Throughout Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, he emphasizes on the importance of freedom as a vital human value. To Rousseau, the idea of progressing in science and arts is detrimental to human morals. The idea of expanding one’s knowledge is seen as selfish, as Rousseau believes that humans try to attain more due to the popular enlightenment idea of amore prop. This idea illustrated that the idea to be better than others was the most desirable to humans, and with this came fame and glory for expanding one’s knowledge. Rousseau criticized this severely as he mentioned that humans should expand their knowledge due to amore de seau, which emphasized the self celebration and recognition for achieving tasks. Although Rousseau does prove that knowledge should be an intrinsically motivating subject, he completely condemns the extrinsically motivating factors that could come through achievement of accolades. This does play an importance to some degree in wanting to achieve more, but to me, this is not practical in terms of the desires of humans. I do believe that there needs to be a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic factors that motivate humans in their endeavors. Rousseau, a man that has been achieved with several awards and is even earning an accolade for the piece in which he is advocating for the condemnation of awards. This action shows the irony of this piece and highlights that even Rousseau believes that he deserves the distinction for his action.
A similar stance that Rousseau takes in his philosophy can be witnessed in the development of artificial intelligence today. Due to rapid expansion of knowledge on this certain topic, there has been a profound discoveries that question the future existence of human morals. The concepts of hard work, passion, and self recognition have been replaced by the power-driven idea of attaining enough knowledge to completely disregard these morals in order to advance scientifically. A specific example of this is seen through the decisions taken by the video game company of Ingress Prime. This company is planning to incentivize the decision for current players to train 2 artificial intelligence “players”, ADA and JARVIS in order to expand the wide realm of Artificial Intelligence. By doing this, Ingress is hoping to blur the distinction between playing between actual humans and pseudo-humans that can perform potentially better than actual humans. This is not the first time that Ingress has decided to pursue these interests in enhancing the environment of the video game, and has created a slight distinction between science fiction and reality.
This environment created by Ingress Prime would be highly distasteful to Rousseau. The fact that knowledge has grown to an extent that is obliterating the human race, including its morals is absolutely insane. The rate at which the growth is occurring is frightening to ponder about, and Rousseau thought about it all the way back in the 1750s.
Works Cited:
- Houser, Kristin. “Scientists Invent an Eye Patch Covered in Drug-Delivering Needles.” Futurism, Futurism, 15 Nov. 2018, futurism.com/eye-patch-needles.
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