textualdeviance (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
textualdeviance) wrote2005-01-06 12:56 am
textualdeviance) wrote2005-01-06 12:56 am
*snort*
So, one of the textbooks we have is this collection of essays called "composing cyberspace." Now, I'm not far enough into the book to really be able to judge, but so far, every essay in Ch. 1 is nothing but ranting about how computers are going to own our souls. That the book was compiled back in 96 or sommat is amusing, too, as I have to giggle every time one of them tries to explain things like MUDs or aliases.
Now, yours truly has been online in some form or other since 1993, so this new fangled in-tar-net thingy is pretty old hat for me at this point. Computers have never scared me. I was too old to have had computers in my schools (they appeared the year after I left) but my parents bought me a Vic 20 for Christmas one year and I happily spent hours writing dumbass graphics in Basic. (And one rather nice little astrology program, too.) Granted that thinking in code has never been one of my strong suits, but the machinery itself never intimidated me. Few machines ever have, unless they're intended to kill people. But I think they do scare a lot of people, particularly the people writing some of these essays. They place value judgements on machines, as if machines have motivation, and that motivation is to steal their souls while they're asleep. These are the people who truly believe The Matrix is a reasonable threat for the near future, and who stockpiled bottled water in 1999.
They're making some very serious fundamental errors though. First is that machines (in their current state) are not independent. Even AI programs must be written by humans. Humans must build and design the hardware they run on. Humans must write the languages that talk to the machines. Even if we eventually get to a point where AI learns, feels, has morals, creates other machines or even creates humans, humans are still the gods of the machines and always have been (who the God is of humans, we'll never know.) Every machine can trace itself back to a human Adam. And for that reason, there should never be anything to fear from machines themselves. What IS scary, is other humans. Because humans know how to make machines that can make life pretty sucky (or end it altogether) for other humans and carbon-based lifeforms. When a gun is fired and the bullet hits someone's heart, it is not the gun or the bullet that actually did the killing. It's the human who fired it. It's the human who designed and manufactured the gun and the bullets. It's the humans who financed the R&D for the gun to be built. And who legalized its manufacture and sale. And this is why we don't hold guns responsible for killing people. (A side note: I do believe in restricting the manufacture and sale of firearms, however, because guns serve no other purpose than to blow holes in things and living creatures, and therefore the potential benefits of their use are greatly outweighed by the potential consequences.)
When these people value organic (cell- and carbon-based) life over manufactured things, they are missing the point that these manufactured things are completely valueless. They have only the value that their manufacturers/designers and users give them. Likewise, they also have only that POWER which humans give them. As with guns, some machines clearly have no purpose other than destruction or misery for organic life, but it's not the machines themselves that are the problem, but the people who created them. Machines are merely a means to an end. Absent malicious motivation *from a human* they have no negative value. And that goes for any tool, not just electronics, not just "hard" items, not just non-carbon-based items. A stick is just a stick until someone uses it to dig a hole to plant a seed, or to beat some poor schmuck over the head. So should we fear sticks or praise them? Or, should we instead place the blame or praise where it belongs-- on the person using the tool in question? Machines have become scapegoats because humans are generally too chicken shit to confront their own failings as a species. That, and somewhere in our logical processes, we realize that we do still have control over the machines, so we like to fancy that we can end human suffering by just pushing a button, because we obviously can't end human suffering generated by other humans. There is only so much control we can have over other people before the control itself becomes a tool of abuse. So there's no way to end human suffering completely, because there will always be humans who believe that their amusement/power/gratification is more important than someone else's right to, say, eat. And that's a pretty depressing thought. So it's not surprising we'd rather just blame machines for making us less humane to each other, instead of realizing that man's inhumanity to man has been around since Ogg first learned how to chuck a rock at Gog's head to get his share of papaya. But I'm sure these people, had they been around at the time, would've blamed the rock. Or the papaya.
Restricting the use of some tools is necessary, of course, because people are far too tempted to misuse them and can't be trusted to use them properly. And of course some tools/machines serve little to no purpose other than to cause suffering, so their use needs to be restricted even more tightly. But absent any inherent negative value, tools shouldn't be blamed for the negative actions of humans. Certainly some tools make it easier for humans to be shitty to each other, and that's why those tools need to be controlled, but the underlying problem won't go away just because the tool does. You have to work on both the means AND the motivation for people being rotten in order to get it to stop.
