Blog Post #5: Final Thoughts on Final Presentation

As I am finishing up my final draft of my paper I come to see just how relevant aura is to robots as well. Let me explain.

Typically we as humans pick quantity over quality. Mass production is idealized in the world. The more produced the better we think. However, mass production can diminish aura as well. The more we increase technology the more capable we become of diminishing the aura. Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1984) is the perfect evidence for this claim.

Donna Haraway explains how you can distinguish a human from a cyborg. A cyborg "would not recognize the Garden of Eden." This is a major point because the Garden of Eden is the where the creation of humans took place in the Bible. Cyborgs were not created here but created by us. This location is essential because it is where all of the natural life on this Earth was created.

How does this relate to aura then? Well if we view the human being as the "original work of art" and the robot as the "copy" it is a simple analogy. The more advanced the robot that is created the more the aura is diminished. Although we are making the robot more human like we are actually diminishing aura more because the robot is then just a copy that is incapable of the most important thing. Emotions and morals are what separate us from robots.

I was hoping to incorporate this message in my evidence as support of my thesis. In my thesis, I state how I the standards that distinguish humans from robots diminishes in the movies that we make about the robots.

Overall I am very pleased with the topic I have chosen because I have been able to take some many different approaches to it. I am able to connect many other movies that involve creation not only robots. I believe that we can connect a lot with what we have learned in the class to robot culture. I know that I am barely scratching the surface of this argument! The reason I chose this topic was because these were the class discussions that I enjoyed the most. I loved hearing everyone's comments on what they thought about making robots. Some of us are major supporters of technology but some of us a still old school and can be skeptical of the new advances in technology. I saw this when we had the show and tell about the driver less car. I was one that was very skeptical of this invention and still am. I think that our debates about technology were some of the best I have heard. We all had great points that we each would have never thought of. I am so glad that I was able to contribute to an honors class like this! I feel like I have learned so much with thinking critically about new media. I now catch myself thinking about things in a different perspective and I almost always try to relate back to our class.