In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks responds to the claims by Jonathan Franzen, Julian Barnes, Andrew Miller and others that literary texts are being damaged by becoming ebooks. Parks’ argument shares features with Hayles’ and is also in conflict with Hayles’ views, a situation I, at least, found pretty intriguing.
In Scientific American, it’s like Graham’s chapter from Thursday’s class has itself come to life: we’ve got DNA, we’ve got robots, we’ve got illness being cured from the inside out
Ashley’s post on the Radiolab episode encouraged me to share with you the following podcasts that I’ve heard over the past few months and think you could find not only interesting and relevant but downright fun. (I’m sure there’s plenty more out there–let us know what you’ve found.)
Radiolab: a short podcast on “Mutant Rights” (12/22/11)
Studio 360: an episode on “Are Computers Creative?” (12/16/11)
Studio 360: an episode on “Making Better People” (11/4/11)
A lot of what futuristic depictions of man seem to be concerned with is the idea of the mobile or transferable conscious. In Battlestar Galactica we see it in the Cylons who are unable to die because they are theoretically “transferred” or “downloaded” back to a new body. in Dark City we saw a twist on this in that the individual thoughts/memories/conceptions could be extracted from one individual human and inserted into another individuals brain. These similarities brought to my mind various other versions of the future human’s brain being a separate and moldable entity from the body. Continue reading
The Stone Gods felt vaguely familiar to me, and then I realized that between Battlestar Galactica, Minority Report, and The Hunger Games, which I’ve read recently, I have already seen and become familiar with many of the elements of The Stone Gods. It seems that our fears for the future as humans all have something in common: an apocalyptic environment, starting over on a new planet, the grouping of the world into fewer and more distinct alliances, the introduction of the android robot as a potentially perilous thing. The other thing that struck me was just how commercial each of these future worlds was. Continue reading
In his article on the potential ramifications of post-humanist technological advances, Winner denounces wealthy, privileged, insular Northern hemisphere scientists who “claim that the changes at issue are foreordained by history”. The author is rightly suspicious of the motives of corporation-funded scientific research, which seems to be geared towards making a bigger profit, rather than the good of humankind. There is also much to be said for his belief that problems such as insufficient housing and healthcare should be addressed first, before any post-humanist innovations are made. Unfortunately, this is an overly idealistic approach which is patently unrealistic when considered in conjunction with humans. Continue reading