Another thing these guys (and one gal, so far) are missing is that humans are, at the core, machines as well. One of the guys interviewed, sounding something like the Unabomber in his hatred of technology, whines about how mathematical principles can never be applied to human thought because it's too nebulous and illogical. He divorces emotion and reason as if they were completely separate things. WTF? The guy is a linguistics professor at Berkeley. Surely he's taken an anatomy class. Human thought and action is all based in the brain which is really just one big squishy computer. Everything humans do, say, think, create all originates in firing neurons. All memory, all learning, all motivation is all held in little electronic pulses along little pathways, which are all constructed and de-constructed as need dictates. On occasion, there can be something wrong with brain structure and chemistry that causes a person to think or behave in fucked-up ways, but generally speaking, every thought and action any organism does is produced by a complex network of neural pathways that were created by biological and social events in the lifespan of that organism. Humans are like plants in that sense. We grow according to what's in our seeds and the environment we're planted in, and the near-infinite unique conditions in both biology and environment is what makes each of us unique. The butterfly effect, as it were. A child is born three days later than it should've been and there are certain things in its development that are different than they would've been otherwise. Small things, to be sure, but differences nonetheless. And those differences affect the child's environment, the other people around it, and its own eventual children. And so on... But it all comes down to those neurons firing. And, how about that, that's exactly what computers come down to as well. Electrical pulses from one place to another. In humans, that's between brain and nerve cells. In computers, that's between circuits. Man not only created God in his image, but everything else around him, too.
But perhaps this all goes back to theology and the notion that humans are somehow more special than anything else on the planet because we supposedly have souls and machines, animals, rocks, whatever, don't. Bullshit. There is no such thing as a soul. And maybe that idea frightens those who have built their worldview on the concept of a deity and afterlife. If all we do after we die is simply leave a small trace of electronic energy hovering around for a moment, that really makes life more nasty, brutish and short than it already is. Pretty depressing. So people like to kid themselves that God and heaven exist, because it's too painful to imagine otherwise. But, amusingly enough, religious faith in and of itself still only goes back to those neural pathways, and how they get created depending on the particular biological and environmental conditions a kid grows up with. A wee boy from Pago Pago isn't going to suddenly become a Christian if he's never been told what Christianity is. He may make up his own religion, in fact, if he's not given one, because religion, at its core, is just humans trying to explain things they don't understand. But quite frankly, cars are God to dogs.
A small side note here that yes, science itself is man's invention to explain things he doesn't understand, but where science and religion differ is in empiricism, and empiricism is automatically more trustworthy. That which can be consistently, tangibly reproduced by anyone presenting identical sets of circumstances is scientific fact. Religion has no such logical foundation. All it has is faith. Of course some religious freaks lately have been trying to classify empiricism as an actual religion in and of itself because they can't stand the idea that there might not be a big man in the sky watching out for them (or, more likely, they can't stand the idea that they won't be able to control other people by threatening them with the wrath of said man in the sky.)
But I digress. The focus of the book, of course, is on humans using machines to communicate, and represent themselves, etc. (hence why it's used in a communications class) but the real fatal flaw in the logic of the complainers is that humans are not interacting with machines, they are interacting with other humans VIA machines. Even when someone is playing a single-player video game, they are, in essence, communicating with the people who made that game. Just because the method of that communication is in a different form than a book or movie or telephone conversation doesn't mean it's any less communicative. It may be one-way communication (although not entirely, because players can influence game makers by their actions of buying, critiquing, etc.) but it's still simply humans transmitting what they cooked up in their squishy gray organic machines to another human's brain. Putting a negative value judgement on a piece of communication merely because of the method of that communication is stupid. The value judgement should come in the content and execution of the message, not the means in which it's delivered. Buy Viagra Wholesale!! is a useless message whether one reads it in a book, sees it on a billboard, is told it over the phone or in person by a human voice, or shows up in a popup box. It doesn't automatically gain or lose value depending onthe medium used for its transmission.
***
I'm rapidly losing clarity because I need sleep, but just imagine that I just wrote a few more paragraphs touching on issues like how machines are themselves organic in the sense that everything on the planet is. Even plastic is created from dead dinosaurs. I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say on this and similar issues as the quarter continues, but I had to get this off my chest. Dumbass technophobes piss me off.
Now, yours truly has been online in some form or other since 1993, so this new fangled in-tar-net thingy is pretty old hat for me at this point. Computers have never scared me. I was too old to have had computers in my schools (they appeared the year after I left) but my parents bought me a Vic 20 for Christmas one year and I happily spent hours writing dumbass graphics in Basic. (And one rather nice little astrology program, too.) Granted that thinking in code has never been one of my strong suits, but the machinery itself never intimidated me. Few machines ever have, unless they're intended to kill people. But I think they do scare a lot of people, particularly the people writing some of these essays. They place value judgements on machines, as if machines have motivation, and that motivation is to steal their souls while they're asleep. These are the people who truly believe The Matrix is a reasonable threat for the near future, and who stockpiled bottled water in 1999.
