http://www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter/conference2010/
Bard College
October 22-23, 2010.
On October 22-23, 2010, The Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard College is hosting an international conference, “Human Being in an Inhuman Age.” I am excited to invite you to participate in our conference.
A doctor uses a joystick to control a robotic laser. The doctor’s movement, his or her human judgment, is “corrected” by computers. Soon, a computer will move the laser with the benefit of superhuman calculating ability. Of course, we will program that computer. But as doctors rely on computers to make ever more miraculous surgeries possible, will they lose the feel for surgery itself? As doctors who don’t themselves operate write computer code, surgeons approximate engineers. What is the importance of the loss of direct experience of the art of surgery?
We stand at the precipice of a new age, one in which super-intelligent machines and incalculably complex statistical models remake the world according to a rationality whose logic is not human. Unmanned robots remove humans from the battlefield; statistical models replace human judgment in social policy; and social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as virtual reality games like Second Life rarify the day-to-day human contact amongst persons. After 2,000 years in which human intelligence has increasingly fabricated and cultivated our world, that world is, for better or for worse, increasingly governed by inhuman rationality.
Our challenge today is to face up to the fact that the vast age of human freedom and human control of the world may be coming to an end. While some might shake their fists at the transformation of human beings and our world, we must instead figure out how to move forward. How ought we humans respond to our inhuman future?
Our conference will bring together artists, technologists, businessmen, academics, and public intellectuals to explore questions like:
•Will Man Be Able to Control and Direct the Advance of Science?
•Do Robots and Technology in War, Medicine, and Art Threaten Humanity?
•What Do the Loss of the Humanities and Rise of On-Line Education Portend?
•Is Man a Mechanism? An Animal? Or Something More?
•What Higher Ends does Technology Free Human Beings to Pursue?
•Is Virtual Reality De-Humanizing?
The Arendt Center’s mission is to think through contemporary ethical and political questions in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1950, Arendt traced the rise of totalitarian government to what she called the “loss of the idea of humanity.” Arendt is neither a Luddite nor a futurist. Written neither out of despair nor hope, The Origins of Totalitarianism counsels the “attentive facing up to, and resisting, of reality—whatever it may be.”
For Hannah Arendt, the challenge to being human in the modern age has at least three sources: Darwinism, Liberalism, and Science. Darwinism sees humanity as one species among many. Since evolution does not stop, there will be higher species. Darwinism thus kicks out one crutch supporting the idea of an absolute and inviolable human dignity.
Liberalism is the political thinking of man governed by power rather than reason. Since power is unlimited, there can be no absolute values; the idea of an inviolable and sacrosanct humanity must fall amidst liberalism’s rationalist determination to employ any means necessary to achieve desirable ends.
Arendt illustrates the alienating power of science through a discussion of the launch of Sputnik, in 1957. Sputnik embodies the desire to free mankind from its imprisonment on earth. To escape our earth is the same as the desire “to create life in the test tube” and to “produce superior human beings.” It is the “wish to escape the human condition” of freedom, chance, and fate. In 1958, Arendt saw that we were nearing our dream of creating the miracle of life. And yet, the achievement of our dreams means the very opposite of human freedom; in the coming age of what she calls universal science, man, as rational animal, acquires a terrible precision. “Human beings are indeed no more than animals who are able to reason, to reckon with consequences.” Science, as the pursuit of objective and thus inhuman truths, threatens to strip man of his freedom, the very quality that marks him as human.
Beyond science, the power of automation also threatens to alter or possibly annihilate humanity. The ever-increasing automation of labor threatens to make “large sections of the population ‘superfluous’.” In a world of automation, the choice, as Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems has written in Wired, is between altruism—keeping a mass of superfluous and meaningless persons alive—and ruthless rationalism, exterminating the mass of humanity.
Arendt’s response to the threats science and automation pose to human freedom is neither hope nor despair. She does not advocate resisting the march of science. And yet, she also does not resign herself to the dehumanizing impulse of science. Instead, Arendt counsels that we think what we are doing. Only in thinking and comprehending the true challenges to humanity is there a possibility of resisting the dehumanization of man. In thinking—the activity of freely and spontaneously being human—man might, she suggests, keep the idea of humanity alive in an age of inhumanity.
We invite you to join us for a conference that will think what we are doing when we use and are used by technology and science.
Confirmed speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Sherry Turkle (MIT), Ron Arkin (Georgia), Susan Silbey (MIT), William Connolly (Johns Hopkins), Thomas Dumm (Amherst College), Nicholson Baker (Novelist), David Rothenberg (Philosopher and Musician), Marianne Constable (UC Berkeley), and others. We expect the final conference to include about 20 speakers and participants.
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