Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gotthard Günther
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
Norbert Wiener ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
New Look

When Günther's book first appeared in 1957, cybernetics was considered the universal science of the future. It had been discovered that basically vacuum cleaners and states work according to the same principles. Günther was not only a philosopher, versed in German Idealism and logic, but also a fan of science fiction literature. This enabled him to fully grasp the importance of this new way of thinking, with Norbert Wiener as its foremost proponent. The book "Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen" (The Consciousness of Machines) is probably the first philosophical work in the wake of Wiener's fundamental texts to locate and interpret cybernetics in the widest possible context of Western metaphysics. For Günther – as, incidentally, for his antipode Martin Heidegger – it was clear that cybernetics was destined to eventually change humanity. Unlike Heidegger, however, Günther enthusiastically welcomed this change, though he was cautious about the possibility of self-aware machines. Since this prognosis of a profoundly universal technological revolution, brought about especially by the computer, has been confirmed, and because, moreover, an even more far-reaching change of the world by robots is already underway, a new look at Günther's work may remind us of a discussion whose significance we can perhaps only now adequately assess.

scholarly journals Good and bad luck of a computer project

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgii Gennadyevich Malinetskii
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
Norbert Wiener ◽  
Joint Actions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Huge Impact ◽  
Current Point ◽  
Social Project

A computer project in the world and in Russia is now usually viewed as an economic, technological or military one. At the same time, it is a global social project. From the theory of the humanitarian and technological revolution, it follows that at the current point of bifurcation, its results can determine the path of humanity to the future. I show that the results of this project reflect the readiness of civilizations for socio-technological change. The COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be a test for social imperatives and had a huge impact on computer reality in the formation of a new sociality. Book by K. Schwab, T. Mallerert “COVID-19: The great reset” represents a variant of such sociality. The analysis presented in this work shows the unacceptability of the proposed changes for the world of Russia. A study of large-scale computer projects in Russia and Belarus shows the need to bring them to a new sociocultural level, much higher than the current one. The unsuccessful experience of mass e-education in the Union State confirmed the imperative of Norbert Wiener: “Render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s”. This should, apparently, be a reasonable line of behavior in organizing joint actions of people and machines.

Modernist Alternatives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the dark themes and moods that characterize some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, a reflection of his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. Bradbury never developed a postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in his failed novels. This chapter discusses “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and several of Bradbury's tales, written in the 1946–1948 period, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of the period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. It also considers the relationship stories that eased Bradbury through his impasse with Modernist themes.

scholarly journals Transfiguracja – Piękna złośnica Jacques’a Rivette’a w świetle mimo-sekularnej myśli o filmie i mediach światłowodowych

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (39) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Janusz Bohdziewicz
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Mutual Respect ◽  
New Creation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Made In

The essay is an interpretation of the film by Jacques Rivette La Belle Noiseuse (1991) within the context of post-secular studies. The sketch is inspired primarily by the writings of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, and it also corresponds with the Bible and biblical studies. The author describes the creative process shown in the film as an act of salvation which occurs between the painter and his model. The hiding of the resulting image is understood here in relation to the passion, cross and burial of Jesus which brings the hope for a liberated life and “the new creation”. The film is made in a very consistent way, which opens up the perspective of crossing the world of images, paintings and classical films (the world of stage), towards the art of mutual respect (the world of interface). Rivette’s work contains a multitude of relevant observations and indications regarding psychology, religion and culture, but it also reveals the possibility of a new way of thinking about film and the media, close to Nancy’s post-metaphysical thought.

The Last Night of the World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
Fahrenheit 451

This chapter reflects on Ray Bradbury's career, describing him as a writer who never really fit the genres he was assigned to. It begins with a discussion of Fahrenheit 451, a novel that illustrates how the ideas in Bradbury's science fiction, often dark and occasionally hopeful, had become cautionary. For Bradbury, the future danger was not technology, but the humans who will control it. The nuclear war that closes both “The Fireman” and Fahrenheit 451 ran parallel to a number of mid-century Bradbury stories, such as “The Last Night of the World” and the last four tales in The Martian Chronicles. This chapter also considers Bradbury's strengths and shortcomings as a creative writer, one who could not resist the temptation of playing the storyteller with details of his own life, but also absolutely true to his public convictions; his desire to be true to his Muse, to write for himself with little regard for outside pressures, has been a constant hallmark of his writing career.

scholarly journals BOOK REVIEW: The Future After Covid: Futurist Expectations For Changes, Challenges, And Opportunities After The Covid-19 Pandemic (Masa Depan Dunia Setelah Covid-19: Perubahan, Tantangan, Dan Peluang Di Berbagai Sektor Kehidupan Pasca Pandemi)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Naufal Priyotomo ◽  
Moses Glorino Rumambo Pandin
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
New Perspective

