Hayles Anthropological Analysis

Technology, the advancement of knowledge and productivity through the application of tools, information, and techniques to create an effortless process, has ultimately lead to the declination of our society and our future. In “A Thing Like Me,” Nicholas Carr addresses the development of technology from the day it was created and how it initiated an immediate impact within the lives of humans leading to an unhealthy dependency. Carr establishes how technology, what was intended to be a tool, has become the “pacifier” of our generation. This “pacifier” causes a loss of freedom, not through the laws of the government, but rather with the values of freedom one holds within themselves. This freedom is the individuality that distinguishes each person from the next, and forms a desire for the development of oneself through the experiences of life and the wisdom that is acquired along the way. Technology has blinded man from this pursuit of self-enhancement and with the advancement of technology occurring daily, there is no resolution. Each day people are confined within themselves and the pieces of technology that will continually limit them in their lives. Freedom is more than just a concept of laws instilled by the government, it is the thought process found within each individual person and their “hunger” to become more. With technology, social media was created and immediately immersed within our lives. The society of today has

In all three works, there is a focus on showing how technological advancements are making society worse off. This is because these kinds of changes are designed to take away any kind of individual creativity and have everyone conform to different social standards. Where, each one is highlighting these transformations throughout the course of human history.

We are the Auxari. We are a race united as one. We have assimilated many into our hive mind, moulding a society envied across the universe. We come in peace, but in dismay. We have without interference observed the rise of human civilization for millennia. We have observed your exhilarating ingenuity, but also fail to understand your need for individual freedom, which will ultimately lead to your demise. We now realize that human society must be saved from itself. We are revealing ourselves to rescue you from your own detrimental tendencies, and offering you an avenue to escape your miseries. Many of your great novels have attempted to dictate the best path for humanity. We agree with a select few, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Evgeny Zamiatin’s We. Although we have deduced that both stories are on the correct path, Huxley closer approaches a utopian society. In both novels, we can see how the lack of individuality creates efficiency, how individuality creates problems for the greater good, and the general populace’s tendencies to be controlled. Through comparative analysis of both texts, it is clear that human society can only find salvation from self-destructive tendencies once all humans are in perfect unity and under absolute control.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

Ryle is attempting here to undermine the Cartsian Dualism presnted by Descartes in the 17th Century, whcih has since become the accepted answer to the Mind/Body Promblem, which Ryle later refers to as ‘the Dogma of the Ghost Machine’. Ryle goes as far as to say that this dogma is entirely false, not in it’s details but in principle itself.

The advancement of technology does not imply the enhancement of humanity , within “ A Brave New World”, by Aldous Huxley, shows a world in which individuality is stripped and replaced by uniformity which can be shown best in the John the “savage”.

Pico della Mirandola, a renaissance philosopher, wrote a book called, Oration on the dignity of man , which humanists refer to as the humanist manifesto. This book, in a way, led to the first thoughts towards human dignity and questioning our place on earth. One of the main points of the book centers on the notion that human beings aren’t preordained by nature to a center fixture like animals . Our destiny is not determined by anything outside of us. Pico believed that what makes humanity a miracle is that unlike all things in the universe, we have the power to choose our own life’s through freewill. Pico writes from gods point of view, “thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire” . While the main driving point behind Pico’s ideology is freewill, he divulges further into the discussion of human dignity by writing about how humans have the power to “degenerate into the lower forms of life” and “to be reborn into the higher forms” .

individuals through technology and science, but overpowers the human spirit. More’s positive and straightforward writing highlights the advantages of harmony when he writes, “Desire must accord with nature” (More 62). By comparison, through exaggeration and sarcasm, Huxley writes about, “Mass production shifting the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness” (Huxley 228).

