I accept the premise of the Artificial Life theorists that life and
intelligence, by some reasonable definition, is more a matter of the nature
of the patterns and their dynamics than of the material substratum, though
clearly the substratum is not irrelevant either. Humans can hardly be the
end of evolution, and cosmological evolution has never been limited to
organic biological evolution -- there was pre-biotic evolution, and there
will be post-biotic, or at least trans-biotic evolution. One direction is
via the cyborg, extending human (and perhaps other bio-species) affordances
and Umwelts prosthetically, as we have long done with our present tools, to
further extend our perceptual capacities, motor capacities, and no doubt
reasoning and maybe even affective capacities. Another is via the
autonomous lifeforms possible in the substratum of silicon chips and their
networks, and on the fuzzy edge between, in the medium of artificial neural
nets, perhaps even those grown from modified human nerve cells. Accepting
Edelman's basic arguments about consciousness and intelligence, all these
forms will require some motor-like interactions with their environments,
and probably some other analogues of 'body' functions. A robot is only the
most simplistic, anthropocentric, and comfortably familiar guise for these
seeming evolutionary inevitabilities.
What better tool to understand ourselves than both the effort to replicate,
or imitate, our functions, and the comparison to otherwise embodied
intelligences? Until we meet the Martians, all we will have is A-life.
One should also note that many ethnological analyses have concluded that
the creation of a radical disjunction between the human and the non-human
is a deep mythic structure in most human cultural traditions. We have often
discussed here its parallels in human vs. human categorial divisions.
Frankly, an obsession with human uniqueness, by which is usually meant
human superiority, tends to fit too closely for comfort with claims or
assumptions regarding the superiority of the 'canonical human', so often
narrowly modeled on the ideals of one dominant human type (male, high
status, etc.)
To shift to more practical issues, what sort of job for a gifted teacher
(or any capable person) is it to endlessly repeat the same basic
information, endlessly demonstrate the same basic machine/tool functions,
the same cautions and warnings, the same set procedures for the engine room
to class after class of novice submariners? A teacher is not meant to be an
animated training manual, but animated training manuals can free teachers
to do more demanding work (or enjoy more beneficial leisure). Which of us
would care to have the job of training endless rosters of students in the
minutiae of Microsoft Word? or could not learn what needs to be learned
just as well or better from a well-written manual, an animated video, or
where useful, a V-R training simulator? Not every form of learning requires
a human teacher. And in fact no one can say, certainly not on the basis of
empirical studies, just what kinds of learning, for what kinds of students,
cannot come from reading books, much less from interacting with
quasi-intelligent tutorial programs, but _require_ a human teacher in
face-to-face interaction. We don't really understand the differential
affordances of various learning "media" (including human interaction) -- we
have concentrated too much on trying to create universal models of learning
applicable to all media, and not enough on understanding how people learn
and teach differently with different media.
Behind every text stands an author; the text still mediates inter-human
communication. This fact does not change when the text is a video or an
interactive program -- or even if the text is embodied in a robot. What may
become different is how unpredictable the meaning communicated may be, not
simply as a function of the user/reader, but as a function of the medium.
Pathways through a hypertext mediate between author and reader differently
than more traditional genres do. Interactive programs can produce text-like
events unforeseeable by the program writer. Which dimensions of difference
among media matter to learning and how?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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