Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This course aims to enable the students to understand the development of science fiction as one of literary genres and to appreciate its major works. The topics include hard science fiction, romance, horror, detective, extra-terrestrial, extra sensory perception, and so forth.
It seems that Asimov foresees that far in the future, the same thing will happen if human does advancement in technology but at the same time put aside humanity. People always seek for the purpose of their existence, so do those clever robots in Asimov's Reason. The robots' intelligence backfired, resulted in rebellious robots toward their own creator. Someday, it may happen to us unless humans begin to think of technology and humanity as two different sides of a coin that cannot be separated from each other. It is the same as Doctor Faustus as his thirst of knowledge doesn't come along with wisdom so that he ends up die and it is far too late to repent.
ReplyDeleteHOwever, it should also be noted that in the end, Cutie manages to resolve the problem by itself without the aid of any human's supervisions under its own deluded comprehension that it is serving a higher being (not humans). Can it be said that technology is not always perfect or faultless in its mechanism but it is still useful to humankind nonetheless? In the story, Cutie saves the earth despite not being aware of its huge accomplishment and the fact that it is saving humankind who it scorns and mocks at repeatedly.
ReplyDeletereason by asimov is a very interesting story, tells us about the dangerous of knowledge. human use knowledge in order to help themselves,but if knowledge have been used to resolve something that actually irrational and related to our faith it will turn to be dangerous. cutie in the story is a very sophisticated robot, made to help the 2 scientists to do their jobs but later with its ability to reasoning it starts to rebel against the creator. it's something that may happen to us as human, when we start to questioning or even worse reasoning our creator (God)
ReplyDeleteI guess those three laws by Asimov have made Cutie starting to asking about his existence. In the first law, we can conclude that actually robot may not harm human being. As a robot with its own 'brain', Cutie has beginning to think who is human and why their position is 'above' his position? Thus, it can lead to disobeying the second law, since the first law isn't appropriate for them anymore. At last in the third law, their existence could be in harm because the human being is jeopardizing their existence.
ReplyDeleteAt last, I'm very interested with the mystery about who is 'the Master' that Cutie has been talking about in the story could it be Asimov himself as he is the writer of the story, or could be God since He is almighty,and He could do whatever He wants to the human kind. That is why we as a human being, we should know who is our creator, and not become just some other Decartes' robots.
@ Endry: For the sake of technology, human cannot sacrifice the humanity in humanbeings. To some extent I agree that technology and human cannot be separated but again technology is created for the welfare of human beings.
ReplyDelete@Fellysia: Isn't that true that technology (in this case Cutie) is created to maintain, to help or even to save human?
@ Juanta: When talking about symbolism, yes I agree. We cannot question God about our existence.
@Irene: Yes, absolutely agree.