Nearly all of our texts contributed to my thoughts on the line between human, animal and machine. The Invention of Morel made me think about the difference between the fugitive before and after he went into the machine. How was that real person different from that person who was captured by the machine? Maybe if he didn’t know the difference, then there was no real difference.
In Postsingular the lines between animal and machine were very blurred with the creation of the orhidnet and the beezies. Towards the end, the Big Pig takes on a life of her own and starts trying to control the events of the real world. She is supposed to be a machine, but is taking on the qualities of a living being. I started to think of her as a living character in the book: part living animal, part machine. Queen City Jazz also made me really think about the difference between animals, machines and humans. The Bees are similar to the Big Pig in that they are part human, part animal and part machine. When Verity became a Bee she had access to information the way a machine would, but also had the Hive and communications of a bee. And through all of that she must have maintained her humanity. Even the City itself was an entity of its own and could know and understand. How does a machine have that much life?
Technocalyps made me think about how we are making machines more and more realistic and life-like and how close they will get to being alive without actually crossing the line. Robots are getting close to making just as good a pet, if not a better one, than a cat or dog. At one point it mentioned that the Japanese animalist spirituality makes giving machines life less taboo there. Does this mean that once we give machines a certain amount of life they can be on the same level as spirits, or animals? I think that there’s always going to be a distinction between animal and machine and human. Even in Ribofunk, where all levels and mixtures of these three have been created, there are still separate categories.
The splices in Ribofunk clearly have some human emotions. Little Worker felt human emotions like loyalty and jealousy. The rabbit that went to free his fellow splices from the farm had clear, human-like objectives and motivations to free his companions. Krazy Kat may have been the splice that was the most human-like, in that he organized and rebelled in a way that animals and machines don’t. Once again, there is this fine line about how much life and thought a machine can have before it crosses over to alive, and then how much more thought it can have before it crosses over to human.
All of these texts blurred the line between animal, machine and human, or at least questioned the lines that do exist. Maybe we should create a fourth category that’s in between machine and living being; some sort of living machine. Perhaps, like in Ribofunk there will be various levels of these categories in which beings are certain percentages of different animals or humans. That would be decided on DNA percentages though, and I’m not sure that DNA is really a fair indicator. There is more to a person than physical biology. What about their mental capacity, or emotional capacity? I keep thinking about the hibrane in Postsingular where all objects have a voice due to telepathy. What if all things have life, but we just can’t connect with them in any way because we aren’t communicating on the same level? I don’t think there’s really a true way to judge the difference between animal, human and machine. And the further technology progresses, the more difficult it’s going to get.
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