STS Artificial Intelligence

Semifinals - use of machines to imitate the way humans think and behave
- replicate in a computer the actions and functions of biological
Lesson 7: The Information Age neurons found in the human body

The Information Age (Digital Age) Lesson 8: Climate Change

- Also called the New Media Age
- A period starting in the last quarter of the 20th century when Weather
information became effortlessly accessible through publications and - Short term changes in atmospheric variables such as temperature
through the management of information by computers and computer and rainfall.
networks - Nature’s way of balancing forces in the atmosphere.
- The focus of S&T and society became “information” itself (handling Climate
and conveying it) - Long term state of atmospheric variables like rainfall and
- Progress in electronics and computers caused information to be one temperature
of the most important commodities - The average weather pattern over a longer period of time. (100
- Advances in biology years)
✓Genetics – revolution in information science
(recombinant DNA) Climate Change (Global Warming)
✓The immune system – also an information processing - A significant change in weather patterns.
system - When you put it in the perspective of a longer period of time you
find it has happened many times before. (100,000 years)
Information and Society
Global Climate System
BEFORE NOW - Radiation from the sun warms the earth’s surface
✓During Galileo’s and ✓Today, the human mind is pictured - Energy radiates from the earth’s surface
Newton’s time, people were as a complicated computer - Energy radiates from the atmosphere
viewed as complicated - Greenhouse gases are being warmed by the radiation from earth
mechanical machines - With greenhouse gases: +15 degrees
✓Thomas Alva Edison, ✓Steven Jobs and William Gates
Alexander Graham Bell, and Causes of Climate Change
Henry Ford External Causes
✓Screw and bolt in the ✓Microchip (inventors were ✓ Solar activity
Industrial era awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in ✓ Earth’s orbit
2000)
✓ Meteorites
✓ Majority of labor force was ✓ Majority are engaged in supply of Internal Causes
into manufacturing of goods services
✓ Feedback
Information and Globalization ✓ Volcanic eruption
- Communication worldwide became cheap (with new phone systems ✓Ocean circulation
and Internet) Internal causes: Anthropogenic
- Changed the way people work
✓ Emissions of greenhouse gases
✓Information-based work
✓ Particles/clouds
✓Business trends
✓ Land change
✓Global banking
Greenhouse Gases
Problems with Information Age - has a warming effect
- Infringement of personal privacy -left in the atmosphere for 100 years
- Excessive use of computers in teaching young children may - Particles (mostly a cooling effect) left in the atmosphere for 1 week
impoverish the development of intellectual capabilities - Acts like a glass
✓ “Knowledge” is replaced by mere “data” - Its role is to trap infrared heat energy trying to escape back to space.
✓Ideas contain data, but data contain no ideas - Includes water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and
Facts on the Information Age ozone.
- Information must compete. Methane to Other gases to
CO2 to Atmosphere
Atmosphere atmosphere
- Newer is equated with truer.
Human Activity Human Activity Human Activity
- Selection is a viewpoint.
-Combustion: - Landfills - Ozone from car
- The media sells what the culture buys.
Burning of coal and - Agriculture (rice) exhausts
- The early word gets the perm. fossil fuels - Livestock - CFC’s from
- You are what you eat and so is your brain. - Deforestation aerosols
- Anything in great demand will be counterfeited. The Earth has warmed
- Ideas are seen as controversial. - The earth’s average temperature has increased by 0.74 degrees
- Undead information walks ever on. Celsius over the past century.
- Media presence creates the story.
- The medium selects the message. Rainfall patterns have changed
- The whole truth is a pursuit. - The world has seen changed in amount, intensity, frequency, and
type of precipitation.
History of Information - Rainfall strongly characterized by variability – year to year variations.
- “in form” – what we are “What makes a tree a tree? And not
cement?” Global sea levels have risen
- For 2000 years, explanation/answers were based on the head - During 20th century, average increase was 4.8 to 8.8 inches per
(natural philosophy/reason) century (1.2 – 2.2 mm/year) due to:
- Oral tradition – fascination with sounds and words ✓ the expansion of ocean water
