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Hello, everyone.
This discussion is devoted to Western culture and robots.
I remind you that this designation is conditional.
In the Western world, the emphasis on the difference between natural and artificial
is a key moment.
Let us look closer
at the understanding of opposition of people and machines.
If we look at ancient myths, which greatly influenced Western culture,
we will see several examples of creating artificial beings.
Part of them performed service functions.
E.g., Hephaestus created two golden maidservants who looked like beautiful maidens,
could speak, possessed intellect and carried out every assignment he gave.
He also made tripod servants,
who moved around feasting guests on small wheels.
Furthermore,
creation of a beautiful woman Pandora from clay and water is also attributed to Hephaestus.
The gods gave her a special box containing all the evils of the world.
Out of curiosity, Pandora opens the box and it leads to a tragic ending: all the evils and diseases fly out and spread around the whole world.
We should note that initially the woman did it without any malicious intent.
Creatures could perform military functions, e.g.,
protection of a state.
There is a myth about Talos, who, according to one version, was made by Zeus himself,
according to another - at the request of Zeus, probably by Hephaestus.
Outwardly, Talos resembles a giant man with a copper body.
He had only one vein, which started in the shoulder and ended in the ankle,
and instead of blood there was Ichor (the blood of gods) flowing in it.
There were copper nails in the ankle, which kept Ichor from flowing out.
Talos did not allow enemy ships to approach the shore;
he threw huge boulders to sink a ship.
If a ship managed to avoid sinking and moored to the shore,
Talos stepped into the water,
his bronze corpus heated up and ships burnt down.
There is another well-known myth – a beautiful story about Pygmalion and Galatea.
The king of Cyprus Pygmalion made an incredibly wonderful statue
of a woman from white ivory and fell in love with her.
He called her Galatea.
The goddess Aphrodite heard the prayers of the young king and made the statue alive.
And they lived happily ever after.
And in Western culture love became the magic that can make anything alive.
So:
anthropomorphic appearance
creatures perform service or military functions
creation of an artificial being is not condemned
No unrest or destruction of humanity.
And no apocalyptic consequences.
Generally, gods or heroes assume the role of a demiurge.
If to omit the Middle Ages,
in the Christian paradigm only God is capable of creating living beings.
Man should not compete with God in this.
The Renaissance period and Modern History promote interest in science and attempts to understand
how man and the world function.
Romanticism supplants the Enlightenment era and concurs with the beginning of the industrial revolution,
when a lot of technological inventions appear - steam engine,
steam locomotive, telegraph, gas torches, photography, etc.
It seems that new technological opportunities
should have been received with admiration, but things went differently.
Great changes come with a new ideological branch of the late 18th century - romanticism.
While the Enlightenment is featured by the cult of intellect and a civilization based on its grounds,
romanticism establishes the cult of nature, feelings and the natural in man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a well-known philosopher of that time, claimed
that the "golden century" of humankind was its primary stage,
when people lived in accord and harmony with nature.
As the man mastered new instruments and weapons,
he conquered his environment and felt pride and vanity,
superiority over nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau considers it the original sin of humankind.
The artificial became more preferable than the natural.
Technological innovations and scientific progress drive man away from genuine nature.
Surely, these ideas were reflected in art.
Myths about creation of artificial beings also get a new interpretation in literature.
Golem becomes a murderer who rebelled against his master.
And in the work of Achim von Arnim "Isabella of Egypt”, a golem is a clay figure
that became alive and assumed the appearance of Isabella, the main character.
Golem has no soul, it is a soulless Isabella.
It is a work of a modern creator who made pseudo-life,
a doll that could force the real Isabella out from this world.
In Hoffman's story "The Sandman", the main character Nathanael falls in love with an automaton Olimpia,
which drives him crazy in the end.
It is symbolic, that at first Nathanael looks at Olimpia through a telescope,
a diabolic mechanism, which makes soulless and dead alive.
Olimpia always listened to the youth, "she looked immovably in his face, and sighed several times, “Ah, ah!”
The boundaries between animate and inanimate,
alive and mechanical are indistinct not only for Nathanael.
Not a single man noticed
that Olimpia was a doll. After she was denounced,
"a pernicious mistrust of human figures in general had begun to creep in.
Many lovers, to be quite convinced
that they were not enamoured of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses
to sing and dance a little out of time."
So where is the boundary between animate and inanimate? In the imperfection of man?
In aesthetics of romanticism, it is the absence of soul that prevents mechanical creatures
from being a full-fledged part of society.
Something artificially created can have a destructive power.
