Week 2 summary

I’ve been thinking about a couple different themes this week. One was to do with the tendency to view technology as a phenomenon independent of its human creators–and particularly, as Bell highlights, its human maintainers. This sees technology (for good or ill) as a nearly unstoppable juggernaut, an unpurposed and potent meme. It might be survival of the fittest: technology in general is good for humanity and the bad associated memes will eventually die out, or mutate into something more useful. But it also might be a capitalist Darwinism: whatever makes money will flourish regardless of its innate benefits to society.

The other theme is Sympathy for the Robot. The examples I’ve picked out (whether of tech or aliens) seem to be popular culture doing its best to get everyone to get along. Whether its ‘robots’ or ‘aliens’ are standing in for race, religion, ethnicity, etc., these and many other sci-fi offerings are pointed at getting one set of humans used to the idea that another set of humans may seem un-human, but once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me. My tone here is a bit condescending, but this has more to do with the manifestation of these lofty goals rather than the goals themselves. It is also worth considering that, while the internet holds the promise of real groups of one sort of human interacting with real groups of another sort of human, this interaction currently has little in common with the intimate relationships portrayed in Bicentennial Man and, yes, Small Wonder.