On AI: Human, Animal & Machine
The Singularity and the Human Condition
in Philosophy Today (2018)
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the Modern Age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being. The transformation Arendt describes is the loss of our human plurality to a technological singularity. She argues, however, that we can choose to hold on to our humanity if persist in thinking, and thus preserve our human spontaneity and freedom.
The Human Condition Today: The Challenge of Science
in Arendt Studies (2018)
Great books, Nietzsche taught, are made small by their readers, “who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.” Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition has too often been made small, picked over for Arendt’s conceptual analysis exploring labor, work, and action. So much atention has been focused on these chapters that we forget that The Human Condition is not principally a conceptual account; it is, frst and foremost, an “historical analysis.”
Drones and the Question of “The Human”
in Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 28, Issue 2 (2014)
Domino's Pizza is testing “Domicopter” drones to deliver pizzas, which will compete with Taco Bell's “Tacocopter” drones. Not to be outdone, Amazon is working on an army of delivery drones that will cut out the postal service. In Denmark, farmers use drones to inspect fields for the appearance of harmful weeds, which reduces herbicide use as the drones directly apply pesticides only where it is needed. Environmentalists send drones into glacial caves or into deep waters, gathering data that would be too dangerous or expensive for human scientists to procure. Federal Express dreams of pilotless aerial and terrestrial drones that will transport goods more cheaply, reliably, and safely than vehicles operated by humans. Human rights activists deploy drones over conflict zones, intelligently searching for and documenting abuses for both rhetorical and legal purposes. Aid agencies send unmanned drones to villages deep in jungles or behind enemy lines, maneuvering hazardous terrain to bring food and supplies to endangered populations. Medical researchers are experimenting with injecting drone blood cells into humans that can mimic good cholesterol carriers or identify and neutralize cancerous cells. Parents in Vermont are using flying drones to accompany children to school, giving a whole new meaning to helicopter parenting. And Pilobolus, a New York dance company, has choreographed a dance in which drones and humans engage each other in the most human of acts: the creation of art.
in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (2012)
The revolution in technology over the last 30 years and the promise of the singularity-a merging of humans and machines into a common species-seem to have very little to do with Hannah Arendt, a chain-smoking German-Jewish émigré who stood far from the swift currents of popular culture. Arendt is best known for her writings on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, and one can hardly imagine her reading Wired magazine. But let me tell you a story.
The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations
in The Fortnightly Review (2010)
A Fortnightly Review of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, and Simulation and Its Discontents by Sherry Turkle. IN “THE ODE TO MAN” from Antigone, Sophocles conjures “Man” as the wondrous being who wears out the “imperishable earth” with his ploughs. This man “overpowers the rough-maned horses with his devices” and tames the “unbending mountain bull.” He flees the “stormy darts” of winter’s frost and he escapes “needful illness.”
Melville's War Poetry and the Human Form
in A Political Companion to Herman Melville (2013)
Lost in the Loneliness of Anti-Social Networks
in The Fortnightly Review, (2011). Review of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
THE UNMANNED DRONES DROPPING laser-guided bombs in Pakistan do what they are told. But now the military is pursuing ethically programmed robots that could make autonomous decisions about when and when not to fire. As roboethicist Ronald Arkin has argued, these robots might very well act more humanely than humans.
in Theory & Event (2010). Review of Vanessa Lemm's Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy.
The animality of humans has been a basic axiom of philosophical thinking at least since Aristotle characterized the human being as the animal having logos. Logos is sometimes translated as speech, so that humanity is distinguished as the animal having language. Others, building upon Kant, translate logos as reason, itself a multi-faceted idea that alternates between the sense of calculative rationality and logic on the one side and a higher and less-well-defined sense of freedom and knowing on the other. Ambiguous as it remains, the appeal to man’s logos has for millennia named a hierarchical relationship, one in which human beings stand above irrational animals lacking logos.
Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google
Language & Thinking Rostrum Lecture
Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Arendt Center, held a lecture this week titled "Earth Alienation from Galileo to Google," as part of the Rostrum Lecture Series sponsored by Bard's Language & Thinking Program.