Annotated Bibliography

Topic: technology and psychology: how is AI similar to the brain? Can AI feel emotion, if emotion is indeed just a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain? How close to humans are robots? Can technology experience love like humans do? (These are just a bunch of preliminary questions swirling around my head, nothing concrete yet)

(I may switch out/add one or two sources such as Steve Johnson’s “The Myth of the Ant Queen” or Oliver Sacks’ “Mind’s Eye”)

Chorost, Michael. Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.

(Cited in Alone Together) This book is a memoir of sorts, retelling a person’s experience after losing his hearing forcing him to receive implants, and his struggle to live normally afterwards. Obviously, I haven’t read through the entire book, but the book could serve as a good tool to show how blurred the lines between technology and biology are.

David Hanson: Robots That "show Emotion" Perf. David Hanson. TED, Feb. 2009. Web. <https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hanson_robots_that_relate_to_you>.

(Cited in Alone Together) This TED talk is about the advances at the time (early 2009) in robotics and showing emotion on robots. Hanson created a number of robots that could accurately mimic facial expressions and was working to implement artificial intelligence to make use of that hardware. This source could be used to show how robots could be nearly indistinguishable from humans in appearance alone, at least.

Fredrickson, Barbara. Selections from Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become. New Humanities Reader. 5e ed. Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015. 106-28. Print.

This source talks about the biology as well as the psychology of love and some of the scientific research on the emotion, effectively explaining it in scientific and concrete terms. This source could be used to compare the brain and love as an emotion to AI and technology, drawing similarities how they consist of components and concrete processes.

Gilbert, Daniel. "Immune to Reality." New Humanities Reader. 5e ed. Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015. 129-47. Print.

This source shows how sometimes people subconsciously misunderstand how much they enjoy or dislike something based on pre-existing notions. This source has a lot of statistics and comes to a number of conclusions on behavioral psychology and could prove useful in proving a point.

Turkle, Sherry. "Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other." New Humanities Reader. 5e ed. Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015. 458-85. Print.

This source explains how some robots can appear to be alive and how children especially can become emotionally attached to these robots. This source gives examples of how technology is becoming increasingly intelligent. It could also be used to show how thin the line between robotic “intelligence” and actual human emotions are.