They're making some very serious fundamental errors though. First is that machines (in their current state) are not independent. Even AI programs must be written by humans. Humans must build and design the hardware they run on. Humans must write the languages that talk to the machines. Even if we eventually get to a point where AI learns, feels, has morals, creates other machines or even creates humans, humans are still the gods of the machines and always have been (who the God is of humans, we'll never know.) Every machine can trace itself back to a human Adam. And for that reason, there should never be anything to fear from machines themselves. What IS scary, is other humans. Because humans know how to make machines that can make life pretty sucky (or end it altogether) for other humans and carbon-based lifeforms. When a gun is fired and the bullet hits someone's heart, it is not the gun or the bullet that actually did the killing. It's the human who fired it. It's the human who designed and manufactured the gun and the bullets. It's the humans who financed the R&D for the gun to be built. And who legalized its manufacture and sale. And this is why we don't hold guns responsible for killing people. (A side note: I do believe in restricting the manufacture and sale of firearms, however, because guns serve no other purpose than to blow holes in things and living creatures, and therefore the potential benefits of their use are greatly outweighed by the potential consequences.)
When these people value organic (cell- and carbon-based) life over manufactured things, they are missing the point that these manufactured things are completely valueless. They have only the value that their manufacturers/designers and users give them. Likewise, they also have only that POWER which humans give them. As with guns, some machines clearly have no purpose other than destruction or misery for organic life, but it's not the machines themselves that are the problem, but the people who created them. Machines are merely a means to an end. Absent malicious motivation *from a human* they have no negative value. And that goes for any tool, not just electronics, not just "hard" items, not just non-carbon-based items. A stick is just a stick until someone uses it to dig a hole to plant a seed, or to beat some poor schmuck over the head. So should we fear sticks or praise them? Or, should we instead place the blame or praise where it belongs-- on the person using the tool in question? Machines have become scapegoats because humans are generally too chicken shit to confront their own failings as a species. That, and somewhere in our logical processes, we realize that we do still have control over the machines, so we like to fancy that we can end human suffering by just pushing a button, because we obviously can't end human suffering generated by other humans. There is only so much control we can have over other people before the control itself becomes a tool of abuse. So there's no way to end human suffering completely, because there will always be humans who believe that their amusement/power/gratification is more important than someone else's right to, say, eat. And that's a pretty depressing thought. So it's not surprising we'd rather just blame machines for making us less humane to each other, instead of realizing that man's inhumanity to man has been around since Ogg first learned how to chuck a rock at Gog's head to get his share of papaya. But I'm sure these people, had they been around at the time, would've blamed the rock. Or the papaya.
Restricting the use of some tools is necessary, of course, because people are far too tempted to misuse them and can't be trusted to use them properly. And of course some tools/machines serve little to no purpose other than to cause suffering, so their use needs to be restricted even more tightly. But absent any inherent negative value, tools shouldn't be blamed for the negative actions of humans. Certainly some tools make it easier for humans to be shitty to each other, and that's why those tools need to be controlled, but the underlying problem won't go away just because the tool does. You have to work on both the means AND the motivation for people being rotten in order to get it to stop.
Another thing these guys (and one gal, so far) are missing is that humans are, at the core, machines as well. One of the guys interviewed, sounding something like the Unabomber in his hatred of technology, whines about how mathematical principles can never be applied to human thought because it's too nebulous and illogical. He divorces emotion and reason as if they were completely separate things. WTF? The guy is a linguistics professor at Berkeley. Surely he's taken an anatomy class. Human thought and action is all based in the brain which is really just one big squishy computer. Everything humans do, say, think, create all originates in firing neurons. All memory, all learning, all motivation is all held in little electronic pulses along little pathways, which are all constructed and de-constructed as need dictates. On occasion, there can be something wrong with brain structure and chemistry that causes a person to think or behave in fucked-up ways, but generally speaking, every thought and action any organism does is produced by a complex network of neural pathways that were created by biological and social events in the lifespan of that organism. Humans are like plants in that sense. We grow according to what's in our seeds and the environment we're planted in, and the near-infinite unique conditions in both biology and environment is what makes each of us unique. The butterfly effect, as it were. A child is born three days later than it should've been and there are certain things in its development that are different than they would've been otherwise. Small things, to be sure, but differences nonetheless. And those differences affect the child's environment, the other people around it, and its own eventual children. And so on... But it all comes down to those neurons firing. And, how about that, that's exactly what computers come down to as well. Electrical pulses from one place to another. In humans, that's between brain and nerve cells. In computers, that's between circuits. Man not only created God in his image, but everything else around him, too.
