Digital Soul

Digital Soul
Author: Thomas Georges
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2004-10-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0786752645

Should the day come when intelligent machines not only make computations but also think and experience emotions as humans do, how will we distinguish the "human" from the "machine"? This introduction to artificial intelligence -- and to its potentially profound social, moral, and ethical implications -- is designed for readers with little or no technical background. In accessible, focused, engaging discussions, physicist and award-winning science writer Thomas Georges explores the fundamental issues: What is consciousness? Can computers be conscious? If machines could think and even feel, would they then be entitled to "human" rights? Will machines and people merge into a biomechanical race? Should we worry that super-intelligent machines might take over the world? Even now we continue to put increasingly sophisticated machines in control of critical aspects of our lives in ways that may hold unforeseen consequences for the human race. Digital Soul challenges all of us, before it's too late, to think carefully and rationally about the kind of world we will want to live in -- with intelligent machines ever closer by our sides.

Digital Soul

Digital Soul
Author: Thomas Georges
Publisher: Westview Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2004-10-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 081334266X

An introduction to artificial intelligence explores the philosophical and scientific implications of building machines that can think and feel more deeply than humans. Reprint.

The Digital Departed

The Digital Departed
Author: Timothy Recuber
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479814946

"A sociologist examines the ways we die online, and the digital texts we leave behind-including blogs of the terminally ill, suicide notes, post-mortem messages, and hashtags about police brutality. The book argues that the Internet has reenchanted our notions of selfhood, but in ways that blind us to the inequalities underpinning our digital lives"--

Shaping the Future of Online Learning: Education in the Metaverse

Shaping the Future of Online Learning: Education in the Metaverse
Author: Durak, Gürhan
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2022-12-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1668465140

Each new technological innovation creates new opportunities in the field of education and affects the learning preferences of individuals. In this respect, it is important to investigate the ways to use these technologies in education to ensure learners receive the best possible education. Shaping the Future of Online Learning: Education in the Metaverse discusses up-to-date knowledge and experience regarding emerging technologies, processes, and applications for online learning. The book also provides a guide for technology enthusiasts, online course designers, and institutions that facilitate the innovative technologies in online learning. Covering critical topics such as augmented reality, virtual reality, immersive learning, and gamification, this reference work is ideal for instructional designers, educational software developers, programmers, teachers, policymakers, administrators, principals, industry professionals, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

The Soul Online

The Soul Online
Author: Graham Joseph Hill
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1725266504

Pandemics, conflicts, and crises have increased suffering, death, and loss worldwide. The growing phenomenon of online interactions by the bereaved with the online presence of their deceased loved ones has recently come to the attention of caring professionals. Many questions emerge. How do we understand and respond to digital memorialization? What do we make of digital identities and continuing bonds? How can we engage with digital bereavement communities? What is the future of digital death and bereavement rituals and practices? How have forms of technospirituality and cybergnosticism emerged? How do counselors and carers respond to advances in the digital afterlife? Graham Joseph Hill and Desiree Geldenhuys examine existing therapeutic responses to death and bereavement practices and evaluate the efficacy in meeting the needs of mourners in a digital context. Geldenhuys and Hill explore the rising interest in spirituality and the phenomenon of technospirituality, including interest in the afterlife. The authors outline new death and bereavement practices in the digital public sphere. Hill and Geldenhuys offer ways that therapeutic and care practitioners can meet these needs. Finally, the authors develop new proposals for counseling, pastoral, and spiritual carers to help them address the needs of the bereaved.

Digital Retro

Digital Retro
Author: Gordon Laing
Publisher: Sybex
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2004-09-21
Genre: Computers
ISBN:

This book tells the story of the classic home computers that paved the way for the PCs we use today - from 1977s pioneering MITS Altair to the latest swivel screen designs of the iMac and the Tablet PC.

Digital Souls

Digital Souls
Author: Patrick Stokes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350139165

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

Philosophy, Computing and Information Science

Philosophy, Computing and Information Science
Author: Ruth Hagengruber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317317564

Over the last four decades computers and the internet have become an intrinsic part of all our lives, but this speed of development has left related philosophical enquiry behind. Featuring the work of computer scientists and philosophers, these essays provide an overview of an exciting new area of philosophy that is still taking shape.

The Fourth Revolution

The Fourth Revolution
Author: Luciano Floridi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0191667706

Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions. As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our 'real' lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, "onlife". Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution. "Onlife" defines more and more of our daily activity - the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the 'e' in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.

The Moral Uncanny in Black Mirror

The Moral Uncanny in Black Mirror
Author: Margaret Gibson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 303047495X

This erudite volume examines the moral universe of the hit Netflix show Black Mirror. It brings together scholars in media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, psychology, theatre and game studies to analyse the significance and reverberations of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian universe with our present-day technologically mediated life world. Brooker’s ground-breaking Black Mirror anthology generates often disturbing and sometimes amusing future imaginaries of the dark side of ubiquitous screen life, as it unleashes the power of the uncanny. This book takes the psychoanalytic idea of the uncanny into a moral framework befitting Black Mirror’s dystopian visions. The volume suggests that the Black Mirror anthology doesn’t just make the viewer feel, on the surface, a strange recognition of closeness to some of its dystopian scenarios, but also makes us realise how very fragile, wavering, fractured, and uncertain is the human moral compass.