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News & ArtsFriday, January 30, 2009
Tech A Conclusion
Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:40 PM
I have finally decided to reject these robot cats and to recognize an aspect of pet ownership that deserves credit, if not praise. My Marxist side is the cause of this line of thought, which begins with Adam Smith and ends with an appreciation of the type of relationship humans have with their dogs or cats. Thinking of Marx and pets lead to me to think about how Adam Smith placed selfishness at the vital center of capitalist economics. Selfish interest, according to the long-dead Scotsman, motors a capitalist economy to the promised land of "the general good." But the problem is this: In the capitalist order, the entire body of interactions between humans form nothing but a network of self-interests. The butcher, baker, the carpenter, the cook—all service my needs and desires not because they like me but because they are interested in my money. Without this money, the whole lot of them would have no interest in me. Because all human relationships in a capitalist order have self-interest as their animating force, a pet offers the owner a relationship that is outside of this order. Here we have a human being kind to a dog for no other reason than being kind to it. Indeed, even the kindness between family members lacks this kind of purity because it has a biological link—it is still interested, self-interested. A pet owner at his or her best has a kindness that lacks any monetary or blood link. (And I think this is at the center of the outrage directed a Michael Vicks—he soiled the purity of the bond between man and dog.) All in all, the robot cats are really capitalism's effort to colonize an area of kindness that is outside of its logic and order.
I mean, simulating a cat just stems from the same impulse to simulate a baby. It's no different, in the sense that you're taking something cute and mimicking it for the amusement/fulfillment of the purchaser. This is not new or anything.
Not to mention the fact that dogs and cats already ARE a commodity themselves... Wanna check with Wittgenstein of Hegel on this one, and get back to us?
"With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn't how we learn to accept robots—but whether we should care when they're mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?"
And then mentions:
"In 2007, a South Korean politician declared that his country would be the first to draw up legal guidelines on how to treat robots; the UK has also looked into the area (though nothing substantial has come of it anywhere). "As our products become more aware, there are things you probably shouldn't do to them," says John Sosoka, CTO of Ugobe, which makes the eerily lifelike robot dinosaur Pleo (also tortured on Web video). 'The point isn't whether it's an issue for the creature. It's what does it do to us.' "
sorry chuck, we're all shadows, even you.
and quite a bit more intellectual than the real Mudede.
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