And what if English 203 were taught by a robot?

I recently introduced my Eng 203 students to the new unit we were going to cover this semester: Technology and the Posthuman. Since I always like to stir what I like to call “diplomatic fights” amongst them as I sit back and enjoy the mayhem and madness I cause, this time, I decided to provoke this rich discussion/organized mess via blogging. To clarify: I have set up a blog for my students where they each log in, post their reflections, and then comment on a peer’s post. (for an idea about how they look like, feel free to browse through the blogs of Section 3, Section 43, and Section 51 that I had set up for my students last semester; each for a different section)

The way it works is that every other week, I would upload a blog prompt up on Moodle and the students would receive credit for both writing the post and commenting on a friend’s post. It is worth mentioning that in the blog prompt I tend to ask numerous questions in order to make my blog topics intentionally broad so students are then able to narrow in and write about any specific subtopic they feel enthusiastic about reflecting on. That said, and in order to get them excited about this somewhat “mechanical” unit, I made one particular blog topic of theirs a little more controversial than usual. For this informal assignment, I wrote them the following prompt:

You don’t choose the family you are born into anymore than you choose the religion you were told you are supposed to follow. As a newborn baby, your experiences, beliefs, knowledge base, and even feelings are all entirely shaped primarily by your family. It is only once you grow up, and start being influenced by external sources (like society, university, etc.), that you start questioning your old beliefs, shaping some of your current beliefs, and formulating some entirely new beliefs altogether. Similarly, you didn’t choose your own genes and biological traits and characteristics. But neither did your parents.

On this note, Fukuyama (2003) writes: “As we discover not just correlations but actual molecular pathways between genes and traits like intelligence, aggression, sexual identity, criminality, alcoholism, and the like, it will inevitably occur to people that they can make use of this knowledge for particular social ends. This will play itself out as a series of ethical questions facing individual parents, and also as a political issue that may someday come to dominate politics. If wealthy parents suddenly have open to them the opportunity to increase the intelligence of their children as well as that of all their subsequent descendants, then we have the makings not just of a moral dilemma but of a full-scale class war” (p.562).

That said, there are too many interesting questions to consider here: What if you could modify your genetic make-up? Would you? Why or why not? What would you change about yourself? What would you leave unchanged? And if it’s too late for you to rearrange your own genes, would you end up carefully picking and choosing which genes to select for your unborn children? Why or why not? As usual, I don’t expect you to answer all of these questions. Just contemplate their implications for a few minutes, start writing, and see what you end up writing about.

Happy Blogging! ☺

The reason I decided to share this particular blog prompt of mine is because first of all, I had no idea how to answer my own questions myself. Thus, I felt that I owed it to my students to try and articulate my own views on the matter. Second of all, at around the time this blog post was due, the students had also been delivering/working on ongoing class presentations. The relation between these two ideas will be made clear shortly. Anyway, so one particular group, upon concluding their presentation, cropped a photo of mine and neatly placed it on top of this robot “body” underneath which they wrote “Predictions for the future of academia: The J-Robot”. Their amusing collage of my face, and play on the first initial of my name, immediately made me wonder about this same question they had been investigating themselves: and what IF a robot taught an English course instead of me? Who would be better? The robot or me? To answer this question, I revisited the questions I had asked in the blog prompt I included above: Would I change my genes? No. Why not? It’s not because I think I’m perfect – far from it, I flaunt my flaws! But rather I would not change anything about myself because although I’m aware I make mistakes, I like that I do so because sometimes, a lesson learned the hard way is a lesson that sticks. That said, like me, a robot could be programmed to develop coping and adapting skills so that it could learn and improve based on error patterns it observed and documented. Unlike me, however, a robot could have access to an infinite database of information and be able to answer any random question/concern a student may have. That said, to which side do we see the scale tipping over? My students seem to think that a combination of the human and the robot appears to be the perfect hybrid solution for a technologically advanced posthuman future. Then again, that leads me to the obvious question: what the hell do we mean by a humanoid anyway? And why should we assume that we must become half robot, lest our other half human attributes be rendered obsolete?

References

• Fukuyama, F. (2003). A tale of two dystopias from the book Our Posthuman Future. In R. Rantisi, L. R. Arnold, N. George, R. N. Hanna, N. Jarkas, J. Najjar & Z. S. Sinno (Eds.), After Words (pp.551-563). Beirut: Educart.