rein.pk/replacing-middle-management-with-apis/
On Extremism
“Obama, after all, faces two overlapping but distinct challenges. One is an ideology: the totalitarian, even genocidal, vision espoused by ISIS. The second is a tactic: terrorism, which is available to people of all ideological stripes and which grows more dangerous as technology empowers individuals or groups to kill far more people far more quickly than they could have in ages past. Instead of assuming that these threats are the same, we should be debating the relative danger of each. By using ‘violent extremism’ rather than ‘radical Islam,’ Obama is staking out a position in that argument. It’s a position with which reasonable people can disagree. But cowardice has nothing to do with it.”
Peter Beinhart, "What Does Obama Really Mean by 'Violent Extremism'?" - http://theatln.tc/1MPL7Wt
On Philosophy of Information
“We used to think that power was about either the creation or the control of things, that it was about the means of production of goods. That’s what Marx thought. It was not about the production of experiences or services. Then society switched to a focus on power being expressed through the control of information. Once control of information is recognised as a source of power, then any powerful entity wants to control this information. Governments and empires all want to control information. What we’re seeing today is the very beginning of another switch, from power over things, to power over information, to power about the questions that shape the answers that give the information about things. If you take the view that semantic information is broadly speaking delivered as a question plus an answer, then those who control the questions shape the answers. That’s the new power we need to understand and manage properly today.”
On Philosophy of Technology
“What was also fascinating in this book [Philosophy of Technology: 5 Questions] was how little discussion there was in philosophy of technology circles about the internet –philosophers of technology completely missed the train on the internet. I haven’t seen any good books, or any books frankly, which engage with new media or blogs or social networking or privacy, let alone transparency or WikiLeaks from the philosophy of technology perspective. For me it is kind of sad that probably one of the most important issues of our day is neglected, with most philosophers of technology still arguing about the clock and the wheel. I don’t know if the internet isn’t too big a subject, and we need a separate independent field, something like philosophy of the internet. It boils down essentially to whether the internet is so unique as a technology that it even defies the conventions of philosophy of technology as a field, and whether it requires its own set of principles and assumptions.”