Nowadays, the world has a pandemic called covid-19 that stalled the world progress in most countries. This book writes about changes in every aspect while this covid-19 is happening and some advice from the writers. Aspects covered are Education, economy and business, healthcare, any activity, and country regulation. It was written to give insight and awareness to people about uncertainity that can unfolds also a futuristic way of thinking. Thus, it aims for giving advice to people that need a new perspective of life while Covid-19 pandemic is happening

scholarly journals The Last Day and Brexit: Delusions of Future Past

Porównania ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Justyna Jajszczok
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ideological Background

The paper aims to show how the traditions of science fiction and, above all, invasion literature provide the ideological background for reading Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day as a novel about Brexit. As it draws on anxious visions of the future, in which the enemy lurks around every corner, and the only salvation is complete isolation from the world, Murray’s work is read here as a Brexit dream come true, in which Britain is once again great, independent and uncontaminated by foreign elements. By evoking the myths that focus only on glory and conveniently “forget” the dark sides of the empire, the novel demonstrates that the fantasies of the past are as distant as the fantasies of the future; the loss of the world that never was is reworked in The Last Day into the loss of ecologically viable planet.

Queer Deviations from the Future on Screen

Old Futures ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 175-212
Author(s):  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Location ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Media And Communication

As part 3 (It’s the Future, but It Looks like the Present: Queer Speculations on Media Time) turns to the cultural and technological reproduction of speculative futures imagined in audiovisual form, chapter 5 focuses on two speculative films whose genealogy in queer screen history is secure yet which rarely appear in canons of science fiction media: Derek Jarman’s 1978 punk dystopia Jubilee and Lizzie Borden’s 1983 lesbian political fantasy Born in Flames. It argues that that the construction of science fiction film as a heteronormative, capitalist genre defined by spectacular special effects obscures the work done by queer speculative independent film. Alternatively, Jarman and Borden project politicized futures into the people and locations of a present whose shifting temporal location refuses progressive teleologies. The films share an intense focus on media and communication even as they offer contrasting strategies for building futures out of a present moment saturated with representations of the end of the world. Jubilee brings the present to light as a dystopian future whose polite public face hides deep-seated violence; Born in Flames shows us how the politics of revolutionary transformation replicate the problems of the untransformed world through the failure to reckon with them.

All Today’s Parties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Fiction Writer

This chapter examines three William Gibson novels: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Gibson had planned Pattern Recognition for a long time: in 1986, he declared that he would “eventually try something else,” and “in twenty years” he would probably be “writing about human relationships.” By shifting from the future to the present, Gibson clearly felt that he was relaunching his career, and hence he logically reverted to the pattern of his first novel. Known as a science fiction writer for decades, Gibson felt an obvious need to justify Pattern Recognition's present-day setting. This chapter considers a number of ways to argue that Pattern Recognition should be classified as science fiction. Spook Country asserts that we live today in a world filled with science-fictional events, but we are unable or unwilling to properly observe them. Zero History suggests that Gibson has entirely distanced himself from the world of computers, the focus of the cyberpunk literature he was once said to represent.

scholarly journals The Future of Extinction: William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Steen Ledet Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Ethical Obligations

In this article, I draw on William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands to think about what François Laruelle has termed a “generic humanity.” This generic humanity broadens and expands our ethical obligations towards those who have not yet been included in humanity. Burroughs’ emphasis in the novel on flattened time, magic, and death as transformation is used to show how we can make Mankind extinct from our way of thinking. Burroughs’ novel is thus an example of a “philo-fiction,” a work of literature that allows us to see the world differently.

scholarly journals The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2021-012199
Author(s):  
Donna McCormack
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Environmental Disasters ◽  
The Past ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Times

With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world. That is, it examines how we may require other ways of thinking bodies as constituted by histories, spaces and times that may be ignored in the biomedical arena. The Tiger Flu, I argue, calls for an intra- and inter-connected way of thinking how we treat bodies, and thereby ways of working with bodies affected by environmental disasters (both acute and ongoing capitalist and colonial projects), multiple selves and time as more than linear. I turn to queercrip as a way of defying a curative imaginary that dominates transplantation and in so doing examine the colonial, capitalist violence of present day living. I move through Eve Hayward’s and Karen Barad’s work to examine how the cut of transplantation is a transformation, as integral to the ongoing experience of having a body in the world and yet potentially unique in its force of bringing inter- and intra-relatedness to the fore of one’s existence. Rather than sick or cured, I argue that transplantation is a transformation that captures our bodily changes, how the environment constitutes the self, how parts may feel integral to the self or easily disposed of, how viscera may tie us to others, and how the future may only be forged through a re-turn to the past (of the donor and a pre-transplant self). Transplantation is not about loss of self or gaining of an other, but rather about rendering apparent our multispecies, multiworld ties, and thus how we are bound by the histories we forge and the futures we re-member.

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