In addition to How We Became Posthumans, Hayles explores on the subject of posthumanism and its relation to autonomy in her another book entitled, My Mother was a Computer. In this particular book, Hayles examines the subject matter of computational thinking by focusing on the relationship between code and language. New languages are constantly emerging and fading into obsolescence. A new part of literature that is present and is widely being used are codes, which are the computer programming languages. In the first section of the book, Hayles questions how to make distinctions between code, speech and writing. She connects code, speech and writing by arguing that humans using code on daily basis has made it comparable to that of speech and

The ethics of human engineering is something that can be seen as falling into the category of mankind's relationship with technology and the idea of man versus machine. The idea that humans becoming closer to “perfection” with the help of medicines or technology has been on the minds of philosophers for decades. Authors such as George Orwell and books such as Brave New World give an idea on the fear towards man vs technology. The sense that humanities individualism will be lost due to being sedated and controlled by machines, medicines, and a government that controls both of those factors.

By factoring in spatial and temporal geographic locations, allowing the continental simulation to account for the whole continent, while the biogeographic model displays specific regional archetypes, as well as reliable or intermediately reliable results, Faith and Surovell collected data to test their hypothesis. There are also other ways the scientific method has been utilized in this field which does not aggregate radiocarbon dates through a system. Meltzer and Mead (1983) accumulated their data from a journal, Radiocarbon, as well as published and unpublished sources, and then tested the material dated through their own conditions. Pettit (2003) measured and interpreted sample taxa dates from radiocarbon datasets found in France to form

In our contemporary societies, it is encouraged to be an entrepreneur, to invent or to innovate. With new inventions such as the Google Glass, smartphones, and smart watches, it is becoming increasingly easier for monopolies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple to influence the public in ways that we cannot fathom, similar to Bentham’s model of the Panopticon. These major capitalist corporations create technological gadgets that become an extension of us, and Haraway further confirmed this by stating in the Cyborg Manifesto that the machine is becoming an extension of us, our processes, a part of our embodiment (1991: 180). As a result of our dependence on these gadgets, it is even easier for corporations and governments to control, monitor, and influence the general public. Therefore, the agency of the general public has decreased in ways that were not possible before. For example, if I were to search on Google “insurance,” the results would not be objective, but based on a system that I have no influence over, meaning my agency has decreased by the simple fact that the Google search engine is making a decision on what the top suggestions are for me. As humans become more dependent on these technological gadgets and the blurring of lines between what a means to be a human and a technological gadget decreases, our agency reduces even more, by the simple fact that the

To understand the contemporary cultural situation means to penetrate in the spectrum of similarities and differences arising from its comparison with the classical stage of modernity. The new age started with a radical break with the traditional society and its cultural stereotypes. Reverence before the past and tradition, accepted symbols and the established order of things sanctioned by myth and religion constitutes the image of traditional society. On the contrary, critical reflection becomes the main force of development of modernity: all forms of social practice are reconsidered in the light of reason that should give a definite evaluation of their effectiveness / Habermas 1989: 27/. The triumph of formal rationality and calculative approach to the universe desacralizes the world and leads to the disappearance of naive symbolism . As a result, science allied with technology is considered as the main tool of comrehension and conquest of the world. In contrast to medieval period, modernity generates a total divorce of the spheres of Truth, Beauty , and Good. Philosophers of this period proposed different versions of their relations in the epoch when scientific images of the world pretended to be accepted as universal thus revealing their power function.

In this essay, I will debate the assumption that nature and technology are binary opposites, or two worlds apart from each other. I will refer to the interactive game which I have used within my presentation to illustrate how technology is not separate from nature- human nature in particular- but that it is simply a man made artifice, which is the materialisation of the plethora of ideas within the human mind. I will also refer to one of the three presribed readings from Arthur (2009) in order to better substantiate my views and opinions about this subject.

Since the 18th and 19th century the world has spiralled into an ever-changing and fast paced place where the possibilities are endless and technology and science rule. There was the introduction of machines, modern technology and science which gave the world incredible inventions such as the motorcar, aeroplane, the radio and electricity. These are the things that bought civilisation into modernity, it changed not only how people used the world but how they saw the world and envisaged the future. As times changes, architects gracefully chose to or were forced to adapt to the needs and conditions of their present world which were created by this Modernity. Some of these conditions which will be analysed are; the way in which society started to reject traditions and believe in the present and future, the initial reactions of scepticism towards the development of technology and imagination becoming important as people’s views on the world started to shift.