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  "publishedAt": "2002-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "Weiss - Review of In Our Image - JCRT 3.3 \n\nIn Our Image\n\na review of Noreen Herzfeld, _In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit_. Fortress Press, 2002. 135 pp. $16.00. ISBN: 0800634764\n\nDennis Weiss  \nYork College of Pennsylvania\n\n  \n\nIn her 1997 sociological study of cyberculture and identity formation entitled _Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet_, Sherry Turkle reports on her visit to MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where its Director, Rodney Brooks, has been building Cog, an \"artificial two-year-old.\" Turkle, skeptical regarding the possibility of building an artificially intelligent mechanism capable of learning from its interaction with the environment, including its interaction with the researchers building it, describes her meeting with Cog:\n\n> ...Cog \"noticed\" me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy. I found myself competing with another visitor for its attention. At one point, I felt sure that Cog's eyes had \"caught\" my own. My visit left me shaken'not by anything that Cog was able to accomplish but by my own reaction to \"him.\" For years whenever I had heard Rodney Brooks speak about his robotic \"creatures,\" I had always been careful to mentally put quotation marks around the word. But now, with Cog, I had found the quotation marks had disappeared. Despite myself and despite my continuing skepticism about this research project, I had behaved as though in the presence of another being. (266)\n\n    > Thus we find in the quest for AI support for the view that it is in our relationships that we find the center of the human, and, this, the image of God....We tend to identify with our minds, but we have come to recognize that those minds, visible in what we say or do, are formed in community and expressed in community. Rationality or intelligence, by itself, is not the defining characteristic of being human. It cannot, in fact, be captured as an isolated quality. We are relational beings; we give expression to our recognition of that fact in our search for AI. (51-52)\n\n     > If the stories we tell in science fiction are an accurate indication of the general public's hopes and fears for artificial intelligence, they tell us that we seek artificial intelligence for its relational potential rather than merely its rational or functional potentials. This is congruent with Barth's interpretation of humans as relational beings...We are most human when we are engaged in encounter with an other. (66-67)\n\n     > Brooks and Breazeal are imagining...a feedback loop in which humans and machines constantly modify one another. As such, their work has moved beyond the challenge of simply engineering better robots'they are also engineering a new kind of social relationship. \"Kismet was designed to be a human-robot system, not just a robot,\" explains Breazeal.\n\n  \n\nBibliography\n\n> Brooks, Rodney. _Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us_. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.\n> \n> Davis, Erik. \"The Soft Machine: The Play-Doh of the Future, Here Today!\" Electronic manuscript available at http://www.techgnosis.com/robot.html.\n> \n> Gergen, Kenneth. _The Saturated Self_. New York: Basic Books, 1991.\n> \n> Herzfeld, Noreen L. _In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit_. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.\n> \n> Midgley, Mary. _Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature_. New York: New American Library, 1978.\n> \n> Turkle, Sherry. _Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.\n\n  \n\n> Dennis Weiss is editor of _Interpreting Man_ (Davies Publishing Group 2002) and associate professor of philosophy and departmental chair at York College of Pennsylvania.\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  *\n\n ' 2002 Dennis Weiss. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/03.3/weiss/\n\n---",
  "title": "In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit"
}