Living machines in our cultural imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Public perceptions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—both positive and negative—are hopelessly misinformed, based far too much on science fiction rather than science fact. However, these fictions can be instructive, and reveal to us important anxieties that exist in the public imagination, both towards robots and AI and about the human condition more generally. These anxieties are based on little-understood processes (such as anthropomorphization and projection), but cannot be dismissed merely as inaccuracies in need of correction. Our demonization of robots and AI illustrate two-hundred-year-old fears about the consequences of the Enlightenment and industrialization. Idealistic hopes projected onto robots and AI, in contrast, reveal other anxieties, about our mortality—and the transhumanist desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies—and about the future of our species. This chapter reviews these issues and considers some of their broader implications for our future lives with living machines.

scholarly journals A vueltas con el Transhumanismo: cuestiones de futuro imperfecto | Dealing with Transhumanism: Issues about the Future Imperfect

2019 ◽  
pp. 45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Campione
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Empirical Assumption ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Future ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The Human Condition

Resumen: El Transhumanismo es una perspectiva que aboga por la posibilidad de mejorar la condición humana física, emocional y cognitiva utilizando el progreso y la tecnología. Las cuestiones que plantea requieren asumir dos premisas, una normativa y otra empírica: la primera es que la formación para el uso de las tecnologías requiere una educación ética y jurídica, además de científica. La segunda implica que en un futuro próximo habrá robots muy sofisticados y dotados de inteligencia artificial avanzada que podrán tomar decisiones operativas, así que ¿cómo regular estas capacidades? Las aplicaciones en el ámbito sanitario muestran los términos del trilema normativo relativo a la distinción conceptual entre “terapia”, “mejora” y “superación” de la condición humana. Abstract: Transhumanism stands up for the physical, emotional and cognitive human enhancement by progress and technology. The issues in question involve both a normative and an empirical assumption: the first one undertakes that the use of new technologies demands not only a scientific approach but also an ethical and legal one. The second means that in the near future advanced robots with artificial intelligence will make working decisions. So, how shall we have to rule those abilities? Many health implementations show the normative trilemma posed by the conceptual difference between therapy, enhancement and going beyond the human condition.

Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Augmentation ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter introduces the “Perspectives” section of the Handbook of Living Machines offering an overview of the different contributions gathered here that consider how biomimetic and biohybrid systems will transform our personal lives and social organizations, and how we might respond to the challenges that these transformations will inevitably pose to our ‘posthuman’ worlds. The authors in this section see it as essential that those who aspire to create living machines engage with the public to confront misconceptions, deep anxieties, and unrealistic aspirations that presently dominate the cultural imagination, and to include potential users in questions of design and utility as new technologies are being developed. Human augmentation and enhancement are other important themes addressed, raising important questions about what it means fundamentally to be ‘human’. These questions and challenges are addressed through the lens of the social and personal impacts of new technologies on human selves, the public imagination, ethics, and human relationships.

Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098111
Author(s):  
Silvia Julia Caporale-Bizzini
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
The Public ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Human Condition

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

On Hearing the Daughters’ Call

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-155
Author(s):  
Elva Orozco Mendoza ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Maternal Activism ◽  
The Human Condition

This article offers an interpretation of anti-feminicide maternal activism as political in northern Mexico by analyzing it alongside Hannah Arendt’s concepts of freedom, natality, and the child in The Human Condition. While feminist theorists often debate whether maternalism strengthens or undermines women’s political participation, the author offers an unconventional interpretation of Arendt’s categories to illustrate that the meaning and practice of maternalism radically changes through the public performance of motherhood. While Arendt does not seem the best candidate to navigate this debate, her concepts of freedom and the child provide a productive perspective to rethink the relationship between maternalism and citizenship. In making this claim, this article challenges feminist political theories that depict motherhood as the chief source of women’s subordination. In the case of northern Mexico, anti-feminicide maternal activism illustrates how the political is also a personal endeavor, thereby complementing the famous feminist motto.

scholarly journals Me, My Bot and His Other (Robot) Woman? Keeping Your Robot Satisfied in the Age of Artificial Emotion

Robotics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rousi
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Sexual Partners ◽  
Sex Robots ◽  
Artificial Emotions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Robotics

With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate and sexual interactions, without the need to consider the other’s (the robot’s) emotions and indeed preference of sexual partners. Yet, with rapid advancements in information technology and robotics, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence and indeed, artificial emotions, there almost seems the likelihood, that sometime in the future, robots too, may love others in return. Who those others are-whether human or robot-is to be speculated. As with the laws of emotion, and particularly that of the cognitive-emotional theory on Appraisal, a reality in which robots experience their own emotions, may not be as rosy as would be expected.