The man is ambitious, and in his desire to play God, he goes too far.
In 1818, a writer Mary Shelley wrote a novel "Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus",
which had a great influence on our attitude to robots.
Doctor Victor Frankenstein tried to animate lifeless matter.
However, we cannot call his motives altruistic.
"Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through,
, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source;
many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me".
He made a creature that was not evil in essence.
It is rather a sad story about solitude.
The monster desperately tries to become a part of human world,
but its frightening appearance kept it from reaching this goal.
Even his creator is afraid of his creature and refuses to make a copule for it,
fearing that new monsters will appear.
And the creature revenges Victor killing everyone he loves.
In this novel, people compete with the artificial;
there is no way for them to coexist peacefully.
And rejection of such coexisting soceity comes from people.
After Victor's death, the monster repents of its murders and says
that it always felt intolerable pain and guilt.
"My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and
sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence
of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine."
In the end the monster goes away
to commit suicide and free itself from the sufferings.
However, mass culture changed the whole complexity of the story and reduced it to one single thought:
“any artificially created
being will inevitably rebel against its creator”.
It was called "The Frankenstein Syndrome".
In the 20th century, the Frankenstein Syndrome for a long time remained an essential part of writings
about robots. And, surely, it was present in Karel Čapek's first play R.U.R.,
where they appeared for the first time.
Čapek describes a factory producing "artificial people"
that are called robots, to free humankind from humiliating labour.
The dreams come true, the world enjoys profusion and carelessness,
but new people are not born any more for some reason,
and later robots revolt and destroy almost all of the humankind.
Before this, one of the heroines eliminates the formula of production of robots,
so they cannot reproduce themselves as well.
So, again we see the world where people and robots cannot exist together.
However, the love of two robots at the end gives us hope.
At the beginning of the 20th century these romantic ideas were also reflected in cinematography: “The automatic motorist” (1911)
“The Golem” (1920), “The mechanical man” (1921)
“The master mystery” (1920)
“Der Herr Der Welt” (1934)
In Fritz Lang's movie “Metropolis” (1927) a female robot appears for the first time
and, of course, takes the dark side.
By the beginning of World War II, the word "robot" in Western culture had been bound
with such associations as fear and danger.
Robots would appear in cinematography as aggressors, killers, soulless and rational creatures
up to present days: The Terminator,
The Matrix, ex Machina.
In the 1940s, a fully different interpretation of robots appears
in the works of Isaac Asimov.
In his fiction world, coexistence with robots was possible.
Moreover, many robots were more humane than some people were.
One of the variants of overcoming the opposition of artificial and natural in
Western culture can be the combination of both components in one.
I am talking about cyborgs.
In popular culture they can be pictured as obviously mechanical
(Darth Vader, Cybermen, Lobster) or identical to people.
Anyway,
their physical or psychological abilities greatly surpass those of people.
Their interpretation in culture has an effect.
The continuing tradition of romanticism does not accept such a creature
and the cyborg appears to be a negative character.
Technology destroys the integrity of a person.
In a later branch of transhumanism a cyborg,
as a version of a post-human,
can be quite a positive future for us.
Nevertheless, the main issue
is still the distnction of boundaries between the man and the machine.
In the work of Isaac Asimov "The Bicentennial Man", a robot Andrew
tries to become a human being,
it modifies its body adding biological components.
By the end of the story, there are almost no differences between the body of a robot or a human being,
except for the brain.
Andrew also becomes mortal. We see how the character strives for knowledge,
makes jokes, and has feelings: including sympathy and love.
So what is it that makes us humans?
Our body or something else?
Let us revise the key points of today's conversation:
In ancient myths, artificial creatures were not viewed negatively.
In the period of romanticism the mechanical (artificial, soulless)
is opposed to the living (natural, spiritual).
The Frankenstein Syndrome appears.
In the works of Isaac Asimov, there appear robots
robots that can peacefully coexist with people.
A western person still asks the questions:
"What is man and what are the boundaries of the human?"
According to Frederik Kaplan,
Western culture uses machines to define a human.
A human is a perfect machine possessing human peculiarities.
Learning more and more details about him-/herself as a machine, man creates better robots.
The majority of people are afraid that the development of robotics
The majority of people are afraid that the development of robotics
Yet we continue to manufacture robots. A German philosopher O. Spengler viewed the idea
of machine in Western culture as a human desire to become equal to God and to subordinate nature, cosmos and other people.
What is the creation of robots in Western culture:
a competition with God
or an attempt to understand ourselves?
That is all, thank you for joining us.
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