Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • 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 Evitable Conflict.” The zeroth law then became a permanent fixture in Asimov’s science fictional literary imagination.

  • 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.

  • Paloque-Bergès and Sondheim on the Poetics of Code

    In her book Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique, Camille Paloque-Bergès examines the history of the writing practices of software code poetry. Her ultimate emphasis is on the concept of Codeworks which was originated by the theorist, artist, and poet Alan Sondheim. Codeworks is the literary writing of informatic code.

  • Jaron Lanier’s Phenotropic Programming

    In his autobiographical work Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, VR pioneer and founder of the company Visual Programming Languages Jaron Lanier explains his view of software code which has a lot of overlap with the view laid out in the present study.

  • Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

    Is computer science a science? What is at stake in the question of “the sciences of the artificial”? Herbert A. Simon was a distinguished professor for five decades at Carnegie Mellon University, one of America’s most elite and important technology institutes of higher education. Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award.

  • Armin Nassehi: Complexity Not Capitalism

    Armin Nassehi is a sociology professor at a prominent German university in Munich. He is one of Germany’s most well-known and successful public intellectuals. His 2019 book Muster: Theorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft received much praise in numerous book reviewsin Germany’s major newspapers and weekly news magazines.