robotic imagery is a mass phenomenon pervasive and elusive, but some time it is now also the main code for the recognition of so-called cyborgian society. This new social group, characterized by a global reach and a complex relational dynamic, based on the prevalence of weak ties, has selected the image of the robot as its natural projective representation. However, when the image is transformed into a symbol, when it does not suggest more than just automatic reactions, such as terror, attraction, of wonder, as do the tribal masks, but instead becomes the key to a metaphorical process without limits We are certainly in the presence of a whole cultural universe in the making.
is not the first time this has happened, but it is the first in which the transit of a mimetic reproduction phenomenon is the development of the symbol, and icon, able to summarize a collective psychic projection takes place by means of something that simply does not exist in nature: a prohibendi imago.
Yet, this same image has little to do with the technology of robots. In fact, the robot is certainly much better known really known. It creates expectations and anxiety, often completely unrelated to the innovations introduced fact.
We are in the presence of a collective phenomenon of contagion, and a summary of the review although its origins may perhaps guide us in an area not easy to estimate.
We actually used in the demonstrations collective contagion. We suffer daily rations every time we come into contact with the universe of goods. But instinctively, we know that the symbols and referents of this enormous set of expectations and desires contagious and most often led by highly diversified global systems, structure and organization: precisely high -oriented, for example, fashion, ' Art System, the video game industry, automobiles or the cinema. These worlds, which they erect their fortunes on the manipulation of the imagination, but using, primarily, a community based on one-many relation.
Here the first difference: the imaginary robot is in fact mainly self-oriented as an extreme form is held by a conceptualization of human faculties. The increasing attention to the robotics course also derives from its striking practical consequences, but in terms of training of the imagination this is not conclusive. Running the query "robotic" on Google, it reported more than eleven million sites. How many scientific? YouTube videos about robots are among the most popular. Why?
Even the mainstream press suffers infection. In recent years, articles, books and periodicals devoted to the subject are remarkably increased, even in Italy (eg the baby two months 'IF'). Not to mention the cinema, which offers products as diverse, from Wall.E of the new Disney Terminator, Transformers of the series, which beyond the banal script is perhaps the best visual metaphor for the new symbiosis between men and machines. And then decades of Japanese industry anime and manga exports thousands of robotic characters. Rock and pop music star, adored by cyborgian generation, ride the tiger robotics. For example, Björk, or Tokio Hotel, who called their last album Humanoid , offering a profusion of robots in the video. This powerful
proliferation indicates that the communication system behaves as a kind of psychic seismograph that records (and amplifying) a real change of state: the acquisition of a new condition of experience. For her, not the man but the machine becomes the model, the archetype, the habitat, humus and nourishment. This transit was preceded by at least three phases, recognizable in the works of writers and artists, but much less in the inventions and scientific theories.
It is believed that the stunning series of androids or zoomorphic mechanisms are lost in the mists of time and there is an author who does not feel obliged to reconnect to the more contemporary imagery remote antiquity. But things is not the case. Only starting with readily identifiable era begins ideally to 'humanize', and to the end, that is artificial. In fact, before then, both in myth and in literature the theme of man (or animal) involved the artificial deception: coup de théâtre is always the revelation of the truth, in this case the truth of a desolate barren mechanism.
Even a philosophical one recognizes a shift in perspective in the historical period that we are taking as an ideal watershed. Moshe Idel, in his monumental essay on the Golem (1990), showed that debate on the possibility of creating artificial life can be documented by at least seventeen hundred years, meaning 'artificial life' only a semblance of free dynamic 'soul': Cartesian distinction that precedes Descartes in esoteric circles. Similarly, he notes that these discussions will end with the approach of the modern age. Thus, the transition from technical to the first real technology (speeches, arguments, rigorous methods that affect the technique) modified the ideal boundary between artifice and nature, opening new self-representations of man. This encouraged the conceptualization progressive 'artificialisation' of human, and the gradual humanization of the artifacts.
also played a role in evolution. 'Evolution' at the bottom means impermanence. If the living emerged under a huge process of transformation and co-evolution, then man must consider himself as a species in progress, and intelligence in progress, due to the cerebralization. But if the faculty so-called 'superior' derived from the selection, why not export this principle to 'species' technology, even assuming an evolution of Lamark mold?
is that writers of various talents were seduced by this new concept. Artificial fantastic characters and artifacts began ontologically uncertain to populate the pages. During the nineteenth century were born of slave machines Samuel Butler, the robots rebel Fitz James O'Brien, the ETA Hoffmann's Olympia, the mechanical dancer Jerome K. Jerome, locomotives and cars humanized by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Pinocchio of Collodi, the metal and electrical supermale of Alfred Jarry's ineffable Hadaly Villiers de L'Isle-Adam: andreide - the latter - just infinitely disturbing Because of its perfection. Hadaly Why is the 'mother' of the nineteenth century all subsequent progeny of sensitive and intelligent robots.
This projection is still in the balance between the territories of magic and those of science. The authors in the nineteenth century that is engaged with these new entities are parahumans finest writers, but little or privy in the hard sciences. Who washes the other hand, those who have any ideas, is content to describe mechanisms fabulous but not frightening, such as the odd elephant-engine-robot by Jules Verne. Nothing comparable in strength and depth to the rational nightmares, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that robot is only partly because of lightning animated by electricity, while remaining a macabre assemblage of bodies of uncertain origin. Yet, it was the first even bizarre image of what is between the living el'inanimato, awakened the inert technology: if not a Electro-articulated, at least something similar, because it was built in the laboratory.
