Tamagotchi's and Other Such

So I should talk about my next show. There's a lot to talk about.

It's sort of a play about evolution. It's kind of a love letter to the theater. It's a lot about the fear of extinction. And it's got a tamagotchi in it.

Do you remember tamagotchi's? They were those little "electronic babies" that told you when they wanted to eat, sleep, drink, etc. You had to push a button to meet their needs or else they wouldn't survive.

Right.

For the longest time I couldn't figure out why there was one in this play except for the fact that it was produced in 1998 and that was kind of the hey day of the Tamagotchi. But it still seemed kind of... random.

Then I read an article about Artificial Intelligence by Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT and expert in the relationship between humans and machines.

She opens the paper by asking:
In the past fifty years, artificial intelligence has had its own internal intellectual debates and it has provoked a conversation in the larger culture, largely through the presence of computational objects. Machines that are reactive and interactive, machines that seem on the boundary of the animate, have led those who use them to new reconsiderations of human identity. If mind was program, as the field suggested, where was self? where was spirit? where was soul? AI has led people to ask, “Will machines someday be as intelligent as people?” but it has also led to another and more self-reflexive question, “Have people always been machines?”

So if Darwin's contemporaries were reeling from the information that humans evolved from animals, our generation reels at the possibility that machines could evolve from humans.

She goes on to discuss how, actually, they can't. That machines seem to have feelings only as a relational counter to a human's feelings. They seem to have emotions because we reflect our own feelings upon them.

I have a google alert on Charles Darwin.He pops up in the news all the time. Things were especially hot around February 12, which was Darwin 198th birthday.

Happy Birthday Chuck!

Recent news also includes the state of Kansas' likely return to sanity and John McCain's continued descent away from it.

As Grady says, he's kind of crazy.