English Composition II (Term Paper Sample)

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English Composition II
In his article on “Programmed for love”, Jeffrey R. Young tries to show the dangers of too much social technology. In this article, he says that in the same way human beings gaze at each other before initiating liking and love, robots also have the ability to like someone back if one gazed at them romantically. This is a theory he supports by giving experiences of Sherry Turkle a professor who studies the effects of technology on society (Young).
In the article, Sherry is said to have come across a robot named Cog with extraordinary behavior. It had the ability to turn and face whoever was speaking in its vicinity. This scenario made Turkle to start treating Cog like any other human being. She confesses to have had the desire to interact more with Cog than the staff members around for the day. The liking for Cog grew vehemently inside her that she describes the whole scenario like a high school crush (Young).
From that day onwards, she studied about these type of emerging robots for 15 years and discovered that they had a negative impact on human life (Young). She argues that these breed of sociable robots had seduction in the way they operated and can cause negative effects to human life if better ones were produced in future. She says that she visualizes a future society where robots could take on human work and duty which she said will not be healthy for the society. She foresees such work as baby sitting, taking care of the old and the disabled, nursing work and building cars being given up to robots. She argues that use of robots is not good because robots promise an emotional connection to human beings and it is something they cannot deliver (Young).
Jeffrey clearly shows the effects of technology in the human society by use of rhetoric questions and examples. At the start of the article, the writer effectively gets the reader’s attention by slowly introducing an imagination which makes the reader eager to know more about how robots can make one fall in love with them (Young). The writer gives the robots the ability to like someone back when looked at and this elicits curiosity in the reader. After explaining the advantages and disadvantages of robots, the author brings up rhetoric questions to ask on who will be comfortable to be handled by robots rather than human beings. This clearly gives the impression that being handled by a robot is unethical and not good in the society. With this, the author successfully convinces the reader that extensive use of robots in the society is not good (Young).
The writer also successfully uses enough examples to convince the reader of the disadvantages associated with the use of robots. He cites Kismet as a robot which caused a child to feel neglected after trying to play with it and it did not respond (Young). This clearly showed that robots cannot reciprocate friendship and should thus not be used as baby sitters for children as children will not learn to be interactive and friendly to others. Another example is cited of a 17 years old boy who complained of his father not remembering anything after a conversation mainly because he taps on his blackberry phone every moment (Young). Turkle also complains that use of machines makes it possible for excess people to conduct one per unit time. An example is cited of his laptop which was receiving around 30 emails per minute. This is a rate that she cannot cope up with and most of the messages may end up not being read or she can spend the whole day reading and replying to messages. Turkle’s daughter also is used as an example in the article and portrays the best practice of not using one’s phone when in a conversation with someone. Use of a phone during a conversation causes confusion and lack of concentration. This then results into the audience forgetting what has been said during the conversation (Young).
The writer also uses debate between two antagonists on the matter of use of robots and clearly shows the advantages and disadvantages of robots (Young). The author uses David Levy who wrote the book Love and sex with robots and Turkle to bring up a discussion to show the advantages and disadvantages of robots in the society. In the debate, David boasts of having offered a way of survival to a young boy who was tired of relationships due to habits of cheating and unreliability. Turkle retaliates to this offer by asking which kind of people will be offered robots for romance purposes. This question troubles David such that he does not give an answer to it. He says that it is an ethical question and only needs ethicists to answer. With this, it is evident that even David knows that it is not ethical to use robots for romance purposes. It is a dehumanizing act and needs to be prevented in all ways (Young).
In connection to this, another article that is close in context to Jeffrey’s is The love machine by David Diamond (Diamond). This is an article that also has extensive use of rhetoric questions from the start of the article for the purpose of getting the reader’s attention and interest in the article. Diamond starts off the article with a hanging comment which definitely requires further explanation in order to satisfy the reader. Use of this will then compel the reader to read further and find out the exact thing that happened (Diamond).
In the article, David discusses of a robot called Laura designed for the purpose of training people in doing exercises. Laura as a machine proves to be very interactive and caring to the trainees and even shows facial changes when in sorrow or happiness (Diamond). The writer develops an interactive session with the robot and even reaches a point where the robot tells the author that she will also miss him after he said that he will miss him. This then brings a controvers...