Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 48 (Hubert L. Dreyfus)

"Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet" (1999)

Background information:

• professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
• interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence 
• educated at Harvard and considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger
• authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do
• has a reputation as a Luddite, but he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research is fatally flawed. He argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. 

Reading response:
Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's notion of the dangers and opportunities of the Press to critiques the Internet. He asks, "What contribution can the World Wide Web make to educators?"

In answering this question, Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's 3 stages--aesthetic, ethical, and religious--to show that only the aesthetic and ethical are possible with information technology, and that the religious is undermined.

He gives several attributes shared between the Press and the Web:

• both level all qualitative disctinctions (all text is equal)
• both create the Public and an absence of responsibility
• both provide anonymity and no risks, which is why we are attracted to them

Dreyfus suggests that the most important commitments in our lives are those that are unconditional--and he gives the following list: politics, religion, love, law (!), and music--because there's risk and loss/grief in losing these things. He asks what role information technology can play in encouraging/supporting unconditional commitments, and concludes that while IT does not prohibit them, it does inhibit them.

I was following along with all of the points of the article, until this last. Dreyfus lost me just before his conclusion, when he states, and I paraphrase:

If Kierkegaard is right, for the cyber-world to avoid despair, it would have to find a way to cancel its risk-free attraction by supporting and encouraging unconditional commitments and strong identities in the real world where risk and disappointment are inevitable. (583)


He goes on to insist that "education at its best must be based on apprenticeship" and that "one can only learn by imitation of the style" of a master. While I recognize the value of learning from mentors, I don't agree with this entirely. What about hackers? What about successful distance education? Aren't these risky and unconditional passions? Or are these the very things Dreyfus means?

I doubt it, given his last sentence: "As far as I can see," [which is a telling statement in itself, I think], "learning by apprenticeship can work only in the nearness of the classroom and laboratory; never in cyberspace." I can't wait to hear some of my classmates refute this! And they will be passionate about it!