by
Ellen Ullman
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The question stayed with me - Do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive? - because it seemed to me that Breazeal's intent was to cite the most basic acts required by human bodily existence, and then see them as ridiculous, even humiliating.
But after a while I cam eto the conclusion: Maybe yes. Given the amount of time living creatures devote to food and its attendant states - food! the stuff that sustains us - I decided that, yes, there might be something crucial about the necessities of eating and eliminating that defines us. How much of our state of being is dependent upon being hungry, having eaten, being full, shitting. Hunger! Our word for everything from nourishment to passionate desire. Satisfied! Meaning everything from well fed to sexually fulfilled to mentally soothed. Shit! Our word for human waste and an expletive of impatience. THe more I thought about it, the more I decided that huge swaths of existence would be impenetrable - indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly unable to be represented - to a creature that did not eat or shit.
In this sense, artificial-life researchers are as body-loathing as any medieval theologian. They seek to separate the "principles" of life and sentience - the spirit - from the dirty muck from which it sprang. As Breazeal put it, they envision "a set of animate qualities that have nothing to do with reproduction and going to the bathroom," as if these messy experiences of alimentation and birth, these deepest biological imperatives - stay alive, eat, create others who will stay alive - were not the foundation, indeed, the source, of intelligence; as if intelligence were not simply one of the many strategies that evolved to serve the creatural striving for life. If sentience doesn't come from the body's desire to live [...], where else would it come from? To believe that sentience can arise from anywhere else - machines, software, things with no fear of death - is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.
[...] About her robot Kismet she says, "We're trying to play the same game that human infants are playing. They learn because they solicit reactions from adults."
But an infant's need for attention is not simply a "game." There is a true, internal reality that precedes the child's interchange with an adult, an actual inner state that is being communicated. An infant's need for a mother's care is dire, a physical imperative, a question of life or death. It goes beyond the requirement for food: an infant must learn from adults to survive in the world. But without a body at risk, in a creature who cannot die, are the programming routines Breazeal has given Kismet even analogous to human emotions? Can a creature whose flesh can't hurt feel fear? Can it suffer?
It was like those moments in your most intimate relationships when you look over and are startled to remember: that other person is not you and is not yours to define. He or she suddenly seems to be some alien whom, inexplicably, you have decided to trust. Even as the two of you lie wrapped in each other's arms, you know that he or she can exist without you, and does just that now and again, in moments, and sometimes over longer stretches of time: sheds you. Yet you continue on, together. And that, too, I think, is an imperative of love.
[...] no escaping it, the joy or humiliaton of every decorating decision you've ever madde, the occasion that brought each object into your life perpetually, inflinchingly present: the brutality of the everlasting.
i really like when present is used as an adj in that way
Each character was a betrayer, a thief stealing some part of my own life (adoption, abandonment by parents, therapy, therapist who had something to hide from me), pieces of those interior stories that will not go away. I did not know if bringing them to the fore would purge them from my mind or more firmly install them. In any case, the characters seemed inevitable.
on her novel
[...] The act of narrration never leaves us. The need for story is in our bodies, in the evolution of our minds. We sleep. The brain is doing its housekeeping, weaving today's experiences into the synaptic connections of all that happened before this day. Shifting moments. Pathways strengthened, or fading.
Meanwhile, we lie sleeping, trying to make sense of it all. We have no choice; we must understand what flickers in our mind. We desperately try to make it coherent - turn the chemical charges into a story, narrate the dream to ourselves. The narration fails. The story will not adhere. The memory of it evaporates upon waking. We fail, we fail. Yet night by night we try. There is no escaping the body that makes us. Sleep is full of storeis trying to unfold.
At seven in the morning, an Edward Hopper white light slashed the facade of the building, and a legless man in a wheelchair sat before the employee entrance, selling yellow number-two Ticonderoga pencils. He was always there, friendly, and I was happy to see him. I bought a pencil every day.
I liked the store in the early morning, the escalators rumbling up and down for no one, the empty selling floor, the mannequins posed to fool you, threatening to come to life. Then up the odd staircase. Past the glass box. Into the gloom of the attic.
Weeks went by. Months. I reached my nine-month anniversary. Two hundred and seventy pencils in a box on the floor.
cool device
[...] You may find that, once you're released from having to understand it all, a certain fascination gets through. It can be like those times you hear someone playing the piano beautifully or a sax wailing through jazz improvisations, and the sounds ignite a longing in you, a desire to take up the difficulties, and learn how to play that music.
[...] He stares at his students for a moment and says of the million dollars, "For most of you, that would be nothing."
I considered the two nothings: the nothing expected of the online students, the million dollars that would be noting to the Stanford students, of whom everything is expected. [...]
At Stanford, the professors are there for the students, making sure they are well prepared and supported by all the resources the exclusive university can muster. Their students stand before the gateway to the summits of knowledge and riches, which is open wide for them. The gateway is otherwise well guarded. A note shown on the web page introducing the online class states clearly, understandably - but coldly - taking the web version in no way permits the students to use the facilities of the university.
Dreams of internet success impose a heavy burden on the recent immigrants. The newcomers soon find themselves buzzing like flies in the sticky paper of the startup life. The ethos that surrounds them says that founding a successful company - getting round after round of venture-capital funding, their startup then valued in the billions - is the measure of the highest personal achievement. It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fith or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by teh wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.
The hopefuls pride themselves on the role they believe they will play as members of a vanguard that will disrupt the existing social, economic, and political structures. But the would-be CEOs can more accurately be called conformists. They want what they are supposed to want; they are the men in the grey flannel suits of our time: tee shirts and jeans, casual business khakis. They are not wild. They march down the startup alley of Second Street not as assemblies of punks but like a disciplined army on maneuvers - yet ever anxious. Their ventures are likely to fade away, as a fickle public disposes of both the soldiers and the code, app by app.
damn brutal