----------- THE FINAL PROJECT IS NOW ATTACHED ------------------

Names (1): Remington Wong
Teaching Fellow: Alice Petty, Section 3
21 November 2008

Humans and Machines Final Project Proposal

PROJECT INFORMATION

• Course Theme: Human-Machine Boundaries
• Project Theme (One Aspect of Course Theme): Humans' Ability to Distinguish Humans from Machines
• Evidence Used: La Mettrie's Machine Man, Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”and Blade Runner
• Evidence's Significance to the Theme: Machine Man discusses the machine-like qualities humans have, qualities that blur the line between humans and machines. Turing's essay and Blade Runner include tests that try to distinguish humans from machines and explore these tests' effectiveness.
• Starter Thesis: Intellectual (as opposed to physical or visual) differences between humans and machines are relevant to humans only if humans can develop a test that successfully and practically measures these differences. If there exist machines that can thwart all but the most cumbersome and impractical of these tests, then humans should (for the most part) treat and regard these machines as actual humans.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

My project will be a fictional conversation (similar in format to the conversation in Kleist's “The Puppet Theatre”) among several Humans and Machines students arguing about the differences between humans and machines and how well these differences can tested. On paper, this conversation will look like a scene from a play, where dialogue predominates. Because I feel that splitting up the writing work with other students may undermine the overall unity of the final product, I have decided to write the script by myself.

However, to make this conversation different from the conversations that take place during IHUM sections, I'm going to add a scenario that will motivate the conversation.

Scenario: It is sometime in the future (I haven't decided what year yet), and a corporation has succeeded in manufacturing “child replicants,” which are like the replicants in Blade Runner except that they actually begin as children and grow into adulthood. On the outside, they are virtually indistinguishable from other humans, but on the inside they are still machines in that they execute explicit instructions. They possess human memories, but they can only mimic human emotions. That year, the first batch of manufactured child replicants are old enough to apply to college. All of the highly selective colleges and universities, however, are determined to reserve their coveted acceptance letters for real humans. That year Stanford University has asked  IHUM students in Humans and Machines to help read applications, figure out which applicants are humans and which are machines, and report their conclusions to the admissions officers, who will re-read the applications and make the final decisions. My project is a scene where a group of these students read a set of applications and deliberate on them.

I chose this form for my final project because a fictional conversation can show both the arguments and ambiguities regarding my topic. I can have the characters in the scene reach the consensus on some aspects of the argument and acknowledge that some particular issues will never be satisfactorily addressed.

Posted at Nov 24/2008 04:09PM:
alice: Remington, I like the idea of your writing a Kleistian essay, and I have a suggestion. Go to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's online, and is basically a newspaper/news magazine for academics and university professionals. Look at the blog-style essays that people write for CHE on subjects like interviews, admissions disputes, financial aid policies and tenure reviews-- these essays have a similar feel to the Kleist piece (sometimes there is dialogue, and they are often narrated by the author's "inner voice") I think you might find this useful in striking the right balance between narrative voice and dialogue.

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ViewIHUM 57-03 Final Project 200812110000.doc