This chapter explores the ways in which Google, Apple, and other corporations have turned the development of cultural algorithms into epistemological quests for both self-knowledge and universal knowledge. This effort to construct a new framework for reality has its roots in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a keystone of the European Enlightenment. Apple’s intelligent assistant Siri, Spike Jonze’s film Her, and Google’s ambition to realize the Star Trek computer serve as exemplars for the algorithmic pursuit of knowledge. These quests are both romantic and rational, seeking a transcendent state of knowing, a state that can be reached only with mechanisms that ultimately eclipse the human. Through their ambitions to develop algorithms that can “answer, converse, and anticipate” with ever-greater intimacy, the technology titans shaping our algorithmic future are constructing a new epistemological framework of what is knowable and desirable: an intellectual hierarchy of needs that will ultimately map out not only the public sphere of information but the interior space of human identity.
Development of an Intelligent Assistant Robot based on Embedded RTOS
