Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge is Ashley Shew’s debut monograph and in it she argues that we need to reassess and possibly even drastically change the way in which we think about and classify the categories of technology, tool use, and construction behavior. Drawing from the fields of anthropology, animal studies, and philosophy of technology and engineering, Shew demonstrates that there are several assumptions made by researchers in all of these fields—assumptions about intelligence, intentionality, creativity and the capacity for novel behavior…
Shew says that we consciously and unconsciously appended a “human clause” to all of our definitions of technology, tool use, and intelligence, and this clause’s presumption—that it doesn’t really “count” if humans aren’t the ones doing it—is precisely what has to change.
I am a huge fan of this book and of Shew’s work, in general. Click through to find out a little more about why.
This is the audio and transcript of my presentation “The Quality of Life: The Implications of Augmented Personhood and Machine Intelligence in Science Fiction” from the conference for The Work of Cognition and Neuroethics in Science Fiction.
The abstract–part of which I read in the audio–for this piece looks like this:
This presentation will focus on a view of humanity’s contemporary fictional relationships with cybernetically augmented humans and machine intelligences, from Icarus to the various incarnations of Star Trek to Terminator and Person of Interest, and more. We will ask whether it is legitimate to judge the level of progressiveness of these worlds through their treatment of these questions, and, if so, what is that level? We will consider the possibility that the writers of these tales intended the observed interactions with many of these characters to represent humanity’s technophobia as a whole, with human perspectives at the end of their stories being that of hopeful openness and willingness to accept. However, this does not leave the manner in which they reach that acceptance—that is, the factors on which that acceptance is conditioned—outside of the realm of critique.
As considerations of both biotechnological augmentation and artificial intelligence have advanced, Science Fiction has not always been a paragon of progressiveness in the ultimate outcome of those considerations. For instance, while Picard and Haftel eventually come to see Lal as Data’s legitimate offspring, in the eponymous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, it is only through their ability to map Data’s actions and desires onto a human spectrum—and Data’s desire to have that map be as faithful as possible to its territory—that they come to that acceptance. The reason for this is the one most common throughout science fiction: It is assumed at the outset that any sufficiently non-human consciousness will try remove humanity’s natural right to self-determination and freewill. But from sailing ships to star ships, the human animal has always sought a far horizon, and so it bears asking, how does science fiction regard that primary mode of our exploration, that first vessel—ourselves?
For many, science fiction has been formative to the ways in which we see the world and understand the possibilities for our future, which is why it is strange to look back at many shows, films, and books and to find a decided lack of nuance or attempted understanding. Instead, we are presented with the presupposition that fear and distrust of a hyper-intelligent cyborg or machine consciousness is warranted. Thus, while the spectre of Pinocchio and the Ship of Theseus—that age-old question of “how much of myself can I replace before I am not myself”— both hang over the whole of the Science Fiction Canon, it must be remembered that our ships are just our limbs extended to the sea and the stars.
This will be transcribed to text, in the near future below, thanks to the work of OpenTranscripts.org:
Hello there, I’m Damien Williams, or @Wolven many places on the internet. For the past nine years, I’ve been writing, talking, thinking, teaching, and learning about philosophy, comparative religion, magic, artificial intelligence, human physical and mental augmentation, pop culture, and how they all relate. I want to think about, talk about, and work toward, a future worth living in, and I want to do it with you. I can also be found at http://Technoccult.net (@Techn0ccult).
