Artificial Intelligence is becoming an increasingly more common part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Whether necessary for our species’ survival or an existential threat, it is clear that this technology is forcing us to consider the questions behind it all: What is the mind? What is consciousness? Are we anthropomorphising inanimate matter, or are we neglecting a sentient being? This paper looks at contemporary discussions surrounding modern AI, such as the likes of LaMDA and Dall-E, and how deeply rooted they are in conversations surrounding philosophy and psychology from the last two centuries, specifically those of behaviourism vs. functionalism. As well as aspects of the conversation which have been overlooked by AI research, such as psychoanalytical approaches, this paper uncovers rhetoric seen from all sides of the conversation which in some cases betrays questionable world views.
Tag: technology
An exploration of the experience of reading as an embodied cognitive technology. Descartes’ Meditations will be used as an example of a text which uses this cognitive technology to its philosophical advantage.
Zygmunt Bauman’s interesting philosophy of modernity and identity offers a great account of people’s fluid identities in contemporary times. Technology has evolved the way we identify with others as worldwide connections have brought people so much closer together. However, this technologically advanced world is hindered by the dark reality that neo-Nazi groups can operate and radicalise online. Thus, they must be combatted.
The rise of the music streaming service throughout the 21st century stands as a revolutionary change within the world of music. Although only a small number of companies dominate control of the market, the streaming service has succeeded in becoming the world’s most favoured method of music listening. The largest and most popular service is Spotify; a multi-billion-pound corporation that will act as the representative case study for the project. Spotify offers a unique platform of audible content, which gives users access to a vast library spanning the history of music. The main appeal of Spotify sits in their provision of a more affordable, accessible, and technologically advanced mode of listening, which is available to be streamed online through digital devices. This project looks to investigate the platform through the unique application of 20th century cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Benjamin’s work will be used to introduce how our experience of art changes as technology evolves. His theory on art’s ‘aura’, a concept relating to the presence of an original piece, which withered in the age of mechanical reproduction, will show how the move away from physical collections of music, such as vinyl, has led to a decline in authentic musical experience. Despite this, Benjamin’s work helps provide a balanced overall assessment of Spotify. This balance occurs through his insights upon how new technologies can bring about social change, particularly through the enhancement of accessibility – a useful argument in the context of Spotify’s global network. The primary conceptual focus, Adorno, will build upon the foundation set by Benjamin, through his observations on ‘the culture industry’. This term refers to the commodification of cultural goods, such as television, film and noticeably, music, that occurred at the hands of late capitalism. Adorno claims the movement comes at the jeopardy of all modern culture, as the industry looks to homogenise cultural creation to accommodate for mass production. . Overall, the project will use Adorno’s philosophy to show how Spotify exists as a modern extension of the culture industry; thus, adding to the decline of true artistic expression in contemporary music.
An investigation into the relationship between internet surveillance and panopticism, and how this impacts the identities of internet users.
Case Study – The Golden Shield Project: An in-depth look into China’s strict surveillance system and how it’s panoptic nature impacts Chinese citizens.
Key Theorists
Michel Foucault: Foucault provides a theory of surveillance that explains panopticism and demonstrates how constant surveillance, such as that seen on the internet, can be used as a tool for political power and oppression.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
Zygmunt Bauman: Bauman explains why identity has become such a large issue in late modernity and why an identity is difficult to cultivate in the digital age, relating to internet surveillance and censorship online.
Identity (2004)
The aim of this project is to look at consumerism, specifically consumer behaviour during the coronavirus pandemic and how it has evolved. The project will also explore how big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google are planning on using this for their own profit and power gain, whilst finally looking at some of the social and critical philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to highlight how this might be problematic and the potential implications it holds for society as a whole.
In this essay i will be drawing a comparison between ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ by Martin Heidegger and the state of social media today. I will investigate a couple of examples and use them to assess whether or not social media is a threat.
This research paper highlights the need for more transparency, open-source initiatives and regulatory bodies surrounding the big data economy. It will help individuals understand what is at stake each time they choose to give up parts of their personal information to companies who offer ‘free’ services.
