Woah, interesting discussion! The subject matter is kind of near and dear to me – particularly the point Jason and Katherine made: “I recognize that this kind of behavior is bad for me, but I can't stop.”

That looks like a good encapsulation of the ‘harm’ robots do us. It’s a common sentiment – I’ve said the same thing myself tons of times – but its commonality is part of the problem. I think it drastically misframes the issue at hand.

In that sentence, the blame is personal, the failure or the harm is self- or other-imposed. It’s just one more guilt complex, and robots (technology and/or its controllers) become something we as humans need another Messiah (more willpower, divine CLS intervention, or maybe the apocalypse) to save us from.

Removing the element of ‘saving from harm’ may require recharacterizing the entire issue: rather than man vs. technology, what about man within technology? I’m leaning on Heidegger here – but also an awesome essay by someone named Edward Ballard – I’ll quote really quick –

Technology as salvation from the darkness: “The image of someone in a machine, successfully complementing his weakness by means of its mechanisms. From every other page of our magazines we are presented for example with a businessman in an airplane, a girl in a car, the astronaut in his module, the worker in a gantry crane, or the data processor in a computer complex. Each seeks to assure us that we too may complement our weakness with machines and thus get securely on the way to technological salvation.”

I love this quote because every single image is commonplace, and every single one brings out strands of this man in machine dialogue. You start asking: What kind of thing in man is not inside a robot?

To me that’s the real question, before harm or control or saving – and I think it’s wrong to consign the question to metaphysics or theology. Since we live together in a technological world, this is a pretty basic question, one that requests a common answer.

Rather than arguing man vs tech, attacking and defending and harming and saving, like in a court case or a war – the first step is seeing, delineating. Re-framing the frames. Instead of laying blame on ourselves (“I can’t stop”) or others (Mark Zuckerberg, iPhones, Wikipedia), I think it makes better sense to look at what is a self and what is an other. Man from inside a machine is not really the same thing as man inside the agora or the warzone. Probably. It’s a return to the Sesame Street version: which of these things is not like the other? How are they different? Do they have to be? Where?

Separating the ‘saving’ dialectic from the ‘seeing’ one is crucial. You pretty much have to feel harm, by definition, but you don’t have to feel anything in order to see something. If it turns out that ‘the modern we’ is inseparable from or invulnerable to our technology (“I just don’t FEEL like I’m being harmed”), where does that leave us? And why all the worry? If otoh something visceral inside man rejects the idea of man as computer, as completely contained in and explained by technology, what is that thing and whence from and whence going?

Long post, sorry.

-- JenniferDoxey - 10 Jul 2012