In Dining with Robots, Ellen Ullman examines the idea of thinking machines, and comes to an unsettling conclusion. “Life is pressuring us to live by the robots' pleasures... Our appetites have given way to theirs. Robots aren't becoming us...; we are becoming them." While such arguments have been put forth by philosophers and social scientists, Ullman's essay is different in two important ways. First, it uses the narrative of having a robot over to dinner to structure the story. Perhaps more importantly, it comes from the perspective of a computer programmer, someone who understands the way computers "think."
The passage that most struck me came at the end of Ullman's story about her first programming instructor's analogy between writing code and writing a recipe. “It didn't occur to me to question the usefulness of comparing something humans absolutely must do to something machines never do: that is, eat.” I think the same question should be asked of many of the living beings and systems that are sometimes viewed as behaving more like machines than truly reflects reality. Even the basic assumption of economics – individuals left to their own devices will rationally choose to do what will make them happy – may be dubious!
Although the main point I took from the article does not have much to do with Applied Technical and Professional, computers and robots do. Almost any computer science class would be highly related to this article. CSCI 5552 – Sensing and Estimation in Robots, and ME 5286 – Robotics, both seem very relevant. Perhaps the professor for CSCL 3461 – Monsters, Robots, Cyborgs could work this reading into the syllabus, although that class isn't in the Applied Technical and Professional area.
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