" vision of a world full of code, a cyborg world"

August 16, 2016 9:19 AM

Go Hack Yourself: Richard Marshall interviews Samir Chopra, CUNY Philosophy professor, cricket writer, and more.

SC: I think what we were trying to get at was that it seemed the world was increasingly driven by software, which underwrote a great deal of the technology that extends us and makes our cyborg selves possible. In the past, our cyborg selves were constructed by things like eyeglasses, pencils, abacuses and the like—today, by smartphones, wearable computers, tablets and other devices like them. These are all driven by software. So our extended mind, our extended self, is very likely to be largely a computational device. Who controls that software? Who writes it? Who can modify it? Look at us today, tethered to our machines, unable to function without them, using software written by someone else. How free can we be if we don’t have some very basic control over this technology? If the people who write the software are the ones who have exclusive control over it, then I think we are giving up some measure of freedom in this cyborg society.

Decoding Liberation: An interview with Samir Chopra
 Computer Programs Are People, Too - "How treating smart programs as legal persons could change privacy as we know it."
How to Become Punjabi in New York City

posted by the man of twists and turns (5 comments total)

Great and thought-provoking interview! I'm just noting that we gave up individual control over our lives a long tme ago. For example, how many MeFi readers grow all their own food or learn about world news by witnessing it all first-hand?

I actually think it's encouraging to see how humanity keeps getting more interdependent and collaborative over time.
posted by Triplanetary at 10:00 AM on August 16, 2016

Oh great. In other words, everybody needs to be aprogramner. Even those of us who due to learning disabilities can't do a for-next loop workout getting confused.

And as has been pointed out, he doesn't care to use the same methods for the food he eats or the clothing he wears. The already established networks for product creation and trust are ignored.

Typical engineer's solution: "everybody should just use the same narrow-category technical problem solving approach to broad social problems." Fortunately his idiotic solution is unlikely to ever be put into effect.
posted by happyroach at 10:44 AM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Well one should not be using "for-next" anyway - applying a map or transformation over a list with a lambda is vastly more... ah, never mind :-) but this will all be moot and easy with a plug-in, an upgrade slipped into that tiny slot at the base of the skull, got your implant yet?
(more smillies, more smillies) </end silly comment section>

Attributing "smarts" or some kind or deliberate intention to any kind of code is clearly science fiction premature, but the (sometimes somewhat silly) discussions about self-driving cars deciding between driving into a group of nuns or crashing over a cliff killing all the kids in the car does speak to a growing awareness that code complexity will have interactions with the world that are very difficult to anticipate.

I did not read the article closely but I think it's a good thing to have philosophers, folks in the humanities and other non-deeply-technological-oriented thinkers not so much answer the question but to raise questions that would never occur to pure coders.
posted by sammyo at 11:10 AM on August 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

#softwarelivesdontmatter
It may temporarily give a certain version of biologically based person a kind freedom for a while, until things really get started and whole classes of freedoms disappear. When programs are considered people, then people later on will be treated like programs. Corporations own programs and we subscribe to them. Programs need to be upgraded to remain compatible, and we can uninstall them at will. Eroding the definition of person so that everything is a person, means nothing is a person. Just bare life, interchangeable commodities, resources with values to be extracted.
posted by otherchaz at 11:38 AM on August 16, 2016

Well one should not be using "for-next" anyway - applying a map or transformation over a list with a lambda is vastly more

flattering to the programmer's ego?
posted by thelonius at 11:50 AM on August 16, 2016 [2 favorites]