An investigation into the nature, history, prominence and management of risk on both a personal and professional level. To answer the question of whether humans or computers are more effective risk managers.
My project seeks to chart out an account of Dewey’s philosophy of education, relating to its practical application in the work of Lipman. I then present various current trends in the way that learning environments have changed both over the past few decades with reference to technological development, and in the last year with reference to the coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, I argue that the main thing preventing a realization of Dewey’s democratic ideal is ‘datafication’, the phenomenon of reducing educational efficacy to quantifiable metrics and abstract information. Due to the insistence of Dewey and Lipman on education as a facilitation of meaningful experience, I hold, datafication makes the manifestation of any true practice of Deweyan pedagogy impossible.
Totalitarianism and Technocracy: A Jungian and Huxleyan analysis of the Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, the distortion of Myth, and the path to Liberation
The object of this dissertation is artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular it concerns AI risk or AI safety. I argue for the veracity of Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis (2012) – contextualised with reference to Hume’s (2007) is-ought distinction – and instrumental convergence thesis (developed initially by Omohundro (2008) in terms of the “Basic AI Drives”). In combination, what these theses show is that the default outcome of advanced AI (AGI and ASI) is existential catastrophe, and thereby the importance of ensuring that the value systems of advanced artificial agents are human compatible. I consider two main approaches to the value alignment problem – direct specification and value learning – and point out the flaws in each. While this project does not offer its own approach value alignment, the central concern of AI safety, it does emphasise the necessity for AI research to undergo a perspectival shift and focus on the search for one. The AI community should, that is, be concerned foremost with AI safety rather than AI capability.
Is the way Technology is advancing really “rational-and-desirable”? (A Critique)
A project by Emily Saladin-Crosse. 3rd year, Philosophical studies. Newcastle university, 2021.
[Item Image]
[key words: introjection, consumption of mediated, de-sublimated product and information; deciphering true and false needs; nothing radically new, increasingly; mediated learning…]
“Dear Guests,
As of 2021, we ask for your help for a critical approach to modern-day technology. To bring you up to date… The new “phenomenological playground” is the internet. Via the phone/ screens we consume products: are “fed” information, images, videos, short and long pieces of information all the time, on the news, social media, etc. Every single thing is at arm’s length (literally), just a *click* away: information, product, print, photo, … everything beautiful and ugly, available and accessible. Art, replicated, multiplied, “free”. Same with porn, and fighting. Surveillance is invasive and “normalised”. For instance, online, we give in quite voluntarily to different forms of surveillance, because it looks rational and desirable and it looks like we have choice. In fact, we are recognised as workers and consumers by Tech. The image shown is the one I utilise to demonstrate/ illustrate parts of the multi-layered problem of deciphering true and false needs which poses perhaps more and more of a problem than before because of technological tendencies towards infinity.
‘Everything is functioning’- says Heidegger, but also: ‘All our relationships have become merely technical ones.’ (Der Spiegel Interview, published after his death, 1976). Today, the values of the Enlightenment bombarded with items according to technological interests instead of our own. This is no longer “rational” to Marcuse in his critique of the Enlightenment ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (1964).
It is valuable to look into ideas such Tech reproducing 1-Dimensional thought in individuals and society as a consequence of “introjection” from the outside (a psychoanalytic notion to be examined). Technology and mediated learning would cause a problem for 18th century Rousseau, but the modern-day Rousseau-inspired educational theorists: we hold on to the idea of an analytic over synthetic approach to education. Whether there are true or false needs at all, is also a question to address.
The writing is in the form of a dialogue, online. This is how the forum proceeds:
ACT 0: Positions.
ACT I: The Paradox of Technology.
ACT II: Deciphering True and False Needs.
ACT III: More critique.
Between Emancipation and Control: A Critical Discussion of Social Media in Postmodern Society
Is social media the key to emancipation, or the handcuffs prohibiting liberation? This project started from the object of social media and the claim that, as society has become highly mechanised, it is a further perpetuation of control and the very medium, which keeps individual behaviour in accordance with what is deemed socially acceptable. This project aimed to investigate this claim, using the case of Cambridge Analytica, to reach a conclusion to the overriding question: CAN SOCIAL MEDIA EMANCIPATE?
