Journal post #2 response

Before I begin on the next round of field reports I'd like to take the time to respond to the previous round. Mostly I'd like to offer my personal response to the two articles. I have this weird thing about robots. It's not something I've ever really noticed until I began school here, and it's was definitely not anything important to pay attention to until I took the film 319 class on American Science fiction. But since that class themes about robots and cyborgs have really interested me. And it's not because I'm like, a huge mechanical engineering nerd or something (no offense to mechanical engineering nerds). I'm really interested by how films with robots and cyborgs address the question of what it means to be human. It's definitely not a question unique to the scifi genre. It's probably hard to find a genre that doesn't address that question in some form, actually. But scifi provides the opportunity to present the human artifice in a sprectrum form. The robot has a cultural iconography that retains a coherence from film to film. It's my impression that if you take a handful of robots/cyborgs and ask 100 people to rate them on a scale of "most human to least human" you would get similar results from each person. I think that is because everyone quantifies the human condition in a similar way. Thats like, a huge deal to me! I found it really interesting how these two authors discussed these quailfiers with the ideas of philosophers that lived well before the matrix went online or skynet became self aware. (You know, figuratively, as in before the movies were released). I think it is interesting how robots and cyborgs can play a cathartic role in answering questions about humanity, as in being able to question what we are from a safe distance. But also how robots and cyborgs can play a troubling role and make us doubt our place in the universe. I like how these articles provided a more concrete way to discuss human approximation.