Category: Science & Technology
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Blade Runner 2049: Android Liberation Between Old and New Informatic Power
Blade Runner 2049 is a brilliant sequel to the original Blade Runner. Thirty years after the events of the narrative of the first film, the police discover evidence of the secret that Rachael, who was a replicant or android, became pregnant and gave birth in a “natural” fertility process to a child. Rachael died while…
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The “Science Fiction World” of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik
The novel Ubik is generally regarded as being Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece. In this major literary work of 1969, the struggle to occupy an “outside” relative to the “inside” of a cybernetic-economic-technological-virtual system is poignantly illustrated. It is a scenario where the “science fiction world” becomes everything, leaving the “safe confines” of a clearly defined…
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Brain-Computer Interface
The digital-neurological or Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is another key science fiction and “real” technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. BCIs can be interpreted as a “becoming cyborg” of humanity. One can distinguish between mainstream versus alternative/transformative designs and implementations of the user applications to be based on BCI – the command-and-control cyborg versus the feminist-theory…
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The Zeroth Law of Robotics and the Robot Unconscious
The suspenseful story of the film I, Robot depends on the energy and complexity of the zeroth law of robotics – added as an even higher ethical priority than the first three laws by Asimov in 1950 in the short story “The Evitable Conflict.” The zeroth law then became a permanent fixture in Asimov’s science…
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I, Robot and the Moral Dilemmas of the Three Laws of Robotics
One of the contemporary developments with which Hayles is concerned is the techno-scientific project that has attracted widespread attention of building robots which, thanks to their Artificial Intelligence, will behave and operate in imitation of humans, yet, in all probability, will not have human-like consciousness. In her most recent work (“The Ethics of Robot Subjectivity”),…
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Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro
Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro Influenced by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s core Critical Theory text Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s epic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, I believe that we have come to the end of the…
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids, by Alan N. Shapiro
I just returned from Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. This is a comment about the talk about androids given by Hiroshi Ishiguro during the “Science & Art I” conference at the Lentos Kunstmuseum during THE BIG PICTURE symposium. Professor Ishiguro’s talk was very interesting and enjoyable. However, I think that he makes one important conceptual mistake…
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The Car of the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro and Alan Cholodenko
co-author: Alan Cholodenko In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about “the car of the future.” He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept. This text was written as an accompaniment to that…
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From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)
Gianna Maria Gatti: (translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro) The digital images of flowers, fields, and gardens created by Pietro Mussini at the computer do not constitute the work in itself, but rather a moment of passage, useful for re-elaborating nature according to different solutions, studying forms and expressive combinations of nature’s sounds…
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Eduardo Kac: Living Works, by Claudio Cravero
Eduardo Kac LIVING WORKS June 10th – September 25th, 2011 The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the controversial figure of Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962; he lives in Chicago). His research explores the frontiers between man, animal and robot, culminating in Transgenic Art, through which living beings become a single entity with the technological.…
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Questioning Steven Hawking’s Scientific Discourse, by Marc Silver and Simon Schaffer
Most of this text is an interview-conversation between Professor Marc Silver of the University of Modena and Professor Simon Schaffer of Cambridge University that took place in Cambridge, UK in November 1995. It was originally published in Marc Silver’s book Arguing the Case: Language and Play in Argumentation.
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Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro
Does Star Trek’s worldview coincide with the unbridled high-tech enthusiasm of recent years? Or is there a tension between the show’s originality and the Borg-like assimilation of its creativity by the Star Trek industry? Focusing on the stories themselves, the author reveals the basic principles behind Star Trek that contest the ideology of mainstream technoscience.