hlennon – The Cyborg Apocalypse

Reliving History

“Reliving History” is an interactive experience where users are immersed in a simulation of history. Users will see actors reenacting historical events or a hypothetical historical events. Users will be able to experience this in the first person point of view. Users will have the ability to answer questions asked by actors by selecting responses with haptic controls.

The goal of “Reliving History” is to get users engaged in historical events and connect with past, or even present, groups of people they would otherwise not understand. It is intended to improve user’s knowledge of historical events by immersing them directly into the historical scene. It promotes empathy in users because they are able to experience how people lived and were treated. Users will evaluate what they’ve learned by taking a short quiz before they exit that reviews the scenario they’ve been through.

The HTC Live VR headset will allow users to experience firsthand what it was like to live in a certain time period as a certain demographic, social caste or role. It will totally immerse users into the scene. They will be able to hear the voices of the actors in the scene, see a full 360 degrees around them, walk in a confined space, and even select and touch objects with haptic controls.

“Reliving History” targets museums as the consumers (the ones who would actually purchase the product) and museum goers as a secondary audience because they would be the ones experiencing it. We could possibly first release a demo set containing short clips of a few historical events and continue by releasing new time periods, roles, and demographics.

Only VR tech that already exists would be used (HTC Live). We would work with museum’s budget so they can get exactly what they want. They could possibly have the new VR technology be part of a grand opening and charge an entry fee for opening night and have people try the technology. More people may come to the museum to try it. Challenges may arise as this simulation cannot reproduce history perfectly (Allison), but we should only go so far in depth with the simulation as we know we can still be accurate.

Eurydice Review

I had the pleasure of seeing Stevenson University’s production of Eurydice last Thursday night. The story told in the production is about the Greek myth of Eurydice and her husband Orpheus. Eurydice tragically dies on the night of her wedding and is deemed to the underworld. Distraught, Orpheus seeks to find his lost bride and bring her back to the land of the living. While in the underworld, Eurydice is reunited with her deceased father and meets a chorus of stones who guide her. Eventually, Orpheus makes a deal with the ruler of the underworld to bring Eurydice back to life, but it fails and Orpheus is doomed to play sad music forever.

The cast of the play performed beautifully. They projected their voices so that they filled the entire space and enunciated their lines clearly and precisely. I think I speak for the entire audience when I say that their performances made us feel like we were experiencing the story first hand instead of watching a show. The ability of the three stones to speak in union at all times was truly impressive as was the ability of some of the actresses to play two roles in the show.

The set was very minimal and simple, and it was a good choice for it to be that way. The play was one continuous act with no intermission or set change so the set that they had needed to be very versatile. The entire space of the stage was used during the play. There were two levels to define the difference between the underworld and the world of the living. There were pools of water on one side of the stage to represent the river in the underworld and poles that extended from the second level of the set on the other side of the stage to build a component of the set. The lighting and music were executed very precisely and achieved their desired intentions.

Stevenson University put on an excellent production of Eurydice, the cast preformed beautifully and the set design and the audio visual affects were spot on.

Cybernetic Bodies from Different Perspectives

In this class, we have reviewed multiple different perspectives on humanoid robots. In each of these, the robots, or androids, are portrayed differently. They exist for different reasons and each behave in different ways. What all of these robots have in common however, is that they all are not what they initially seem to be. In this essay, the cybernetic bodies from Stepford Wives, R.U.R., and Black Mirror will be compared.

Stepford Wives is set in the 1970’s in a suburban neighborhood. When Joanna Eberhart and her family move to the area, Joanna immediately realizes that there is something strange going on with the women in the town. All they seem to care about is doing housework. She realizes that the men behave strangely as well. They are all part of an association that meets every night. Joanna eventually discovers that the men have replaced all the women in Stepford with robot replicas. The men’s motive behind this is they want their women to be perfect housewives. They want them to be well-behaved, cook, clean, and take care of the children. The men don’t make exact physical replicas of the women, they enhance their features to make them more attractive. They want to have women that praise and worship them and always tell them that they look good. The cybernetic bodies in Stepford Wives are physical robot copies of the women they resemble, but they lose all of what they previously were. They hardly have emotions and all they care about is housework. This idea of having robots represented as women is interesting because as Hayles states, “feminist theorists have pointed out that it has historically been constructed as a white European male”. We’re used to seeing humanoid robots as white males so it’s a new concept to see them portrayed as women.

R.U.R. is set in a dystopian future Europe where there exists a factory on an island dedicated to creating robot laborers. The only humans on the island are the men who run the factory. Helena, a female human, comes to the factory to attempt to liberate the robots. She feels that they are being oppressed by not being given a soul. One of the engineers eventually gives souls to a few robots which leads to their uprising against the humans. The only difference that could exist from one robot to another is sex. Female robots fulfill traditionally female roles such as secretaries while all the males are physical laborers. The initial motive behind creating these robots was so that humans would never need to worry about work again. The robots would handle all the labor while humans could relax and discuss philosophy. The robots in R.U.R. were never real people. The only resemblance they bear to humans is their physical appearance and their version of a soul. They are able to feel some sort of empathy, as shown in the ending of the play when two robots feel empathy towards one another when they’re each threatened with death, but they are not human at all.

