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We find the personality of the Macintosh reflected in the AI's of William Gibson's Neuromancer. While Gibson was by far not the first person to give a personality to a computer, he was certainly one of, if not the first, to re-embody his AI's. While they do not inhabit a physical body, per se, (both Wintermute and Neuromancer are registered as "living" in a particular space in the physical world, but actually inhabit the virtual matrix of the 'net), if we fall back again on Hayles and her interpretation of Hubert Dreyfus's arguments on embodiment, we see that both AI's typify the three functions characteristic of embodied learning:
An implication of this embodied learning is that humans know more than they consciously realize that they know, and we see this with both Wintermute and Neuromancer, who both acknowledge that there are things they cannot know, but can contain (Hayles 202, Gibson 261). Hayles also notes that "the openness of the horizon allows for ambiguities and new permutations that cannot be programmed into explicit decision procedures" (202). Again we see this with the AI's, who operate well above, beyond, and outside their specific programming constraints. |
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| While Gibson introduced the term cyberspace in this book, which took off in ways he never imagined, perhaps the most valuable contribution is his concept of the matrix. Originally this started as a type of next-generation internet, three dimensional and capable of environmental interaction with the user. What is actually morphs into, even in the course of his book, is The Matrix - a living organism that is "nowhere, everywhere, ...the sum total of the works, the whole show (Gibson 269-270).
In the world of Neuromancer, humans are no longer augmenting their own intelligence with computers, computers are augmenting their intelligence with humans. |
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