Examining our ambivalence for technology

with specific regard to the robot and AI.

The history of robots (from simple automation to complex sentient being) is
the history of a civilisations hopes and fears for its future. The story of one tells
the story of the other because with each iteration of the machine man as
the embodiment of human progress and ingenuity, you get a corresponding
anxiety - usually correspondent to replacement anxiety.
 Alienation and the uncanny valley -
Understanding our problem with robots.
AI and Transcendence - Exploring the representation of our ambivalence
for technology through two case studies.
Research Proforma

Author: Emmanuel Carrere

Critical position: Author
Title: I am alive and you are dead: A journey into the mind of Philip K. Dick
Publisher/publication: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Place of publication: London
Date: 2005
Chapter: What is human?

Subject/Key points and potential for use:

Early anxiety towards the robot caused by popular culture.

Quotation:

From the earliest science fiction on, the robot - like Golem and Frankensteins monster before it - had been cast in the role of
villain, its human creators most cunning adversary. In the fifties, Isaac Asimov had tried to impose a code of good conduct on
robots and their writer-creators, to reduce the theme of robot rebellion to the scientific absurdity and cheap literary convention,
but he did not succeed. As the fiction became more and more plausible and the possibility of the thinking machines aroused
interest not only among the visionary set, the writers, the philosophers, but in the scientific community as well, fear of the robot
grew in the popular imagination.
Research Proforma

Author: Athena Andreadis

Critical position: Author
Title: To Seek Out New Life - The Biology of Star Trek
Publisher/publication: The Crown Publishing Group
Place of publication: New York
Date: 1998
Chapter: Send up the kites

Subject/Key points and potential for use:

The realisation that a thinking machine is still far off into the future.

Quotation:

Will computers or robots ever be alive - specifically, self aware? Whatever their achievements, they are still lagging far behind
in speech and pattern recognition. And they are woefully devoid of both intuition and common sense. With their enormous
computing capacity but lack of flexibility, they are deservedly considered idiot savants.
Research Proforma

Author: Ian Simmons

Critical position: Author
Title: The Uncanny Valley
Publisher/publication: The Forteantimes
Place of publication: UK
Date: July 2013

Subject/Key points and potential for use:

One of the key enquiries into the anxiety caused by A.I.

Quotation:

Essentially, the graph shows that as non-human objects become more and more human, our sense of empathy and comfort
with them also rises - that is, until an object comes to resemble a human very closely, then our feelings of empathy and comfort
take a immense nose-dive, to be replaced with unease and a sense that the object or entity is somehow wrong and even
malign. And while this discomfort is marked enough with stationary objects, it absolutely rockets once the object is moving.
Research Proforma

Author: Sigmund Freud

Critical position: Psychiatrist
Title: The Uncanny
Publisher/publication: Penguin Group
Place of publication: London
Date: 2003
Chapter: The Uncanny

Subject/Key points and potential for use:

One of the key enquiries into the anxiety caused by A.I.

Quotation:

One such is the uncanny. There is no doubt that this belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.
It is equally beyond doubt that the word is not always used in a clear definable sense, and so it commonly merges with what
arouses fear in general.