Bertha's Critical Annotated Webliography

Question 3:

Frankenstein continues to occupy the popular imagination as a monstrous scientist. Analyze some of the ways in which Frankenstein continues to haunt discussion of recent technologies.

I have chosen question 3 as the main topic to be discussed in my webliography. As a webliography, no doubt that all the sources that I used were found from the Internet. The article of Catherine Waldby “The Instruments of Life: Frankenstein and Cyberculture” gave me some hints on how to deal with the question. Referring to the question of Frankenstein, this definitely made me think of something that related to science and machines. Therefore, I began my searching with the keywords like “Frankenstein” and “technology” through several of channels, such as Goggle Scholar, UWA Library SuperSearch, the online journals from Wired Magazine and Capitalism Magazine. I found that this gave me plenty of articles or websites on my question. However, some of the links were not able to access while some articles needed to be purchased in order to view the full content. The following six online sources that I found could be the most applicable in answering the question.When we mentioned about Frankenstein, people may immediately think of the green monstrous character of Mary Shelley’s movie in 1816. For today, Frankenstein is being metaphor as the new technologies that give great improvement on the medical and biochemical sectors.

[1] “Technology and Evolution: The Quest For a New Perspective” by Taede A. Smedes

First of all, in Taede A. Smede’s paper, it was a well-organized which gave a quite detail description on the relationship between technology and human nature. He had suggested a lot of useful statements that our relation to technology has become one of the symbioses between humans and machines. At the same time, it pointed out the issue that we may concern today, the fear of Frankenstein-effect, our technology has advanced up to a point where we have lost contact with the natural environment. The rapid change of technology has brought with it the danger of the destruction of the biosphere.

[2] “Will technology change humanity, or has it already?” by Robin Pierro

We are all living in such a technological world, the machines did enhance our bodily abilities, they can help us to do what we could not do which improved our life a in many ways. I found that Robin Pierro’s article is yet rather short but it brought out an interesting discussion. He has shown his own experience and perspective on the argument of whether technology changes the course of our humanity or not. He has also pointed out the most valuable point that the transformation of the new technologies would turn us find ourselves completely lost within the society.

[3] “Technology vs. Humanity” by Michael J. Hurd

In this modern society, human life seems to be intimately connected with the technologies; everything that we used in our daily life has be deal with machines or technologies. At this stage, there’s come to an argument that the technology has actually surpassed our humanity. In Michael’s article, he had another way of perspective. He defined that our technology is in fact a consequence of our humanity. That is the meaning that we could not live without the technology but at the same time the technology could not survive without human to operate them.

[4] “Why the future doesn’t need us” by Bill Joy

As to further elaborate the discussion of the future for the body within human and machines interactions, the online journal “Why the future doesn’t need us” from Wired Magazine had effectively explored the possible danger of machine replication and the replacement of human with the robotic technology. With providing some very great examples for the discussion, including the writer’s personal involvement with the technology industry. More than this, this article also brought out the possible challenge of human life over technology, which is the developing intelligent machines can do all things better than human beings can do with. In a sense, I appreciated the writer did include the solutions on how to maintain the boundary between machines and humans.

[5] “Frankenstein of the Future” by Alisa Burns

Similar as the above article, in the article written by Alisa Burns, it explored the technology of Frankenstein deal with the human future. It was an article that easy to follow and give strong supportive to the question. I agreed what the article suggested the statement that the link between human intelligence and machines would precipitate to immense proportions, which reshaping our daily lives. It implicated the creation of Artificial Intelligence nowadays is just like the story of Frankenstein. In another way, Alisa applied the example of the film “The Matrix” in order to explain the immense power of Artificial Intelligence that actually intends to take over human.

[6] “Cloning Can’t Be Stopped” by Daniel J. Kelves

As we knew that the advance technology nowadays could even make impossible things in the past to become possible today. In Daniel’s article, it covered the controversial issue that related to the reproductive technology, which is human cloning. The prospect of human reproductive cloning has been widely condemned, and it became an ethical topic to be discussed and observed. It stated out that there was already existence of the cloned animals and therefore probably will get the human clones in the very soon future. Other than this, I found there’s a quite interesting point that he has mentioned. He thought that there would be the demand for such of human cloning for those who were not able to have children, such as the gays, lesbians and infertile couples.

To conclude, I really think the invention of technology is very important to the people. It possibly became the essential parts of our life and brought us a lot of conveniences. However, what a contradictory point is that people benefited from the technology that they love it very much. At the same time, they felt fear about it because they afraid the technology will control them one day. Therefore, we have to learn how to deal with the technology in our life but not fully reliance on it.

References:
[1] Smedes, Taede A. (2005) “Technology and Evolution: The Quest For a New

Perspective”
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ehost/pdf?vid=5&hid=120&sid=5a1f6cb7-ebb9-4a43-b7af-e786ab703f7e%40sessionmgr104

(Accessed on 28/03/2008)

[2] Pierro, Robin. (2005) “Will technology change humanity, or has it already?”

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/robin022805.htm
(Accessed on 28/03/2008)

[3] Hurd, Michael J. (2001) “Technology vs. Humanity”

http://capmag.com/article.asp?id=152

(Accessed on 29/03/2008)

[4] Joy, Bill. (2004) “Why the future doesn’t need us”

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

(Accessed on 29/03/2008)

[5] Burns, Alisa. (2002) “Frankenstein of the Future”

http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/frank.comment4.html

(Accessed on 29/03/2008)

[6] Kelves, Daniel J. (2002) “Cloning Can’t Be Stopped”

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/12852/

(Accessed on 29/03/2008)