The Time Machine; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-535
Author(s):  
Robert M. Philmus
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Active Audience ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

Most of the early science fantasies of H. G. Wells are, as he defines the term, prophetic: the myths that they develop to a logical conclusion represent a critique of some historical or essential aspect of the human condition. The Time Machine, his first scientific romance, explores the premises of prophetic fantasy at the same time that it embodies a myth of its own. In it Wells envisions the future devolution of man, already outlined in previous essays of his, as the ultimate consequence of what he perceived as a present attitude of complacent optimism, an attitude he dramatizes in the reaction of the Active audience to the Time Traveller's account of the world of 802,701 and beyond. Although the Time Traveller accepts this vision as literally true, his own theories about that world make it clear that its significance pertains to it only as a metaphoric projection of tendencies existing in the present. Thus the structure of The Time Machine reveals the Time Traveller's point of view, like that of his audience, to be limited: his final disappearance into the fantasied world of the future vindicates the rigorous integrity of Wells s prophecy.

An Answer to a Question that Cannot Be Answered: A Pragmatist Approach to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s Theoretical Perspectives on Humor

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jarno Hietalahti
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Future ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article offers a pragmatist approach to concentration camp humor, in particular, to Viktor Frankl’s and Primo Levi’s conceptualizations of humor. They both show how humor does not vanish even in the worst imaginable circumstances. Despite this similarity, it will be argued that their intellectual positions on humor differ significantly. The main difference between the two authors is that according to Frankl, humor is elevating in the middle of suffering, and according to Levi, humor expresses the absurdity of the idea of concentration camps, but this is not necessarily a noble reaction. Through a critical synthesis based on pragmatist philosophy, it will be claimed that humor in concentration camps expresses the human condition in the entirely twisted situation. This phenomenon cannot be understood without considering forms of life, how drastic the changes from the past were, and what people expected from the future, if anything.

Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons

Public Things ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Honig
Keyword(s):  
Shared Memory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Shared Space ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Lincoln Memorial ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
The Human Condition

This epilogue compares the public things model with that of two others, the commons (or undercommons) and shared space. It argues that while all three models respond to the democratic need, public things have their own specific and necessary contribution to make. The Lincoln Memorial is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt has in mind as the basis of shared memory and action in The Human Condition. The commons model identifies the losses caused by dispossession, appropriation, and accumulation, and public things may well look like one more enclosure in a very long line of them. This epilogue discusses the contributions that all three models can make to the project of preventing ever-increasing privatization and promoting justice and equality in contemporary democratic societies.

The Use of Big Data in Marketing Analytics

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Chai-Lee Goi
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Business Intelligence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Marketing Analytics ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Data Architecture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination

Big data has broken through the public imagination, has revolutionised the process through which business find innovative ways, and has transformed the data into valuable information that will shape business intelligence and gain business insights to make better decisions. The purpose of this study is to review the development of big data, architecture, and the use of big data in marketing analytics. From the analysis of literature reviews, a big data in marketing analytics model has been proposed. In using big data in marketing, marketers need balanced analytics and then identify opportunities for improvement based on reporting or analysing past and present big data to predict and influence the future.

Robots and the Future of Retribution

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-101
Author(s):  
John Danaher
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter studies the future of retribution and, in particular, the role that robots will play in shaping that future. It begins by describing the Bouphonia ritual, which speaks to two important features of the human condition: the enduring significance of practices of blame and punishment in human life, and the occasional absurdity of this desire. What happens when robots — or other sophisticated artificially intelligent (AI) machines — get embedded in our societies and have a part to play in criminal acts? Should they, like the knife in the Bouphonia ritual, be blamed for their contribution? Or should something else happen, something a little more radical? The chapter makes the case for radicalism. In particular, it suggests that the rise of the robots should lead us to reconsider the wisdom of our traditional practices of punishment and blame.

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