Humans and
Machines
|
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
|
Text Selections
René Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy
A. M. Turing,
Computing Machinery
and Intelligence
Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater"
Lerner & Loewe, My Fair Lady (George Cukor’s film)
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media (excerpts)
Philip K. Dick,
selected short stories
Course Description
How is a living, thinking human being like, or not like, a machine? This might seem
like a new question for the Information Age, yet it has been a preoccupation of
our civilization for centuries. From the culmination of the Scientific Revolution in the
seventeenth century, philosophers, physiologists, engineers, authors, political actors and
artists of every kind have taken humanity’s measure by comparing humans with machines.
Our course follows this tradition.
Together, we ask a number of questions about what it means to think of the human
mind, body, and society as types of machines. How has the machine served as a metaphor
for the cosmos and culture? How do we interact with machines, and how have machines
influenced literature, performance, and the arts? What separates us from our machines, and
are we really as separate as we think we are?
We explore the shifting boundary lines between the mechanical and the human by
considering how humanity has created or imagined machines and our interconnections with
them. What do the concepts of “machine,” “human,” “alive,” “intelligent” and “self-aware”
mean in different times and places, including our own? We will consider how humans may
be conceived and designed as well as manipulated as machines, and how our
artificial creations may in turn reflect and reflect upon their human creators.
The philosophical, scientific and ethical
questions regarding the relationship of humans
to machines are not just the preoccupations
of our current moment. These questions have
generated long, rich traditions of responses. We
must draw upon these if we are to confront our
current concerns, not as isolated actors, but as
members of an ever-evolving culture.