*That's quite a screed. Rather warms the heart of a science fiction writer.
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 37, NO 1
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
BLUESHIFT SERIES 07/22/2015 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
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ROBOTS TREKKING ACROSS THE UNCANNY VALLEY
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_____________________________________________________________________
Dear Readers,
This is the fourth and final excerpt from ~Surveillance Never
Sleeps~. The fourth chapter is titled "Robots Trekking Across the
Uncanny Valley." The full monograph is now available at CTHEORY.net,
and a PDF version is available at
http://pactac.net/books/Surveillance_Never_Sleeps.pdf
Kind regards,
Arthur and Marilouise
=====================================================================
~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~
Uncanny Bodies
————–
There was a recent newspaper report that evocatively captured the
feeling of the uncanny in the robotic future. Appropriately titled,
"SociBot: the 'social robot' that knows how you feel," the report
focused on the underlying element of uncertainty that is often a sure
and certain sign of the presence of the uncanny in human affairs:
If Skype and FaceTime aren't giving you enough of the human
touch, you could soon be talking face to rubbery face with your
loved ones, thanks to SociBot, a creepy "social robot" that can
imitate your friends.
"It's like having a real presence in the room," say Nic Carey,
research coordinator at Engineered Arts, the Cornish company
behind the device. "You simply upload a static photo of the face
you want it to mimic and our software does the rest, animating
the features down to the subtle twitches and eyes that follow
you around the room.
The company sees its potential in shopping centers and theme
parks, airports and tourist information centers," anywhere
requiring personalized content delivered with a human touch," as
well as potential security applications, given that the Socibot
can track up to 12 people simultaneously, even in a crowd.
"We are looking for platforms that can be really emotional,
investigating how robots can interact with people on multiple
levels." [1]
In his classic essay "The 'Uncanny," written in 1919 and perhaps
itself deeply symptomatic of the profound uncertainties that gripped
European culture post-WWI, Sigmund Freud approached the question of
the uncanny on the basis of an immediate refusal. [2] For Freud, the
uncanny–unheimlich–does not denote a kind of fright associated
with the "new and unfamiliar," but something else–still
indeterminate, still multiple in its appearances and illusive in its
origins. Far from being "new and unfamiliar," the uncanny for Freud
represented something more enduring in the human psyche, "something
familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become
alienated from it only through the process of repression"–namely,
the continuing yet repressed presence of "animism, magic and sorcery"
in the unfolding story of the psyche. For Freud, scenes that evoked
the feeling of the uncanny were remarkably diverse: "dismembered
limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy
tale of Hauff's"; "feet which dance by themselves as in the book by
Schaeffer"; the "story of 'The Sand-Man' in Hoffmann's _Nachstucken_
with its tale of the 'Sand-Man who tears out children's eyes' and the
doll Olympia who occupies an unstable boundary between a dead
automaton and a living erotic subject"; the always enigmatic
appearance of the double; the fear of being buried alive; and, of
course, the constant fear of castration. For Freud, whatever the
particular animus that evokes feelings of the uncanny, the origin
remains the same–the return of that which has been repressed not
only by prohibitions surrounding "animism, magic and sorcery," but
also by episodic fractures, unexpected breaks in the violence that
human subjectivity does to itself to reduce to psychic invisibility
the complexities of sexuality and desire.
