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Conflicting

MSA322's picture

From the readings and the video of Stelarc we saw, thoughts would not stop coming to my mind. Thoughts about how mind-blowing the world we live in is. I kept wondering, is technology really something that's benefiting us, humans? We've created it, we are its creators and we supplied it with power in the intention of aiding ourselves and making life easier, but now the question that's been posted and that's been popping to my head after the reading from Haraway is that, is the machine we have created become a part of us? Is it really helping making our lives better and easier? Or are our machines going to take over our world and our lives? The thought of "no separation" is very new, very foreign, and very scary. After quiet a while of thinking about the connection we have with the machines we make, we really have been working towards and still are under these unconscious thoughts and actions of "human-fying" our machines, we give them names, we personify them and that's where it all starts, we have let them be part of us. I have to agree that the human mind is primed to reach out for help, for others and for communication in whichever form possible to reach.  This fact explains Clark and Haraway's mutual connection in their papers where they both have a certain agreement on machines being parts of us, like any other organ we have, our machine is part of us, and sometimes even our machines could succeed in life more than its creator. Pretty scary. Specially the video with people piercing themselves and believing that it would add to the extension of our body and its abilities. Are we using our machines or are our machines using us?

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kgould's picture

I think it's kind of a reach,

I think it's kind of a reach, at this point anyway, to presume that our machines are using us. That would suggest intent and, at least in the case of Stelarc, hooks and wires aren't planning on taking over the world. 

Is it possible that, in the future, as machines grow more sophisticated, that something happens and humans lose their dominance over their creations? Perhaps. But that's assuming that we're dominant to begin with.

While I found Stelarc's suspension performances rather disturbing, I don't know that I'm too disinclined to incorporating technology into who I am. Because I already have been for a long time, since I was born, as have our ancestors, those recent and those in the far past. We are predisposed to using tools to do what we cannot on our own.

I don't think that's a bad thing.

What I do think we have to be careful about is relying too heavily on technology to do our work. Think of how we would all communicate if the Internet, for whatever reason, shut down?...

Mass chaos.

Kind of scary.

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