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Technology and Human Values
The Single Scariest Moment of My Life
I just returned home from four days in the hospital, having been taken there by ambulance last Friday morning. I should say at the outset that I’m not exactly a stranger to hospitals. I’m a Type 1 Diabetic and about 10 years ago I was also diagnosed with a mysterious condition that my doctors called…
Read MoreThe Uncanny Valley
[Update: This post is the first in an ongoing series about the Uncanny Valley. Click here to read them all.] A couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Descartes’ Meditations, one of my students made reference to something called the “uncanny valley,” which I had never heard of before but which sounded really fascinating….
Read MoreThe Uncanny Valley 2: Racial Appearances
[This is a continutation of my previous post on the uncanny valley. If you don’t know what the uncanny valley is, you may want to go back and read the previous post first.] In 1931, at the beginning of the dénouement of the Harlem Renaissance, conservative (some would say “reactionary”) African-American author George Schuyler penned…
Read MoreThe Uncanny Valley 3: φύσις and τέχνη
As I recounted in my first post on the uncanny valley, I learned of this phenomenon from a student in one of my classes. I can’t remember the exact context of his bringing it up– it had something to do with our knowledge of the outside world as contested, and then proven, by Descartes in…
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