An investigation into the ways that technology is used as a method of creating insecurities with the self, leading to cosmetic surgery and the sustainability of capitalism.
My aim of this investigation is to explore the effects of technological apps such as Snapchat and Instagram on self-esteem and confidence. Also to investigate how far there is a link between beautifying apps and the cosmetic surgery industry, in a 21st century society where the conception of beauty is given great importance.
In this investigation, I conduct a survey to understand the effects of technology. I ask questions regarding frequency of usage, confidence levels after usage and pressure in society surrounding beauty.
Philosophical Concept 1: Adorno and the Culture Industry
Philosophical Concept 2: Freud and ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’
What is data-mining?
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, data-mining is extracting data from people’s social media accounts to gather information on them.
What is micro-targeting
Micro-targeting is using data and information gathered on people to identify their interests and beliefs and then use this to try influence them, in this case their political decisions.
Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica is a data analytics company founded in 2014. They manipulated Facebook in order to access millions of people’s personal details and information and used it to influence elections.
Democracy in the age of technology: a philosophical enquiry exploring the effect data-mining and micro-targeting has on a democratic government.
Philosophy used to explain this: Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Does Technology Merely Distort or Substantially Change Law and Justice?
The Media:
Common-held belief was that – because of Simpson’s celebrity- he would not be prosecuted.
Despite the incriminating evidence against him, the public supported Simpson. As noted by Bugliosi, there were “people carrying sings outside the courtroom during the trial declaring “Free OJ” and “Save the Juice”
The Pharmaceutical Industry
Euthanasia:
Technological advancements have made it considerably more comfortable for us to watch someone “slip away”
The Death Penalty:
At this present- day, advancements in the pharmaceutical industry ensure that ‘the shelf life of benzodiazepine’ also plays a role in this process.
My Fundamental claims:
1. Smartphone use damages the individual’s ability to retain memories.
2. Smartphone use damages social capital, a feature of society essential for the development of individuals rights.
3. Smartphone culture is fundamentally changing the way in which we view our human identity, from a complex narrative interpretation to mere information on a screen.
Key Philosopher used to support my claims:
1. Plato
2. Taylor, Nozick
3. Lyotard
Within postmodern society the prevalence of the Smartphone is explicitly clear. One cannot avoid the fact that the Smartphone has become a fundamental aspect of our day-to-day lives. Within this essay I hope to shed light on the nature of this dependency, through the use of the above criticisms, with the intention of demonstrating the negative impact that it has upon the very nature of humanity, the human condition.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a film many find hard to properly understand. I aim to present an account of 2001 that enables easier comprehension of this cinematic feature through philosophical themes.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick exhibits on rapture and the Ubermensch. I will, in my project, present how Kubrick uses colour, sound and cinematography to evoke feelings of rapture.
Focusing on the character Dave Bowman, I reveal how rapture and the overcoming of computers enable humans to delve into the next stage of Ubermensch.
The project contains breakdowns of the most important scenes of the film in relation to the works of Nietzsche. Including mans overcoming of computers, and the transcendence of humanity.
I wish to claim that technology is not what man uses to master nature, but a philosophy of history a way of looking at the world or a way of life.
The aim of my project was to trace the history of technology in order to establish a definition of its essence that is consistent across time.
Heidegger argued that technology is a means of exploiting nature, reducing it to “standing reserve” which we can draw upon as we desire it. Further, he argued that modern technology reduces man to standing reserve and that we should be sceptical of it.
In response to his argument I explored the thought of Marcuse and Feenberg who both suggest that technology is defined more by its social elements than by its function.
Finally, I explored the future of technology, specifically artificial intelligence, and considered which, if any, definition of the essence of technology I explored remains applicable.
Main Sources:
The Questioning Concerning Technology by Heidegger, One Dimensional Man by Marcuse, and Questioning Technology by Feenberg.