- Print and written culture – printing press ✓ melting of mountain glaciers and small ice caps
- Alan Turing broke the Nazi code
- Developed the concept of computers
More extreme weather 2. Technology as Poeisis: Applicable to Modern Technology?
- Tropical storm and hurricane frequencies vary considerably from Modern Technology
year to year. However, evidence suggests substantial increases in - Challenges forth
intensity and duration since the 1970s. - Very aggressive in its activity
- Sets or brings about a setting upon
Changes will continue in the future - Expedites unconcealment of nature
- Caribbean temperatures will continue to increase in 2099 - Stores that which is extracted from nature
- Computer models suggest the Caribbean will warm by 1 to 5 degrees - Modern technology views Earth as a huge gas station, a
Celsius by the end of the century representative of the extraction, drilling and rape of Mother nature.
- The Caribbean and Jamaica will be drier by 2009. Modern Technology
- Drying will be between 25% and 30% in the mean for the Caribbean. - Age of switches
- Drying will be most severe between May and November. - Standing reserve
✓Sea level rise - Stockpiling for its own sake
- Caribbean sea level rise may be higher than in other regions because
of its closeness to the equator. 3. Questioning as the Piety of Thought
✓Hurricanes - A process of knowing the truth of who we are as beings in this world.
- Storms will likely be more intense, with higher rainfall rates, and - Martin Heidegger in Question Concerning Technology
increased maximum winds.
4. Enframing: Way of Revealing in Modern Technology
✓ It’s getting warmer. Enframing
- Way of revealing in modern technology
✓ More evaporation. And more rain.
- Views nature as calculable and orderable system of information
✓ Sea-levels are rising, glaciers are melting, extreme weather…
(calculative thinking)
Plants and animals adapt or disappear.
- Earth as gas station  Conceals poeisis
People and societies adapt.
- Modern physics is the herald of enframing
Climate has… Meditative thinking – let nature reveal itself without forcing it.
- long braking distance
5. Human Person Swallowed by Technology
- domino effects
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
- many irreversible processes
– Martin Heidegger
We must change how we live
Art as a way out of enframing
✓ More effective use of energy
- Technology is poetic in the primordial experience
✓ Renewable energy - Nature is art (techne) par excellence
✓ Capture carbon dioxide from both bio-fuels and fossil fuels - Nature is the most poetic
• There is difference between technology and modern technology
As an example…
Community risks: >It is in questioning that we build a way to understand.
▪ Landslides and flooding from heavy precipitation >Technology is usually thought of as that which solves problems, but
▪ Extreme droughts on crop production Heidegger asserts that it is something we must question.
Community response: >Calculative and meditative thinking works together.
▪ Contour farming
Aristotle’s Conception of the Four Causes was mechanical
▪ Re-forestation
1. Causa materialis
▪ Fruit trees production
2. Causa formalis
▪ Dry farming techniques
3. Causa finalis
▪ Drip irrigation
4. Causa efficiens
Lesson 9: Human Flourishing in Science & Technology (Heidegger)
Aition is an ancient Greek word which means ‘cause’ or ‘reason’, that
The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger to which something else is indebted’, not cause and effect
- Aition is responsible for bringing forth
Martin Heidegger
- September 1889 – May 1976 - Though we have consigned technology as a tool, it belongs to the
- German philosopher realm of truth as a way of revealing.
- “Father of Existential Phenomenology” - Technology as something that defines how we do science is aition.
- Author of “Sein Und Zeit” or “Being and Time” - Though enframing happens, it cannot snuff out the poetic character
of technology.
1. Technology as a Mode of Revealing
Common Understanding of technology
❑ Means to an end
❑ Product of human activity
❑ Practical application of science

Technology is instrumental and anthropological:

- Correct but not true.
- We pursue the true through the correct.

Technology is a way of bringing forth, making something.

- What is brought forth is the truth.
Ancient Greek concepts:
• Poiesis – bringing forth
• Aletheia – truth, disclosure, unconcealedness
• Techne – skill, art, or craft
“Technology is a poiesis that discloses or reveals the truth.”