Machines, Animals, And Aliens Summary

In chapter six, “Machines, Animals, and Aliens,” Durham Peters discusses the 20th century- the century which revolves around cinema, television, cell phones, and the internet. Observing these new media and their promises, Peters visions our grasps toward the dream of communication extended to the limits of communicability, in the modern concern for the language of animals, Alan Turing’s apocryphal tests of machine intelligence, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). To start off, Peters references Hegel who claims that “Determining the range of creatures we will communicate with is a political question, perhaps the political question” (Peters 230). Peters argues that what is at stake in this discussion about communication is the what makes or doesn’t make us humans or distinct. He then discusses different philosophers and their methods of finding the distinction between humans and animals. Peters specifically talks about Descartes, who is “a theorist who makes communication a distinctly human capacity that distinguishes us from animals and machines” (Peters 231). In
In the article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Turning explores communication between machines and animals. Turning proposes a test called “The Imitation game”, in which at first did not involve any type of computer intelligence, but just a man and a woman. Turning then proposed a modification of the game which involved a human (of any gender) and a computer on the side. The judge’s main goal is to decide which contestant is human and which is the machine (Peters 235). Peters connects the Turning Test to Judith Butler claiming that this game is an example of what Judith butler would call gender trouble. Within the game, the idea of gender seems more prominent than the actual difference between a machine and a