Now that we live almost one hundred years after Freud's initial
interpretation of the origins of the uncanny, does the emergence of a
new robotic technology such as SociBots have anything to tell us
about the meaning of the uncanny in posthuman culture? At first
glance, SociBots represents a psychic continuation of that which was
alluded to by Freud–a contemporary technological manifestation of
the feared figure of the double as "something familiar and
old-established in the mind." For Freud, what is truly uncanny about
the figure of the double is not its apparent meaning as mimesis, but
its dual signification as simultaneously being "an assurance of
immortality" and an "uncanny harbinger of death." That is, in fact,
the essence of Socibots: an assurance of (digital) immortality, with
its ability to transform a static photo into an animated face,
complete with twitches, blushes, and possibly sighs; but also a
fateful harbinger of death, with its equally uncanny ability to
transform living human vision into what Paul Virilio once described
as cold-eyed "machine vision "–machine-to-human communication with a
perfectly animated software face tracking its human interlocutors,
twelve test subjects at a time. In this case, like all robots,
SociBots certainly give off tangible hints of immortality–upload a
photo of yourself, a friend, an acquaintance, and they are destined
for eternal digital life. But, as with all visual representations
come alive, it is also a possible harbinger of death, provoking
feelings of human dispensability, that the tangible human presence
can also be quickly rendered fully precarious by its robotic
simulacra. Interestingly, while Freud began his story of the uncanny
with a reflection upon the psychic anxiety provoked by the figure of
the Sandman, who robs children of their eyes, SociBots may well
anticipate death in another way, this time the death of human vision
and its substitution by a form of vivified robotic vision. Here,
SociBots could be viewed as providing, however unintentionally,
perhaps the first preliminary glimpse of the psychic theatre of the
Sandman in a twenty-first century digital device. With this addition:
SociBots resemble the myth of the Sandman in a second important
manner. Not only, like the Sandman, does this technology provoke
enduring, though deeply subliminal human anxieties over the death of
vision, but it also draws into cultural presence, once again, that
strange figure of the doll Olympia with its subtle equivocations
between dead automaton and living erotic subject. In this case, the
particular fascination of SociBots, with its almost magical and
certainly (technological) occult ability to animate "features down to
the subtle twitches and eyes that follow you around the room," does
not solely reside in its animation of death, but in its manifestation
of a world where objects come alive, with eyes that track you, with
lips that speak, and facial features that perfectly mimic their human
progenitors. Neither death by automaton nor life by the doll-like
construction of Socibots, but something else: this is one robotic
technology that derives its sense of the uncanny by always occupying
an unstable boundary between life and death, software animation and
real-life visual conversations and tracking. In essence, the
uncanniness of Socibots may have to do with the fact that it is a
brilliant example of the blended
objects–part-simulacrum/part-database–that will increasingly come
to occupy the posthuman imagination. Curiously, while it might be
tempting to limit the story of SociBots, like the mythic tale of the
Sandman before it, to stories of the death of human vision or even to
the fully ambivalent nature of blended objects, from dolls to robots,
there is possibly something even more uncanny at play here. It might
be recalled that Freud controversially concluded his interpretation
of the uncanny with his own psychoanalytical insights concerning the
unheimlich place as the uncanniness of "female genital organs":
"This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former
Heim (home) of all human beings, to the place where each one of us
lived once upon a time and in the beginning." [3] While making no
prejudgment on the genital assignment of robotic technology, it might
be said, however, that the story of SociBots has about it a haunting
and perhaps truly uncanny sense of a premonition about a greater
technological homecoming in which we are, perhaps unwittingly and
unwillingly, fully involved. In this interpretation, could the
origins of the SociBots uncanniness have to do with its suggestion
that we are now in the presence of technologies representing, in
their essence, possibilities for a second (digital) rebirth? The
suggestion of the uncanny, therefore, that is SociBots may well
inhere in its capacity to practically realize the once and future
destiny of robots as born again technologies.
Junk Robots in the Mojave Desert: Year 2040
——————————————-
What happens when no tech meets high tech deep in the desert of
California?
Just up the road from Barstow and far away from the crowds of Joshua
Tree, there's a junkyard where robots go to die. It consists of one
hundred or so cargo-sized steel containers packed tight with the
decay of robotic remains. Everything is there: a once scary DARPA-era
animal robot weighing in at 250 pounds looks forlorn bundled in a
shroud of net; early cobots and autonomous robots can be seen huddled
together in one of the containers waiting to be reimagined;
broken-down industrial robots that have reached a point of total
(mechanical) exhaustion from repetitive stress injuries; abandoned
self-organizing drone hives left to slowly disassemble in the desert
air; swarms of discarded mini-robots–butterflies, ants and bees;
mech/cyb(ernetic) corpses of robots made in the images of attack
dogs, cheetahs, and pack animals, all finally untethered from reality
and left to rust in the Mojave desert. Most of the valuable sensors
seem to be missing but what remains is the skeleton of our robotic
past. The only sound heard is the rustle of scattered papers drifting
here and there with scribbled lines of start-up algorithmic codes.
The only visual is the striking contrast of the sharp-lined geometry
of those steel compartments against the soft liquid flows of the
desert, land, and sky. The overall aesthetic effect of this robot
junkyard is a curious mixture of the desert sublime with the spectral
mountains in the background and dusty scrublands close to the
watching eye, mixed with a lingering sense of technological
desolation.
What's most interesting about this robot junkyard–interesting, that
is, in addition to its lonely beauty as a tarnished symbol of
(technical) dreams not realized and (robotic) hopes not achieved–is
that it has quickly proven to be a magnetic force attractor for a
growing compound of artists, writers, and disillusioned computer
engineers. Like a GPS positional tag alert on full open, they come
from seemingly everywhere. Certainly from off-grid art communities on
the plains of East Texas, some transiting from corporate startups in
Silicon Valley, a few drifting in from SF, probably attracted by the
tangible scent of a new tech-culture scene; there are even reports of
artists drifting in from around the global net–Korean robo-hackers,
Japanese database sorcerers, Bulgarian anti-coders, and European
networkers–taking up desert-style habitation rights in the midst of
the robot junkyard. It's a place that some have nicknamed *RoVent*–a
site where heaps of robots can be retrieved, repurposed, reimagined
and reinvented.
