Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Chapter 3

The material below represents notes compiled by Robert Keel and Takako Nomi in their reading of Turkle's, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and Schuster, 1995..

Making a Pass at a Robot

Computers as a Postmodern Machine: What is a computer, just a machine?

• Shift in our understanding of our relationship with a machine, a computer
• Shift in our perception of a computer, consciousness, and life

A psychological way of understanding of computers: Computers as psychological machines

• Piget studies of children's cognitive development: What are the distinction between alive/living and not alive/living? motion=alive??
• A computer talks, moves, and seems smart--Is it alive??
• New understanding of objects for children--Criteria not as physical or mechanical, but as psychological.
• Interests--Objects' status of mind; whether the objects "know", "cheat", or "meant to cheat"
• Computers as a psychological machine: How much can it remember?
• The Keys--responsive, interactive and opaque aspects of a computer--similar to human mind?

What are the boundaries between people, machines, and animals?

• In the modern era--distinctiveness of people in terms of gifts of speech and reason
• In the Postmodern era-- in the presence of a computer, which seems it also has the same gifts,
• People ask "What if anything might ultimately differentiate computers from humans?"

Understanding of human in relation to the machine

• The response-- romantic reactions (Romanticism)
• A computer as a psychological object
• Distinction between cognitive and affective--
• Computers think v. People feel (physically and emotionally)

Perception of computers as postmodern machines

A new categorization, 'Machines' Attributions--properties and qualities of machines such as ideas and intensions--'Machines' have psychological qualities that used to belong only to people.

• Children's thoughts--computers can think and have a personality.
• Children no longer question if computers are alive. They know they are not.
• Computers' psychological activities as a sign of consciousness but not a sign of life: the machine has a psychology, but it is not alive. Artificial intelligence
• Machines as psychological objects and people as living machines

Concerns and Controversies--a key boundary between people and machines Are people not programmed? What about deterministic power of the gene? Development of new technology and the relation to our lives--influences on the question of life and death Blurring distinction between the natural and the artificial Romantic reactions: What makes human special?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impact on our consciousness

Responsive computer programs--AI

• Controversy over the line between AI as Turing tricks and AI as psychology
• Julia in Mud: interactions between users and Julia

Now, setting aside a philosophical question, we construct reality by responding/reacting to the environment.

• Human consciousness--reflexive The key--the notion of believability in characters on the screen--the notion depends not on modeling the human mind but on providing the illusion of life Visible emotion of characters as the key to believability
• Notions: not whether or not characters are viewed as emotional agents. But rather our interpretations of their expressions and responses to them.
• People can interpret charaters' behaviors as expressing appropriate states of emotion and respond to them as if they were alive.

Alternative AI: Mobots and Agents

Machine intelligence and its impacts and our reactions:

• New relationships--trust in the relationships through communication with agents
• A challenge to human dominant ideology--dominant over and separate from the rest of the cosomos--
• Threatens to the essential human distinctiveness.
• Acceptance of Alternative AI as a psychological machine A computer as the role of a psychotherapist--humanazing--people talk to technology in intimate ways.

Now, people have come to take computers at interface value