Posted on by Renee Furner

Lifestream, Tweets

I suspect this might be my last, or near to last, post before the final summary as it’s Friday afternoon, I’ll work on the summary tomorrow, and Sunday (the due date for the Lifestream) is always a crazy day at work for me. It feels really lovely to return to the beginning – back to cyber culture’s questions about what it means to be human, and at the same time to make connections to community (loosely) and to algorithms.

In the video, Ishiguro says that he started the project, building a robot, in order to learn about humans. He asks what it really means to be human – which things that we do are automated? Which things could someone impersonating us do? When are we truly being ourselves, being creative? Erica (the robot) suggests that through the automation of the uninteresting and tedious aspects of life, robots can help us to focus on the creative aspects, and other parts where we are truly ourselves. With AI being essentially the work of algorithms this ties our first block (cyber cultures) to our third (algorithmic culture). Can algorithms allow us to be more human?

In the video it is also asked, what is the structure that underlies human interaction? We can identify many ‘ingredients’ that play a role, but what does it take for a human to interact with a robot and feel that they are interacting with a being? This is from where my – albeit loose – connections to community are drawn. Last week Antigonish 2.0 told 4-word stories about what community means (#Antigonish2 #4wordstory – there were over 700 responses). How will robots understand all these diverse and valuable ways of being together? Maybe they don’t need to – maybe we can – in the spirit of Shinto – accept them as having their own type of ‘soul’, and accept automation of the mundane.. if our economic system allows for and values our very *human* contributions.

Bring on Keynesian theory and the short working week..