Music: Steve Reich and Musicians
Dawkins: We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
Dawkins: Machines, machines, are machines (looped)
Sherry Turkle: When Marvin Minsky said,
“The mind is a meat machine”, people freaked.
Dawkins: A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees,
Watson: The script for human life is 3 billion letters,
Turkle: It doesn’t seem so frightening anymore.
Dawkins: a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water.
Turkle: preparing for a new kind of
-kind of cyborg consciousness
Dawkins: They’re all about preserving the code, preserving DNA.
Rodney Brooks: We’ve always thought of our brains in terms of our latest technology
Dawkins: DNA is a molecule –
it carries coded information –
exactly like a computer tape.
Brooks: So at one point our brains were steam engines.
Dawkins: What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire
Brooks: When I was a kid, they were telephone switching networks
Dawkins: not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’.
Brooks: Then they became digital computers.
Dawkins: If you want to understand life,
Brooks: Then, massively parallel digital computers
Dawkins: think about information technology
Brooks: Probably, out there now, there are kid’s books which say that our brain is the world wide web.
Dawkins: I don’t think there’s anything that we are, that is in principle, deeply different from what computers are.
Brooks: We probably haven’t got it right yet.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Alan Turing
Brooks: Alan Turing came up with this idea
Genesis, drummed out: And the Eternal
Brooks: if you talked to a computer over instant messaging,
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: talked to a computer
Genesis: commanded the man,
Brooks: and you couldn’t tell the difference
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: couldn’t tell the difference
Genesis: of every tree of the Garden
Brooks: between whether it was a computer answering you or a person answering you.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: a computer or a person
Genesis: you may freely eat.
Brooks: Then the computer must be intelligent
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: must be intelligent
Genesis: But of the tree of knowledge
Brooks: That leaves out a whole lot of stuff that we do with one another
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: leaves out a whole lot
Genesis: of good and evil
Brooks: We look each other in the eye,
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we look
Genesis: you must not eat
Brooks: we smile
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we smile
Genesis: for on the day you eat it,
Brooks: we nod at each other.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: we nod
Genesis: you will surely die.
Steven Pinker: I might be fooled by a good silk flower.
It doesn’t mean that its a real flower.
It may just mean that I don’t know enough about flowers.
Dawkins: We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
Robert Pollack: I have no sense of guilt pulling the plug on any machine.
Adin Steinsaltz: Its a machine or not a machine.
The real question would be: Are you responsible or not responsible for anything?
Turkle: Not what the computer does, but what the computer does to us.
Kevin Warwick: The human body is extremely limited.
I would love to upgrade myself.