But perhaps this all goes back to theology and the notion that humans are somehow more special than anything else on the planet because we supposedly have souls and machines, animals, rocks, whatever, don't. Bullshit. There is no such thing as a soul. And maybe that idea frightens those who have built their worldview on the concept of a deity and afterlife. If all we do after we die is simply leave a small trace of electronic energy hovering around for a moment, that really makes life more nasty, brutish and short than it already is. Pretty depressing. So people like to kid themselves that God and heaven exist, because it's too painful to imagine otherwise. But, amusingly enough, religious faith in and of itself still only goes back to those neural pathways, and how they get created depending on the particular biological and environmental conditions a kid grows up with. A wee boy from Pago Pago isn't going to suddenly become a Christian if he's never been told what Christianity is. He may make up his own religion, in fact, if he's not given one, because religion, at its core, is just humans trying to explain things they don't understand. But quite frankly, cars are God to dogs.
A small side note here that yes, science itself is man's invention to explain things he doesn't understand, but where science and religion differ is in empiricism, and empiricism is automatically more trustworthy. That which can be consistently, tangibly reproduced by anyone presenting identical sets of circumstances is scientific fact. Religion has no such logical foundation. All it has is faith. Of course some religious freaks lately have been trying to classify empiricism as an actual religion in and of itself because they can't stand the idea that there might not be a big man in the sky watching out for them (or, more likely, they can't stand the idea that they won't be able to control other people by threatening them with the wrath of said man in the sky.)
But I digress. The focus of the book, of course, is on humans using machines to communicate, and represent themselves, etc. (hence why it's used in a communications class) but the real fatal flaw in the logic of the complainers is that humans are not interacting with machines, they are interacting with other humans VIA machines. Even when someone is playing a single-player video game, they are, in essence, communicating with the people who made that game. Just because the method of that communication is in a different form than a book or movie or telephone conversation doesn't mean it's any less communicative. It may be one-way communication (although not entirely, because players can influence game makers by their actions of buying, critiquing, etc.) but it's still simply humans transmitting what they cooked up in their squishy gray organic machines to another human's brain. Putting a negative value judgement on a piece of communication merely because of the method of that communication is stupid. The value judgement should come in the content and execution of the message, not the means in which it's delivered. Buy Viagra Wholesale!! is a useless message whether one reads it in a book, sees it on a billboard, is told it over the phone or in person by a human voice, or shows up in a popup box. It doesn't automatically gain or lose value depending onthe medium used for its transmission.
***
I'm rapidly losing clarity because I need sleep, but just imagine that I just wrote a few more paragraphs touching on issues like how machines are themselves organic in the sense that everything on the planet is. Even plastic is created from dead dinosaurs. I'm sure I'll have plenty more to say on this and similar issues as the quarter continues, but I had to get this off my chest. Dumbass technophobes piss me off.
I like the way you think :)
Interestingly enough, we come to similar conclusions from different viewpoint.. I'm fairly animistic in my religious views so unlike yourself I do believe in a "soul" but everything has one - people, rats, snakes, rocks.... Interesting how one ends up at the same place whether you consider the set of souls to be the empty set or unity.
Re: I like the way you think :)
Someone once told me that this is somewhat Taoist, so maybe that's what I'm closer to than anything. A bit Pagan, too, perhaps. I don't necessarily believe that anything without a brain has a consciousness, but I do believe it has energy that can be felt by other things. Trees understand that animals exist, water understands that rock exists. Etc. I suppose all of this is why I'm an environmentalist. Not that I'm going to go do a tree sit anytime soon, or believe that Treebeard walks the earth somewhere, but I do believe that since all things are interconnected, that if humans, as the species with the capacity to do the most damage to other things (I won't say the dominant species, because insects vastly outnumber us) were to continue doing that damage at the current rate, we're soon going to make ourselves extinct because we will have altered the rest of the things on the planet to a point that their energy can no longer be transmitted to us in the way or volume that we need it to to sustain our lives. So we'll all die, our energy will be returned to the earth as fertilizer, and that will be that for this stage of the universe's evolution. Saving the environment is a misnomer. The planet will always exist (barring some galactic cataclysm) but we may not if we continue misusing the rest of the resources we need to survive.
no subject
The internet has crossed unimaginable boundaries, especially with such a huge, disjointed population. It has made possible things heretofore impossible. It has shrunk time.
It has also allowed people to reinvent themselves. Again, as you say, not the fault of the machine. It just provides an opportunity to let our baser or our nobler selves manifest behind the one way mirror of anonymity. We have seen in life and in color on Data Lounge.
"I read it on DL."
Because we believe what some anon said.
One knows now this is how organized religion got started.