The episode “Be Right Back” of Black Mirror is about Martha, a woman who loses her boyfriend Ash to a car accident. Devastated by her loss, she recreates his intelligence in a robot body. Based off of only his social media accounts and everything he had stored in his phone, a version of him is uploaded into a robot. This relates to Hayles’ observation that “the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”. Ash’s intelligence in seamlessly uploaded into an exact physical robot copy of himself. At first Martha is shocked and pleased with him, but she begins to realize that he isn’t the man she had once known. While parts of him still remain, such as his appearance and some of his personality, he has no depth or history at all. Martha tries to dispose of him, but eventually locks him in her attic. Martha’s motive behind creating this robot is so that she could have Ash with her, even after he was dead. When she realizes that the robot version of her late boyfriend is nothing like the real him, she is devastated.

In each of these examples, robots are created to benefit humans in some way. In Stepford Wives, they are meant to please and praise the man that created them. In R.U.R., they are meant to replace all human labor so that mankind can reach their philosophical potential. In “Be Right Back”, the robot is meant to ease the suffering of grieving Martha. However, in each of these examples the robots do not completely fulfill their desired intention. The female robots in Stepford Wives start to malfunction, for example, Bobbie begins to repeat the same phrases and break plates. Once the robots in R.U.R. are given souls, they start a revolution and kill all humans except for one. In “Be Right Back”, the robot version of Ash does not have the depth and history that Martha remembers from the real Ash and she is distraught.

The robots in Stepford Wives, R.U.R., and “Be Right Back” all exist to better human existence. Initially, they all fulfill their potential but as the stories progress, they each begin to deviate from the original intention. The either begin to malfunction, start an uprising, or reveal that they are not what they once appeared to be. In all cases, they cost more than they were worth.

Works Cited:

Hayles, Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman.” dropbox, https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u9yaj6wtcgm1d7/Hayles-Posthuman-excerpts.pdf?dl=0. Accessed 1 November 2017.
Capek, Karel. R.U.R. 1921.
Stepford Wives. Bryan Forbes. 1975. Film
Be Right Back. Owen Harris. 2013. Television Episode

Can There Be Peace?

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a science fictional story set on a futuristic dystopian Earth. World War Three, or as it is called in the novel World War Terminus, has left the Earth scarred by nuclear attacks and caked in radioactive dust. Earth is now scarcely populated by humans, many of which evacuate to Mars, and void of almost all animal life. The only humans left on Earth are those required by stay by their professions, such as bounty hunters like protagonist Rick Deckard. The niche of the bounty hunter is to track down and retire any androids that manage to escape their lives as slaves on Mars and flee to Earth. The latest and most advanced model of android in existence is called the Nexus-6 which are physically indistinguishable from humans in every way. However, humans and androids can be told apart based on empathy. Androids supposedly do not express as much of it as humans do. The only way to tell whether an individual is a human or an android is to administer a test called the Voight-Kampff. This test is designed to measure the subject’s empathetic response to a series of questions. If the subject scores low enough, he or she is deemed an android.

In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, humans and androids look and move exactly alike, but if you begin to dive beneath the surface, it becomes clear that there are some distinct differences. An android is a cyborg, which in the words of Donna Haraway is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (149). Obviously what really distinguishes humans from androids is the fact that humans are born, not built. However, that is not the difference that Dick chose to highlight in his novel. He intended to spark a debate based on the following: since humans and androids are indistinguishable physically, is there anything in our human nature that still makes us superior to these machines? One topic often discussed is whether androids experience empathy to the same degree that humans do. Empathy describes being able to relate to and love another life other than your own. Although in the novel the Voight-Kampf test is in place to determine whether an individual is android or human based solely upon empathy, it’s questionable whether that test is effective. Some humans experience empathy to a much lower degree than others, such as psychopaths, but that doesn’t make them biologically inhuman. A few androids addressed in the novel do seem to experience some empathy. In the case of Roy and Irmgard, they seem to have some sort of romantic relationship which requires them to express human-like emotions and empathy. Roy is devastated when Rick shoots Irmgard which reveals that he did care for her in some way.

The most prominent conflict in the novel is between man and technology in the form of humans versus androids. The androids are slaves on Mars and are seen as inferior by their human counterparts. However, androids are exactly like humans in every aspect besides their lessened experience of empathy. The goal of the androids is to gain complete equality to their human counterparts. The novel is better understood when paralleled to the current inequality between the civil rights of Peoples of Color and whites. The Black Lives Matter movement parallels the want of the androids to become equal to humans but also coerces readers to view the plight of the androids in a different light.

Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep during the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960’s, African Americans and other Peoples of Color were fighting and struggling to gain equal rights for themselves. This struggle for equality appears to be a main issue in the novel because the androids are trying to make themselves exactly the same as humans in every way. In 2013, the Civil Rights Movement was brought back into focus when the Black Lives Matter movement was created. Now, before we go any further, note that the androids from the novel and the Black Lives Matter movement are only being compared in the sense that both groups want to be given equal rights to the group that views them as inferior.