It is almost as if there is a bit of telepathy at play in this
strange conjuration of the artistic imagination and robots in transit
to rust. Instinctively breaking with the well-scripted trajectory of
robotic engineers that have traditionally sought to make robots more
and more human-like, these pioneers seem to prefer the exact
opposite. Curiously, they commonly seem to want to release the spirit
of the robots, junkyard or not, to find their own technological
essence. What is the soul of a data hive? What is the spirit of an
industrial drone? What is the essence of a junkyard robotic attack
dog? What makes a beautiful–though now discarded–robotic butterfly
such an evocative expression of vitalism? Strangely enough, it is as
if something like a Japanese-inspired spirit of Shinto, where objects
are held to possess animate qualities and vital spirits, has quietly
descended on this robot junkyard with its detritus of technical waste
and surplus of artistic imagination.
The results of this meeting of supposedly dead technology and
quintessentially live artists are as inspiring as they are
unexpected. For example, one artistic display consists simply of a
quiet meditation space where some of the junkyard robots are gathered
in a rough circle, similar to a traditional prayer circle or the
spatial arrangement of an ancient dirge, all the better to find their
inner moe, or, at minimum, to reflect on that illusive point in
their individual robotic work histories where the mechanical suddenly
becomes the AI, the vital, the controlling intelligence and then,
just as quickly, slips on backwards into the pre-mechanical order of
the junkyard burial site.
In the darkness of the desert night, there's another artistic site
that is organized as a funeral pyre for dead robots. Without much in
the way of wood around for stoking the flames, these artists have
paid a nocturnal visit to the ruins of the CIA-funded Project Suntan,
close to a super-secret aviation project, where a barrel of abandoned
liquid hydrogen has been retrieved for releasing the night-time
spirits of (robot) mourning. The funeral pyre should be a somber
place, but in reality it's not at all. Maybe it is simply the visual,
and thus emotional, impact of a full-frenzy funeral pyre, fueled by
the remains of secret experiments in high-altitude aviation fuels,
sparking up the desert air. Or, then again, perhaps it is something
different, something more decidedly liminal and definitely illusive.
In this case, when robots are stacked on a burning funeral pyre, it
is very much like ritualistic final consummation, that point where
the visibly material melts down into the dreamy immaterial, and where
even the scientifically contrived mechanical skins, electronic
circuitry, and articulated limbs finally discover that their final
destiny all along was an end-of-the-world return to the degree-zero
of flickering ashes. The concluding ceremony for this newly invented
Ash Wednesday for dead robots is always the same: a meticulous search
by the gathered artists for the final material remains of the robots
which are then just as carefully buried in the dirt from which they
originally emerged. Ironically, in the liturgy of the funeral pyre,
there is a final fulfillment of the utopian–though perhaps
misguided–aspiration common, it seems, to many robotic engineers,
namely a haunting repetition, in robotic form, of the human life
cycle of birth, growth and senescence.
However, if the stoked inferno of the funeral pyre for abandoned
robots sometimes assumes the moral hues of an anthropomorphic version
of (robotic) imagination, the same is most definitely not the case at
a third site where a feverish outburst of the artistic
imagination–splicers, mixers, recombinants, recoders–plies its
trade anew by remaking this treasure-load of robot technologies.
Here, strange new configurations emerge from creative remixes of
self-organized drone hives and fluttering robot butterflies. When
(dis)articulated robot pack animals, some missing a leg or two, are
repaired with extra legs culled from leftover parts of robot dogs or
now only two-legged robot cheetahs, the result is often spectacular.
It is just as if in this act of robotic reinvention that the
drudge-like life-trajectory of many robots, previously valued only
for invulnerability to boredom, to boredom with things (repetition)
or boredom with human beings (routinization), is suddenly discarded.
What's left is this genuinely fun scene of robots, forever heretofore
consigned to compulsory labor, untethered from their AI leashes,
finally free to be what they were never designed to be: robotic
cheetahs moving at the speed of a just-reassembled pack animal;
robotic attack dogs, now equipped with reengineered robotic
butterflies for better visual sensing, suddenly sidling away from
high-testosterone attack mode in favor of startling, but ungainly,
emulations of those exceedingly life-like Japanese theatrical robots.
