Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- I, Reader: A Nod to Asimov’s I, Robot
- Robots and Readers: A Tight Coupling of Container and Content
- Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- Machine Life: The Final Prejudice
- RB-34 Prefers Slushy Novels
- Creative Reading: A Golden String
- Creative Reading by anemone achtnich
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self
- Creative Reading: Thinking with Other Minds
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- Creative Reading: The Discovery of Other (Thinking with the Minds of Others, Take 2)
- Creative Reading: The Mathematics of Self, Other and Extension
- What Books Changed You?
- I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- Every Extension Breaks a Rule
- The Trajectory of Reading: Creative Contribution
- I Read, Therefore I Write
- What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So
- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
- Using a Blog to Draft a Book Idea: 9 Observations
- From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media
- Birth of the Reader-Writer
- To Read a Book is to Ignore 4000 Others
- Quantity has a Quality all its Own
- The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain
- How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections
- The Accidental Programmer
- Definitions of Hacking
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker II: Breaking the Rules
- Ways of the Reader Hacker III: Two Bright Ideas
- A Hacker’s Reading List
- Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- The Information Race and Pushing the Button
- How to Make an Elephant Statue
- Every Story Deserves a Good Ending
- Expressions of Offworld
- “Would I start to resemble a book myself?”
- Myth of the Reader-Hero
- Print is Digital
- Am I Still Chasing that First Reading High?
- Do Robots Read? Yes I Do (Conclusion to “I, Reader”)
- I, Reader: A Book Outline
- Reading List for Next Draft of I, Reader
Robots and Readers, Pt. 2
When I read I, Robot again after many years, it was the mass publication with Wil Smith on the front, a inevitability of the movie release. Anyone who has read the book but not seen the movie must wonder what character Wil Smith could possibly have portrayed in the book. No doubt his Spooner character was loosely based on detective Elijah Bailey from Asimov’s other robot books. The movie was unlike the book. I disliked the movie when it was released, but watched it again recently with lowered expectations and found it passable. Although I generally like Wil Smith movies, the Spooner character was too crude and prone to violence, and the movie never reached the breadth of the book.
The early stories in the book are also simple. Powell and Donovan find themselves in silly predicaments as field testers of new robots. The first law of robotics says that a robot must not allow a human being to come to harm, so Speedy the robot runs off to acquire the selenium that will save their lives. However, a strengthened third rule forbids Speedy from endangering itself when the selenium is located in a corrosive atmosphere, and the robot winds up running in circles. The simple puzzles of the early stories grow into mysteries and then paradoxes of koan-like complexity, requiring the assistance of Dr. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist, a character of Sherlock Holmes proportions.
The rising complexity is not just good story telling. It underscores a philosophical question posed by the book’s main premise of robot intelligence. Do robots represent a more evolved form of life than humans? Bringing the question home, what does it mean to introduce technological extensions to our acts of intelligence, such as reading and writing? Does digital technology only extend mind? Or does it also supplant our need to think? Do you really read on the web, or do you scan information? Is it nonsense to think that technological extensions to mind will one day evolve to replace it? Or is it the basis of a still common fear and hatred of technology? These questions are part of my inquiry into the puzzles, mysteries and paradoxes that arise when looking at the role of digital technology in reading.
IMDB. I, Robot. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/
Litwin (October 4, 2009). People and Machines. Library Juice. http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=1722.
Wikipedia (2009). Isaac Asimov’s Robot Series. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov%27s_Robot_Series.
In The Bicentennial Man, Andrew the robot jokes, “What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor? Make me one with everything.” (It’s an old joke. When the monk asks for his change, the vendor replies, change is an illusion). The novella is also by Asimov. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man. I recall liking the movie.
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