Last Blog Post

i think that in order to do well in this class is make sure you treat it as a completely seperate class than ENG 101. it gets confusing at times. i think if you dont save anything for last minute than you should be good. in order to do that make sure you do all the blog assignments because they will help you out and make sure you do everything else before the deadline cause you dont wanna lose points for being late. i think thats the only piece of advice i could offer.

Blog Assignment 6

I was reading up on some new tech stuff in the world today, and i came across this

http://www.slashgear.com/petman-humanoid-robot-ready-for-the-us-army-31192080/

this video is like the same video from the robot army dog, they now are making one thats called a humanoid. I can relate this to the singularity is hear by ray kurzweil. i think that this can be a good match for the whole idea if you are kurzweils side. i think so because if you think about it he was talking about robots becoming more llike humans and this robot has the body to prove that robots are becoming more like humans the way he stands the way he walks. The robot embodying a human form but its singularity according to kurzweil will be a lot more stronger than that of a human.

Blog Assignment 5

David Gelernter wrote the article Dream Logic, the Internet and artificial thought. This article talked about how Gelernter thinks that robots will never think like humans do. In this article he explains that robots cannot think like humans because of various factors. “The solution will probably take the form of software that is trained to imitate the emotional responses of a particular human subject” (Gelernter 207). I don’t think that humans and robots can think like one another. I think that because human’s minds are much more complex. For example a human has emotions that they have to deal with and robots don’t have emotions. They can be programmed to have emotions but that’s it they are only pretending. It’s not a real emotion. They can’t ever really feel happy. They can never know what it’s like to cut their knee as a child. Ray Kurzweil is an optimist that believes that “Intelligence will inherently find a way to influence the world, including creating its own embodiment and physical manipulation” (Kurzweil). He is really optimistic that robots will be like humans and because they are so smart they will actuallu be far more superior than us humans he is sure of it.

Blog Assignment 4

Oliver Sacks sort of suggests that Temple has made a connection with him. “I hugged her-and I think she hugged me back” (Sacks 18). When she was asked “have you ever cared for somebody else, and she answered I think lots of times there are things that are missing from my life” (Sacks 15). This alone shows that she has a really hard time connecting with people during her life. Temple Grandin is an explicit example of not needing emotions to make moral judgments. Oliver Sacks writes, “Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong” (Sacks 18). She has no sense of her emotions yet she has made more morally right decisions than people with emotions make. She wants to respect the cattle in their last few minutes of being alive and honor them by making them calm on their way to their death. She makes better connections with animals because she can understand them. Its not complex for her to understand. Its simple. “She can understand simple, strong, universal emotions but was stumped by more complex emotions” (Sacks 6). 

Blog Assignment 2 Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is a real example of overcoming difficult obstacles. Being that she is autistic she can’t feel regular human emotions like sadness or happiness because she doesn’t understand it and she can’t relate to it. Although she is autistic she has accomplished a great deal of work and is an autism advocate. She holds a Phd in animal science as well as running her own business. She created the Stairway to Heaven for animals, and she has created a squeeze machine for autistic people to calm them down. Human beings do not really need emotions to connect with other human beings or animals or to behave morally with a sense or right and wrong.

Temple Grandin although she is autistic she has made connections with people and especially animals, but they aren’t the connections that are the same for non autistic people. For example Oliver Sacks writes, “she introduced me to the secretaries in a somewhat brusque manner, giving me the feeling once again of someone who learned roughly how to behave in such situations” (sacks 5). Examining this quote shows that Temple Grandin had to rather learn a behavior that normal people acquire, like introducing people that don’t know each other. There is clear evidence that she can connect with animals because she feels for them even though she is autistic.  Temple says “I got to love my enriched pigs, I was very attached so attached that I couldn’t kill them” (sacks 7).  Temple being autistic cant really comprehend complex emotions like love yet she understood her emotions she had with these pigs that she was writing about for her thesis. Sacks then continues to say “she was very distressed at their deaths” (sacks 7). She doesn’t have any real emotional understanding yet she became so close to these animals that she didn’t want to just kill them for her thesis. This proves that maybe you don’t need emotions to emphasize with animals.