Quotes from Ch. 5: Postindustrial Discourses

Computers are useful, in fact, not only for control but also for communication, and any technology that enhances human contact has democratic potentialities. (91-2)

A strategy of automation that took advantage of the computer's communicative capabilities would attenuate the distinction between mental and manual labor. In this version of computerization, new forms of sociability emerge around the new technology, which becomes a medium for democratic self-organization. (92)

• The Internet?

Roughly formulated, the problem concerns the similarities and differences between human thought and information processing. To the extent that similarities can be found, computerized automata can replace people for many sophisticated purposes. To the extent that differences are found, greater philosophical precision is introduced into the notion of human thinking, clearly distinguished from manmade simulacra. (96-7)

• Indicates a general misunderstanding of the basic way computers work. The sophistication of human thought is not programmable simply because we cannot put parameters on the type of complex judgment humans engage in when thinking. Looking at various attempts to simulate this (fingerprint recognition, facial recognition, voice recognition, etc.) have indicated a level of sophistication that we simply cannot replicate with current technology. In short, I don't think we need to be worrying about computers taking over the world, just yet. It makes a great storyline for a movie, but otherwise, it's just science fiction.
  

But living things are "programmed" by genetic materials which are themselves the objects on which the genetic program operates. And, although some mental operations are describable in terms of the metaphor of external programming, the brain as a system largely "creates" itself by operating on its own states, more like a neo-connectionist neural network than an ordinary computer. These are, in short, self-programming beings, an apparent contradiction in terms. (103)

But however "intelligent" it may appear to be, the computer is not a mind, but "a structured dynamic communication medium that is qualitatively different from earlier media such as print and telephones." It is the programmer, those who help prepare the program, and those with whom it is applied who are engaged in communication, not the computer system. (107)

Philosophy must reconceptualize social and technical action on the basis of a radical acceptance of human finitude: the cognition that our actions on the world are ultimately actions on ourselves, on our way of being in the world and on our very nature. (113)