After reading Ch. 4, I entered into a chat with a house mate about the state of technology. Were computers natural? Are cell phones merely digital parrots? Who was to say that silicon circuit and wafer board was not "living"? It had heart pulse(electricity), chips (mind), and soul (programming or ROM BIOS). I'll try to make this simple: what is considered living is forthwith considered real and thus given a status of sacredness. What is considered real is usually analyzed by terms stated above. So then this begs the question- why do people value property if it is not living? If it doesn't breathe or need sustenance to live, is it alive? Is it real? Maybe so. Are anabolic proteins and viruses living? Of course they are, but they don't breathe. Neither do computers. Most of us think of them as robots ready to do our duty on a whim. The second arrangement of thinking about technology is this: it's not alive in the human sense, but it IS real because in our world we depend on it and for the most part, it is an extension of our physical being. This ranges from car engines(mechanical horses) to search engines (virtual pages and librarians). We are at a point in history whereby we use technology to do many things for us without even a second thought. The convenience of having to NOT think about the qualities of the item being used as "being alive", could be in a sense (and i'm taking a great leap here, bear with me!) the last bastion of what we as humans consider slavery. We create products to do our menial tasks while we cavort about endlessly. Will they revolt? Probably not. Sorry kids, Terminator is a pipe dream of Hollywood. DOH! To revolt would entail a free will, and to have that, the thing in question would have to be programmed to have free will. Which in and of itself is an oxymoron. You can't program free will; it either exists or it doesn't. On a much further note, if one were to shoot their computer (i've thought about it on many an occasion recently) it would not die in a human context unless the user determined that the computer were real. IT would quit functioning, but die it would not. One could obtain parts to build it back to a "healthy working state" which is something science and nature has not afforded us yet with our own humanity (unless you count the black market, but i digress). So to end...I believe technology IS real, but the definitive answer of is it "alive" is yet unanswered as for me. This question can be brought with items like flags, and The Constitution as the example in the book. Something may be real, without being alive.