hmm…cybernetics and AI, lets talk.

I would like to discuss the art, the meaning and ideas behind cybernetics and most specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI). In class we have covered this topic many times before and each time the same ideas and concerns come to mind. AI is the study of how we learn and applying that knowledge to machines and technology. It is a cognitive science, a look at how humans learn and problem solve. But if our final goal is to one day share this with machines and AI what will set us apart? Or is that the real goal, to make humans and machines interchangeable and one day only the machines will be left? If we teach them, the AI, to think like we do then reproduction will be all that separates us and even that can already, today be done artificially and without much effort! The World will become one similar to the most cliche sci-fi movies and shows. The kind were the people are interacting and living with robots but they don’t know that they are robots etc. This is where I get lost, is all this really feasible? Could this one day be our future? If so, will the robots dictate how we humans live or vise a verse? What if they are in charge will they decide what we do, who we grow up to be and who we make a life with? Have you ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ? Well in it they have master artificial reproduction and taken away all pain and suffering, basically a utopia. But even in this ‘perfect’ world there si a darker, hidden side. I fear that with societies eager acceptance of AI and bio-technologies such as Sommerer and Mignonnonea, A-Volve, 1997, Life Spacies, 1997 and Interactive Plant Growing, 1992. Also Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, Telegarden, 1995-present and Ken Goldberg’s Mori, 1999-present has lead to the welcoming of much more provocative pieces and even the arrest of a leading bio-techno artist! One such piece that strikes me as slightly alarming is Oron  Catts and  Ionat Zurr from the  Tissue Culture and Art Project and their Victimless Leather Jacket be alter, like the natural order could nthat is actually semi-living, a term that has been created in recent years for the new technological biomedical advances and states of being discovered as of late. Society just eats up this new, good-for-the-environment stuff that will one day have us all wearing shirts and pants we have to remember to feed and walk! I understand the need to always be moving forward and finding newer, better ways of doing the ’same old’. Some things should not be messed with such as naturally occurring organisms. I am ok with the interactive, web-based plant growth and the programs that stimulate life but cloning a creating life where it did not already exist with technology does not seem right. Should we really learn how to grow our own leather, other than cows of course? I know that eventually we will run out of cows and that maybe we shouldn’t use them for jackets anyway but making our own leather and growing it like a plant or something is just unsettling. Does anyone else think so, or I am just too close-minded for my own good!?! I know that technology will continue to advance into newer and stranger fields such clothing but I feel cautious, even now when we have barely stuck our toe in the tub, metaphorically speaking. W e are not that far in the grand scheme of things but I am fearful of where we will take it.

I do not want to get into a whole big thing about cloning and bio-technologies but I do want to say that we should probably just leave well enough alone when it come to human life. Let nature take its course and all that. I do not really have a problem with cloning animals and things of that nature but cloning people takes it too far. Then you enter a field of ethics and morals, would the clones think for themselves, would have have all the subconscious thoughts and activities that we do now, and off on a more personal wavelength, would they have a soul?

Ok, so I got into it a little, I can’t help but go there because for me it is all linked. It starts with cybernetics now and AI and then the AI’s become commonplace and then clones and then what? We are already growing jackets and cloning sheep, will it ever stop? Who will stop it, who would be in charge if we continued? We would need a leader in the field with high morale standards but if you are in that field to begin with do you have high moral standards? These are all questions I don’t have answers to, but I am curious…on some levels.

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