Pre-Post Preamble
Today I'm going to continue my post series that is an attempt to log and to preserve the insights that came out of a science fiction class that I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th century."
Here is a link to the first post: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror
Now that I'm on post 6 I feel compelled to offer a table of contents of previous posts. Here they are:
As I'm proceeding through this post series I'm starting to realize how each post is going to become less and less "self-contained" as I proceed; by which I mean, I find I am compelled to refer to previous posts in a way I haven't had to in previous post series.
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| Data and Lore |
Some summary (I'm taking some ST:TNG corpus knowledge for granted here): the Enterprise stops by the planet where Data was found by the Federation. There they find in a hidden chamber an exact replica of Data, except this replica is disassembled. They bring the android pieces on to the Enterprise and reassemble them. It turns out, this is Data's brother, another android by the name of Lore. Immediately there are things about Lore that begin to disturb and stir the suspicions of the crew. It turns out Lore was disassembled because of his evil tendencies. He thinks androids are better than humans and therefore they deserve to die, or at least serve androids as slaves.
What is so interesting about this episode, I think, is the two separate visions of technology that emerge out of the two different android characters.
Lieutenant Commander Data is a kind of "Pinocchio" figure who loves humans and strives to be a human. Data is moral and helpful and very often endearing.
Lore, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac. He is deceiving and extremely powerful; furthermore, he thinks of humans as flawed and as insects that are dispensable.
We begin to see in this episode all sorts of parallels with the previous texts we've treated in this class.
Ray Kurzweil and Transcendent Man
In Kurzweil's documentary, Transcendent Man, a major debate is whether or not the super intelligences he predicts will be empathetic to humans or hold us in contempt as insects. Hugo De Garis obviously believes the latter is the case while Kurzweil believes that not only will the robots serve us, make us better (his argument is much stronger), but that the robots will be us.
And so, we can perhaps see in Data--struggling to become human--as suggesting Kurzweil's vision of technology; and we can see Lore--the evil, human hater--as suggesting De Garis's vision of technology.
Star Trek (Episode 7): "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
We see this very ambivalence played out in the Star Trek episode I treated in an earlier post. In episode 7 of Star Trek you have two avatars of robots or technology: Ruk, the human hater, and Andrea, the robot who falls in fall and commits suicide when she realizes she will never be able to love.
The Twilight Zone (Episode 7): "The Lonely"
At the end of this episode the android, Alicia, is shot and killed. I'd like to suggest that the episode doesn't key us into how to read this. Is this a murder? Something horrendous? OR! Has the protagonist (who was in love this this android?) been freed from a kind of spell? Was Alicia truly in love with the protagonist? Or, was Alicia's love an illusion, the product of software?
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Robots-as-humans versus robots-against-humans: this is an ambivalent, vexed issue that recurred consistently throughout the class. The core queston these texts seem to be asking is, is technology of us? For us? Inextricably bound to us?
OR! It technology becoming something else? Something other? And therefore, something hostile or something we should be suspicious of?
Hmm...
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