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  "publishedAt": "2001-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "Weiss - Mecha Love: A Review of Steven Spielberg's A.I. - JCRT 2.3 \n\nMecha Love: A Review of Steven Spielberg's _A.I._\n\nDennis Weiss  \nYork College of Pennsylvania\n\n  \n\nIn _Life on the Screen_ Sherry Turkle argues that today the ontological distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain. \"As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex.\" (21) Our new technologically enmeshed relationships, Turkle argues, provoke in us reflection on what it means to be human. Where once dreams and beasts were the test objects that provoked reflection, today it is the computer that is our key test object. As Turkle observes, like dreams and beasts, the computer stands on the margins.\n\n> It is a mind that is not yet a mind. It is inanimate yet interactive. It does not think, yet neither is it external to thought. It is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts, and seems in a certain sense to know. It confronts us with an uneasy kinship. After all, we too behave, interact, and seem to know, and yet are ultimately made of matter and programmed DNA. We think we can think. But can it think? Could it have the capacity to feel? Could it ever said to be alive? (22)\n\n> When there are computers who are just as smart as people, the computer will do a lot of the jobs, but there will still be things for the people to do. They will run the restaurants, taste the food, and they will be the ones who will love each other, have families and love each other (81).\n\n> \\[Many adults\\] saw the computer as a psychological object, conceded that it might have a certain rationality, but sought to maintain a sharp line between computers and people by claiming that the essence of human nature was what computers couldn't do. Certain human actions required intuition, embodiment, or emotions. Certain human actions depended on the soul and the spirit, the possibilities of spontaneity over programming. (82)\n\n> Pinocchio ultimately is a parable of the process by which a caring and loving human being is created out of the narcissistic self of the infant .' He must learn to be a human child. He must appreciate the specific qualities of identification, imagination, and empathy which are at the roots of human love. To become truly human, he must first learn to hear the voice of conscience; to identify with those who are hungry, poor, and in misery; to appreciate the profound joy of giving that transcends the ephemeral pleasure of receiving. Or, in the words of his guardian angel, the Blue Fairy, to possess all that she subsumes under the heading of \"a good heart.\" (129)\n\n  \n\nWorks Cited\n\n> Gaylin, Willard. _On Being and Becoming Human_. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.\n> \n> Konner, Melvin. _The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit_. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.\n> \n> Turkle, Sherry. _Life on the Screen_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.\n> \n> \\-----. _The Second Self_. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1984.\n\n  \n\n> Dennis Weiss is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin. His interests revolve around philosophical theories of human nature, feminist philosophy, and the digital culture. He is currently working on an edited collection of essays on philosophical anthropology and a text on the meaning of human being in the digital age. He has published a number of journal essays exploring the role of philosophical anthropology in contemporary philosophy, the impact of digital media on human nature, and the significance of the computer culture. These essays critique the \"thin\" accounts of human nature prevalent in work on the digital culture from the perspective of the more developed, \"thick\" accounts of human nature in the work of philosophical anthropologists such as Michael Landmann, Martin Buber, Jose Ortega y Gassett, Arnold Gehlen, and others.\n\n  \n\n> \n\n  *\n\n ' 2001 Dennis Weiss. All rights reserved.  \nUpdated 07/28/21.   \nhttp://jcrt.org/archives/02.3/weiss/\n\n---",
  "title": "A. I: Artificial Intelligence"
}