Month: February 2013
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Transforming Computer Science into a Humanities Subject, by Alan N. Shapiro
In his book What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture, Slingerland argues persuasively that the “French theory” which has dominated university humanities studies in recent decades has serious flaws – like disembodiment and cultural relativism – that need to be corrected by infusions from the cognitive and natural sciences.
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Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro
Influenced by Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, Adorno and Horkheimer’s 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 long era of technology being conceived and developed as a tool for the ‘domination of nature’.
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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots, by Alan N. Shapiro
These are my “lecture notes” for my lecture at the Art University in Linz, Austria on June 21, 2011. In the first part, I presented the idea of beginning a multidisciplinary and “humanities informatics” approach to the development of robots-slash-androids, going beyond the mechanical engineering approach to ASIMO that Honda has taken so far.
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International Flusser Lecture, by Alan N. Shapiro
On July 10, 2012, I gave the International Flusser Lecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Related to this lecture, a small book by me in German will be published in the International Flusser Lecture series by the Walther Koenig Verlag.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids, by Alan N. Shapiro
Presented with the reality, which is at the same time still half-fictional, of bringing robots or androids into our social world, I believe that we are being offered the gift of an opportunity for humanity to grow and develop, to untangle the knots binding us to our current stagnation, to improve our lives.
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Seminar on the Future of Reading and Learning at the Offenbach Arts and Design University
At our meeting on January 24 we will cover the folowing topics: 1. Talk about McLuhan, “The Medium is the Massage” 2. Talk about the media theory of Vilem Flusser 3. Student presentations of their ideas for their design projects 4. Website design – relation of editorial content and format.