Hey folks! So, you may have been wondering about the weirdly generic picture of a sunrise on the header of the page. Maybe you thought, “oh, like ‘onward! To The FUTURE!,’ or some shit, right?” Right? Well, yes, but also no.
You see, this picture is actually one I took of sunrise over Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, back in 2012. Kirsten and I had just landed for our layover on the way to my first international conference: The Machine Question Symposium.
This picture is the first time either of us had ever seen the sunrise on the other side of the ocean. One quarter of the way around the world, more than half a day on a plane, and the sun rising over a country we’d never seen, on the way to a place we’d never been, for me to give my first professional paper in front of an international audience of people whom I wanted to be my peers.
It was a weird feeling.
That trip contained one of the most clarifying moments of my life, since high school: At one point, during one of the group lunch breaks for the weekend, several of us were having a conversation about practical methodologies of teaching ethical constructs to machines, and someone facetiously puts out there, “So what? You want to teach robots Zen?”
And I don’t remember if that question was directed at me, or at one of the other people in our impromptu group, and I don’t remember if I was the one but we all got really quiet, and eventually somebody said “…Yes. Let’s teach robots Zen.” I mean, obviously, that’s not the whole of this–I mean programmatizing Japanese Zen Buddhism isn’t the full breadth and depth of what this project’s about. But in that moment you could see everyone at the table thinking about things in a way they hadn’t exactly put words to, before that very second. It was a new approach, and started a whole line of questions like, “how Would you program Zen?” that started to cut into a lot of assumptions people had been making about what “Machine Ethics” was supposed to mean.
That’s what I’m aiming for, here. Not only do I want to learn more about these topics, and talk with you about what I find, but I want to challenge any uninvestigated assumptions we find, in the process. I want us to be able to deconstruct why we’re doing what we’re doing, so we can piece it all back together in the most useful way possible. To that end, the first phase of this is going to deal in a lot of definitions.
Over the course of our time together, I’m going to make a lot of use of terms like “The Invisible Architecture of Bias,” “Normalization,” “Autonomous Created/Generated Intelligence,” “Robot,” “Cybernetics,” “cyborg,” and so on. While a bunch of that will make itself clear in the context, I want to make sure there’s no undefined jargon being put into play, and so I’ll make a few short posts breaking down many of the most jargon-y of these terms.
After we have these definitions in hand, we’re going to be using the words as necessary, so I may make something like a standing glossary of weird-assed terms, or something. We’ll see how it goes.
Well, for an intro post, this has gone on a pretty long while. There’ll be more to talk about, soon but, until then, have a great night!