This is actually the other great tradition of ' imagerie robotics, which matures with the robot, Josef and Karel Čapek, and then grow and multiply, for example, assuming the appearance of humans in robotic machines Anxiety Ruggero Vasari, Surrogates by Philip K. Dick, of the neoroidi Shinzoningen Casshern Hiroshi Susagawa.
However, since the early twentieth century opens the second phase of the iconography robotics. Of course, electronic computers are still to come, but the logical and mathematical foundations have made great strides. And then the electricity goes with the mail that gets results. Engineers and Scientists dream robot that prefigure the current and you notice that psychologists think fast, for example, cognitive Edward C. Tolman, who investigate the way in which high-level factors such as motivation, knowledge and intentions are embedded and sensory responses to stimuli, arrived at a model that actually predated the current robotic architectures that try to play intelligent behaviors.
The new climate is reflected in the literature of science fiction, and this in turn make assumptions and pitfalls, not least because the literary inventions not need to show trials. There is however a fact revolutionary scientists, engineers and technology experts are beginning to practice in the areas of science fiction first-person. For example, Hugo Gernsback, electronics expert, was also the first major publisher like that. But the most famous is Isaac Asimov, the robot who devoted more than half of his vast production. One peculiarity - that of the scientist-writers - that is perpetuated in the post-war think astrophysics Fred Hoyle, co-author of A for Andromeda , whose protagonist is a gineide genetically human but a computer built by alien origin, so it is protoplasmic a robot. Quoting the Italians think of Roberto Vacca engineer and author of novels about robots, or Primo Levi, chief writer, but also chemical and author of several stories about androids, less known but no less interesting than the rest of his production.
In this second phase, recognizing the critical exercise science. The new breed of robot is no longer just a projection visionary, and is not static. Instead, the writers often useful practice thought experiments, which require non-trivial notions of reverse engineering. Probably a 'positronic brain' will never be invented, but reading it is clear that Asimov was already thinking about neural networks. We sense that intelligent machines could emerge and interacting although by different evolutionary strategies converge. Robots and humans get to share (in science fiction, but also in reality) the same Umwelt, not without conflicts. Indeed, one can say that the mother of all roboethics been gained in this intellectual climate. Not be explained otherwise asimoviane three laws of robotics, the more the fourth (the universal law zero), if they had not been assessed in a nutshell legal issues, and ethics, as to the limits, prohibitions and concessions resulting from the interactions between men robots.
Similarly, since the '20s is projected catastrophes embodied in new monsters, but not created by the sleep of reason, but by same reason. The robot killers Čapek is the brainchild of Dr. Rossum (or, in Czech, Dr. 'Reason'). We are witnessing the birth of a nightmare with open eyes that captivate the crowds. We talk about the frightening vision of the man-eating robot, the robot cannibal: the humanoid to the Terminator, who not only want to destroy its creator, but that goes beyond the threshold of the extreme taboo, physically engulfing the human race. This is what happens in the celebrated (wrongly) of The Matrix trilogy, which sacked a vast existing literature.
tremor, fear, ecstasy and even unheard of, they resort to these extreme productions of the collective unconscious, but it should be added that the great fortune of the robotic iconography hides the fact that it does not progress for years more. Why? Meanwhile
a consideration: there is a close relation between the imaginary and the modern robotic connectivity. This is clear in the contemporary literature on the phenomena of social contagion. For example, psychologist Susan Blackmore, in his famous book dealing with the theme of 'memetics' (the discipline that studies the replication of 'memes', that is, the memory unit), of course goes to the areas of connectivity Internet users, but stops before the bewildered robotics. In fact, the robot is an unsolvable enigma 'memetic'. If it is true that any system of communication requires some form of connection, it is also true that in the future robots could break free from any human connection and launched a radical discontinuity. I imagine more than half a century ago, John von Neumann. Why do we not?
In fact, the last chapter of the tale robotics insists on its radical discontinuity. For example, IA Spielberg speaks of unbridgeable differences and temporal finis. So Eden Iroko Endo, or even Blame! and Noise by Tsutomu NIHE. What happened? The Web has in some sense 'removing the word' scientist-writers. Not that the former can not speak, but the fact is that under conditions of equality, ie starting from the same battery type informational, in this case provided by connecting the voice of the few end up being overwhelmed by a great many of. In fact, the immediacy, the pervasiveness and the ubiquity of online communication known cause resonance.
However, something must be said of the medium itself. In fact, the interface changes and to some extent 'plasma' is the message that the issuer or the receiver of the message. Yet the image of the robot well sums up the kind of apperception in a dominant global civilization connected, since the general medium in this case is ultimately reducible to the union between electricity Boolean algebra. In short, the condition is a connective 'robot-world', and is therefore a medium-robot. How surprising, then, the emergence of a subject-object that integrates into a single image of a gigantic process psychodynamic identification?
(collective work published in the book for the event "... and create the robot in both image and likeness", in progress at the Science City of Naples)
0 comments:
Post a Comment