-What (if anything) can we do to improve the present(future) condition?
-Shaviro writes that we have “moved out of time and into space” (p. 249) – if this is the case, then where is a place of critique and/or change?
Humans are always struggling to improve their situtaion, be that fighting over a scrap of meat so they can survive another day or lusting after a new piece of technology that will give them an added convenience. Shaviro (and a few people during the discussion) seemed very concerned over where we were heading, sacrificing our privacy in order to participate in a service that makes our lives easier. That this act of chipping away at our percieved rights is going to lead us to a world where no one has any rights over their own lives, that we will be a “zombie workforce” that are nothing more than mindless slaves that only live to service the Machine, be it a corporation or some vast super-intelligent computer system. I would posit that nothing needs to be done to prevent this sort of thing from happening, especially in Western societies.
Western science fiction is full of examples of intelligent systems bent on the destruction of human (or all) life: The Borg, HAL, Skynet, the bugs and many others. Westerners are terrified of such systems and no matter how much we work toward creating a network or machine that can effectively think for itself there will always be some sort of safeguard to shit down that system. The President of the United States has an Internet kill switch, there would be something built in to protect the creators, even if it is as simple as Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.
The concern over the erosion of rights such as privacy and ownership are problematic in that these are things that shift over generations. The American Indian tribes are often said to have had no sense of property or ownership, but they still fought for the land that the Europeans wanted to take from them. Generations past have all had their own ideas over what could be considered “theirs” or “private.” Starting with the current generation and perhaps more so with the younger generation, these concepts are shifting yet again; perhaps we are moving toward something more “enlightened” or maybe we will all be slaves to the successor of IBM’s Watson, we will not know until we are there, but the only certain thing is that humans will always act in their own self interest. Right now, it seems best for us to give up a bit of information about what we search for on Google in order to have an excellent tool at our disposal, but in 50 or 100 years, we might have a completely different system where no one has to give up anything because everything is already out on the Internet (or whatever comes after it) and no one cares what you search about because it really doesn’t matter what you are doing in your spare time as long as you aren’t causing harm to someone else.
In regards to Steve’s second question of finding a place of critique and/or change in our current state, humans are always in that place (provided they have access to what is to be critiqued/changed). Humans are capable of great insights into the world around them, every point on a person’s timeline (including the space they are in at that point in time) is a potential place of critique and change. It helps to be able to remove yourself from a particular situation in order to think critically about it and how someone might work to change or improve it, Shaviro is doing it in Connected and we do it every class period. Shaviro claims that we have “moved out of time and into space,” but I am going to have to agree with mainstream physics in that the two cannot be divorced from one another. Everything that makes a person who they are is a product of their experiences up to and including that moment, those experiences consist of a place and a time. Take a common activity: going out to dinner, everyone has a favorite restaurant and maybe a favorite dish at that restaurant. Order that dish at that restaurant two different times and your experience will be different. Maybe the cook added too much salt or the people at the table next to you were being obnoxious. You are at the same place but at a different time. If we are no longer beings of time and space then the jerks sitting next to you at the restaurant do not matter, just that you are in the same place. Experiences make us who we are and those experiences that we hold dear are only special because they happened at a particular time and cannot revisit them; we can try to recreate them--and maybe one day we will have a technology that lets us do just that--but that recreation is always a pale imitation of the original experience.
Follow up questions:
1. Why do we have to be afraid of letting the future happen?
2. Why should we be stuck to (potentially) outmoded ideas of privacy and ownership when those models may not suit us in our present (or future) states?
3. Would privacy even matter in a society where everything and everyone is connected?
Artifacts:
C-Net’s Top 10 Evil Computers:
Western culture is horrified of computers taking control, these are just a few of the many ways we have portrayed the evil computer. We are mortified by computers becoming sentient but if we are smart about creating them, they probably won’t exterminate the human race.
The Laws of Robotics:
Isaac Asimov created a simple set of rules that all robots must follow in his stories revolving around robots. These laws have been used in many different forms over the years and I do not see any sentient or near sentient forms of computer being created without a similar safeguard in place.
Humanity in the 24th Century:
A small series of clips from the episode The Neutral Zone of Star Trek: The Next Generation where members of the crew of the Enterprise explain society in the 24th Century to a group from the 21st Century. An example of a society where humans with advanced computers and networks were able to outgrow some of the concerns that Shaviro raises in Connected.
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