ournal 7
This week was a very interesting one. I had been pondering the project without any real guideline presented after I agreed to work with Ashton and Jubal. I began to think about the general themes of the class, those of theories of ethics, machine ethics, robotics, and work. Initially, unsure about the design of the project altogether, I began to think about last semester. Last semester, I took a philosophy 100 class. This class entitled God, Humans, and Animals, is one that I have talked about before and forms the basis of my general knowledge of some ethical theories. My professor, Gary Steiner, is an expert in the field on animal rights and animal ethics. This class focused on an overview of religious theory, an exploration of human rights theories, and lastly focused on exploring animal ethics.
Although, not a direct correlation, one of my ideas for the project was to dive back into the world of animal ethics, connecting it to robotics, radical anxiety termination, and the labor class. This would allow us to connect the ideas of Asimov and Delaney with the current place of animals in our society. Are the RATs used the same as animals are in our current society? Do they fill similar roles? How is this similar or different from the institution of slavery in the 1800s? These questions fluttered through my mind.
In the end, we decided upon the project topic of Brain-to-brain interfaces, a topic that is extremely interesting and seems almost magical. The idea that two or maybe even more people perceive what each other is thinking is one that I thought was only a notion of science fiction. I am very excited to dive into this topic and connect it in turn to ethics and memory.