knowig when to limit ourselves

The Readings for this week really connected with me. I really agree with many of the points made by Weizenbaum in the article ‘ From Computer Power and Human Reason’. I think that he foreshadowed many ideas and concepts that he made in the 1970’s. I feel that a lot of what he said has happened today. He says that there are limits to what computers OUGHT to do, not to what they CAN do. This is very interesting to me.

I feel that with all the technologies that we have in our lives today, we are losing basic skills that one must have to be an intelligent person. While we can teach computers to do basically everything for us, is this really what we want? Do we want to be completely reliant on technology and machines and be virtually powerless on our own? I don’t.

Weizenbaum says that science is an addictive drug. I think that it is interesting that he noticed this from an early stage of technology in the 70’s. I see this as very true. Once you realize one thing and begin to understand how things truly work, it is addictive and you want to know more and more about more and more things. He says that, ‘Science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom’ and goes on to say that science is a ‘slow-acting poison’. I take this to mean that the more we learn and the more we create things that perform more and more actions for us, the more we degrade ourselves and the more we lose importance in our own world.

Weizenbaum says that in the past, the arts were viewed as intellectual nourishment but today, they are seen as solely entertainment. We care only about the hard facts and are slowly losing our ability to be creative and think on our own.

I think that Haraway believes many of the same ideas that Weizenbaum talks about. She sees technology and ‘the cyborg’ as a machine and organism creature. She claims that we are ‘chimeras’, or theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine organism. She says that slowly, this idea of cyborg will create a grid of control on the planet.

Both Weizenbaum and Haraway see the importance of technology but also the idea that we must limit ourselves in order to preserve our existence as we know it. I really enjoyed these readings and definitely agree with many of their main ideas.