Romanticism and technology are widely assumed to be opposed to each other. Romanticism -- understood as a reaction against rationalism and objectivity -- is perhaps the last thing users and ...developers of information and communication technology (ICT) think about when they engage with computer programs and electronic devices. And yet, as Mark Coeckelbergh argues in this book, this way of thinking about technology is itself shaped by romanticism and obscures a better and deeper understanding of our relationship to technology. Coeckelbergh describes the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs.Coeckelbergh argues that current uses of ICT can be interpreted as attempting a marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism. He describes the "romantic dialectic," when this new kind of material romanticism, particularly in the form of the cyborg as romantic figure, seems to turn into its opposite. He shows that both material romanticism and the objections to it are still part of modern thinking, and part of the romantic dialectic. Reflecting on what he calls "the end of the machine," Coeckelbergh argues that to achieve a more profound critique of contemporary technologies and culture, we need to explore not only different ways of thinking but also different technologies -- and that to accomplish the former we require the latter.
Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition,Anatomy of a Robotexplores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of ...humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle.By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes fromTwilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro's novelNever Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle'sPhysicsandDe Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse- the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human.This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people's main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.
Being Bionic Calvert, Bronwen
2017, 2017-01-30
eBook
The contradictions and complexities of the cyborg therefore hold particular appeal to programme makers of dramatic TV narratives. Bronwen Calvert examines the uses and representations of the cyborg ...in this ground-breaking text, by looking at its frequent appearance in a wide variety of popular and cult shows: from the iconic Daleks of Doctor Who and bionic female empowerment in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, to the duality of humanoid and distinctly robotic cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica. In doing so, she reveals how television's defining traits shape our experience of cyborgs and help us as viewers to question contemporary issues such as surveillance and terrorism, as well as the function of simulation and ultimately what it means to be human.
The Enlightenment cyborg Muri, Allison
The Enlightenment cyborg,
c2007, 20070101, 2007, 2007-01-01
eBook
The Enlightenment Cyborgestablishes a dialogue between eighteenth-century studies and cyborg art and theory, and makes a significant and original contribution to both of these fields of inquiry.
Inspired by the biobotics, we wanted to create an automatic control system using neural networks. This paper throw light on the subject of creating a biobots control system using deep-trained neural ...networks based on AI framework slitherin. Insect biobotic agents can be used for monitoring and assessing missions after natural disasters or earthquakes. Scientific and technological approaches created as a result of work on this project can cre-ate fundamentally new ways of interacting not only with insects, but also with other animals.
Abstract
Contemporary technological developments undermine the core pillars defining the human self, under the emergence of cyborgs and super-empowered individuals. The pre-determined boundaries ...between humans and machines may turn obsolete with the consolidation of the new hybrid humanity. This may foster an innovative approach to the traditional understanding of human ethics and the establishment of cyborg norms and regulations. In this article, the primordial nexus between cyborg ethics and the eugenics movement is further analyzed, hence as enhancing catalysators of mankind. Moreover, the article raises an ethical decision-making diagram, in which the normative cyborgs debate is framed in terms of positive and negative eugenic regimes. This analysis aims at providing a clearer understanding of cyborg-related ethical decision-making and the ways it magnifies eugenic features. As technological components become an inherent part of the human body, the international community should adhere to reshaping the notion of cyborg ethics and its ethical and regulatory implications.
The subject of the posthuman, of what it means to be or to cease to be human, is emerging as a shared point of debate at large in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. This volume asks ...what classical learning can bring to the table of posthuman studies, assembling chapters that explore how exactly the human self of Greek and Latin literature understands its own relation to animals, monsters, objects, cyborgs and robotic devices. With its widely diverse habitat of heterogeneous bodies, minds, and selves, classical literature again and again blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human; not to equate and confound the human with its other, but playfully to highlight difference and hybridity, as an invitation to appraise the animal, monstrous or mechanical/machinic parts lodged within humans. This comprehensive collection unites contributors from across the globe, each delving into a different classical text or narrative and its configuration of human subjectivity-how human selves relate to other entities around them. For students and scholars of classical literature and the posthuman, this book is a first point of reference.
Chen Qiufan comes from a new generation of Chinese science fiction (SF) writers who use a style of SF realism to interrogate problems in Chinese society. In 2013, his novel Waste Tide (2013) won a ...Chinese Nebula Award. The novel depicts a dystopian posthuman China where a female protagonist is forced to transform into a cyborg and seek justice for members of the underclass who lives on a hazardous waste site. This paper aims to examine how Chen's Waste Tide applies cyborgs to counter the impacts of globalization, environmental destruction, and the hegemony of the premodern system of Chinese society. In doing so, this paper employs the concept of a cyborg from Donna Haraway to explore the embodiment and functions of a cyborg, particularly in the context of Chinese society, together with the concept of ＂slow violence,＂ a term coined by Rob Nixon to explore environmental issues. Four main discussions are presented in this paper. First, the paper suggests how Chen's SF realism sheds light on a relationship between the premodern Chinese clan system and globalization, which becomes a cause of environmental exploitation and oppression of subordinate humans and nonhumans in the novel. Second, the paper scrutinizes how Chen integrates Chinese elements into his cyberpunk narrative to resist the oppression of marginalized people in Chinese society. Third, the Sinicization of Chen's cyborg is discussed. The narrative illustrates how Chen uses the female body as a radical figure to challenge the concept of human beings through supporting the subaltern, thus subverting dominant Chinese culture. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of Chen's narrative regarding a cyborg and how his narrative reflects elements of traditional Chinese gender ideology.
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