Is what distinguishes a human from an android the definition of humanity? In the novel, what is suggested to define humanity is empathy. Yet empathy is not exclusive only to humans, some animals also exhibit it. Therefore the question arises, what truly defines humanity? In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, humans dial the Penfield mood organ for which emotions they wish to feel. These emotions created by the mood organ are simulated and are not responses to real stimuli so in this case, what makes humans different from androids? In the novel, the prime example of the inequality between humans and androids is Mercerism and the empathy box. Mercerism is a sort of religion to those in the world of the novel. It centers around an elderly man named Mercer as he climbs the same mountain repeatedly while being bombarded by stones. One can connect to Mercer when they hold the handles on the empathy box. The purpose of this exercise is to evoke an empathetic response in users to the suffering of Mercer. The only thing that is suggested to differ between humans and androids in the novel is empathy. Therefore, androids aim to eliminate Mercerism in order to level the difference between themselves and humans. When Buster Friendly, an android TV personality, exposes Mercerism as a fraud, Roy is pleased. He says, in an accomplished and relieved tone, “the whole experience of empathy is a swindle” (Dick 193). Humans now have one less connection to what is said to make them human.

Androids are portrayed as being without true emotion but the same is true for humans in the novel in some instances. When they want to feel a certain emotion at a given time, they use the mood organ. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, there is a real conflict between humans and technology, but what are humans without technology? Both in the novel and in the real world, humans rely on technology very heavily. In the novel, they use the mood organ to control how they feel, use hover-cars as transportation, have electric animals to symbolize their economic stance, and even the androids were created as slaves to make human life easier. In the real world we aren’t so different. We are constantly using our smartphones for everything from telling us the weather to connecting with people across the world. We have tablets, laptops, computers, cars, and more.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, once physiological needs are satisfied, one can focus on other needs or wants. This hierarchy of needs is said to be exclusive to humans as the theory of human motivation. However, without having the most basic needs satisfied, humans are no different from animals, or perhaps androids. If our most basic needs are not met, we may need to resort to drastic measures until they are. Androids are portrayed as evil and stripped of empathy in the novel because they kill without remorse. But what makes them different than a human who is in a situation so dire that they may do the same? This parallels the Black Lives Matter movement because when peaceful demonstrations turn violent, those involved may need to resort to violence in order to keep themselves alive. In that moment, one would be able to kill without remorse.

Another debate evoked by the novel is whether or not there can ever be peace between humans and androids, will they ever be able to live side by side? This debate parallels the Black Lives Matter movement because years after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, Peoples of Color are still not treated completely as equal to their white counterparts. Although the inequality of rights has been leveled for the most part and public areas have been desegregated, African Americans are still discriminated against in some circumstances and are subjected to offensive and sometimes violent acts based on the color of their skin. If, as the novel suggests, empathy is truly in our human nature, it is possible for peoples of all races to live together peacefully. However, humans and androids will never be able to live peacefully. Just as the nexus-6 androids made all empathy tests prior to the Voight-Kampf obsolete, new models of android will continue to be developed that will eventually make humanity obsolete. New models will become better and smarter and will be a real threat especially if their software can adapt and learn. In other words, there will be a conflict between humans and androids as long as they both exist.

It’s interesting that even with all the emphasis on empathy in the novel, the humans don’t seem to express it very much towards one another. For example, Rick and Iran. They live together as husband and wife yet they don’t seem to really love each other. Love requires empathy but Rick is solely focussed on chasing his dream of owning a real animal and Iran simply yearns to feel something genuine, and not generated by the mood organ. On the other hand, some androids display a romantic connection. Roy and Irmgard came to Earth on the same ship and seem to be very close. Roy is even devastated when Rick shoots Irmgard. This suggests that even with all the focus on empathy being the distinguishing factor between human and android, androids may be able to experience it to some degree.

In Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the natural conflict of man versus technology takes the form of humans versus androids. Androids were created by humans to be slaves on Mars that would make human life easier. When any android escapes slavery and flees to Earth, they are to be retired, or in other words killed. Androids are completely physically indistinguishable from humans and the only method of telling one apart from the other is an empathy test. However, in the novel androids have shown that in some cases they can exhibit more empathy than humans in other cases. Androids Roy and Irmgard seem to be more emotionally attached that humans Rick and Iran. Rick even goes ahead to sleep with another female.

So in the end, the main question of what truly defines humanity remains without a solid answer. When an android flees slavery and is not a threat to Earth’s society, they should not be retired without a second thought. In the case of Luba Luft the opera singer, she was a talented artist that actually had something to offer the world yet she was lost. This instance brings back the Black Lives Matter movement because the reason the group started was because a young man who was believed to be innocent was killed. It is possible for humans of all races to live together peacefully, yet the same is not true for humans and androids.

Works Cited

Davis, Lennard J. Constructing Normalcy. Binghampton, 1995
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Del Ray, 1968
Haraway, Donna. The Cyborg Manifesto. Berkeley Socialist Reveiw, 1985
Black Lives Matter, Haki Creatives, http://blacklivesmatter.com/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.