RE: I, Robot

Eugene Matusov (ematusov who-is-at UDel.Edu)
Mon, 21 Dec 1998 18:41:05 -0800

Hi everybody--

I found myself being a teacher-robot a few days ago when I was grading my
students' final papers. I captured myself thinking about distribution of
grades. Many ed. institutions (e.g., schools, universities) like when there
is a bell-curve of grade distribution. There is certainly an institutional
pressure for grades and grade distribution (we had several faculty meetings
on "grade deflation"). What makes me a machine-like is being a conduit of
institutional will/control without believing/agreeing with it.

Just a comment.

Eugene
PS I apologize in advance to the Machine/Robot Liberation Organization for
comparing myself with a machine/robot. So far machines/robots do not to
have a choice of being a tool of others' will (unlike me).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, December 19, 1998 3:44 PM
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> Subject: I, Robot
>
>
> I rather like robots, or at least the idea of robots. Perhaps I have been
> brainwashed by "Robbie" (Forbidden Planet) and R2D2 (Star Wars) to accept
> the most expensive commodity of the near future. Having long ago read the
> famous _I, Robot_ and _Foundation_ series by Isaac Asimov, I'm
> now enjoying
> the posthumous trilogy sequel (by Brin, Bear, and Benford). The
> most recent
> volume (_Foundation and Chaos_) explores the theme of the human-robot
> difference and relationship in rather interesting ways.
>
> 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.
>
> ---------------------------
> 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>
> ---------------------------
>