In this artistic scene, it is no longer the animating spirit of
Shinto at work, but something else: the splice, the mix, the creative
recombination of robotic parts into a menagerie of creative
assemblages. Or maybe not. Some of the most fascinating projects
involving this group of recombinant artists were those by descendants
of _Survival Research Lab_. Their renderings quickly brushed aside
the aesthetics of creative assemblages in favor of a kind of
seductive violence that is, it appears, autochthonous to the American
imagination. In this scenario, it is all about riding the robots.
Robots as monster dogs, cheetahs, wildcats, sleek panthers, and
large-winged earthbound birds waging war against one another or at
other times left untethered to roam the nighttime desert, whether as
sentries, mech watchdogs, or perhaps free-fire zone attack creatures
burning with the ecstasy of random violence.
Designs for the Robotic Future
——————————
A Cheetah, an Android Actress, and the (AI) Cockroach
—————————————————–
Intimations of the robotic future are often provided by the design of
robots presently being assembled in engineering research labs in the
USA, Japan, and the European Union. Here, the robotic future is not
visualized as fully predictable, determined, or, for that matter,
capable of being understood as embodying an overall telic destiny,
but, much like the human condition before it, as something that will
likely be contingent, multiple and complex. Indeed, if robots of the
future–presently being designed on the basis of advanced research in
sensor technologies, articulated limbs, and artificial
intelligence–provide a glimpse of that robotic future, then it may
well be that traditional patterns of human behavior notable for their
complex interplay of issues related to power, affectivity, and
intelligence may be well on their way to recapitulation at the level
of an emerging society of future robots. Consequently, while the
ultimate destiny of the robotic future remains unclear, its possible
trajectories can already be discerned in the very different
objectives of remarkably creative robotic research. Building on
traditional differences in approaches to technology in which the
United States generally excels in software, Japan in hardware and
Europe in wetware (the soft interface among technology, culture, and
consciousness), new advances in robotics design inform us, sometimes
years in advance, concerning how robots of the future will
effectively realize questions of (soft) power, (machine) affectivity,
and (artificial) intelligence. For example, consider the following
three examples of contemporary robotic designs, none of which fully
discloses the future but all of which, taken together, may provide a
preliminary glimpse of a newly emergent future in which human-robotic
interactions will often turn on questions of power, emotion, and
consciousness.
Robots of Power
—————
In the cutting-edge research laboratories of Boston Dynamics, there
are brilliant breakthroughs underway (mostly funded by DARPA) in
designing robots that embody a tangible sense of power, robots with
astonishing capabilities in moving quickly over a variety of
unexpected terrains. For example, the _Cheetah_ robot is described as
"the fastest legged robot in the world," with "an articulated back
that flexes back and forth on each step, increasing its stride and
running speed, much like the animal does." Its robotic successor, the
_Wildcat_, has already been released from the tethers of _Cheetah_'s
"off-board hydraulic device" and "boom like device to keep it running
in the center of the treadmill," [4] in order to explore potentially
dangerous territories on behalf of the US Army. The _Cheetah_ and the
_Wildcat_ are perfect robotic signs of forms of power likely to be
ascendant in the twenty-first century: remotely controlled, fast,
mobile, predatory. That Google has recently purchased Boston Dynamics
(possibly as a way of acquiring proprietary rights to its unique
sensory software) may indicate that important innovations in software
development are themselves always sensitive to the question of power,
seeking out, in this case, to ride Google into the robotic future, at
least metaphorically, on the "articulated back" and fast legs of
_Cheetah_ and _Wildcat_.
Robots of Affectivity
———————
In Japan, it's a very different robotic future. Here, unlike the will
to power that seems to be so integral to the design of American
versions of the (militarized) robotic future–whether terrestrially
bound or space-roving robots like _Curiosity_ on Mars–Japanese
robots often privilege designs that establish emotional connection
with humans. Japanese robots, that is, as the newest of all the
"companion species." Here, focusing on robots specializing in
therapeutic purposes (assisting autistic children, augmenting health
care, helping the elderly cope with dementia), or for straightforward
cultural consumption (androids as pop entertainment icons, robotic
media newscasters), the aim has been to cross the uncanny valley in
which humans begin to feel "creepy" in the presence of robots that
are too human-like in their appearance and behavior. Psychological
barriers against crossing the supposed uncanny valley have not
stopped one of Japan's foremost android designers, Professor Hiroshi
Ishiguro, who, working in collaboration with Osaka University, has
created a series of famous robots, including an android-actress
_Geminoid F_, described as "an ultra-realistic humanlike android,"
(who smiles, frowns, and talks) and, in a perfect act of simulational
art, an android copy of himself. While Boston Dynamic's _Cheetah_ and
_Wildcat_ may provide a way of riding power into the future,
_Geminoid F_ and Professor Ishiguro's android simulacrum do precisely
the opposite by making the meaning of robots fully proximate to the
question of human identity itself. If there can be such fascination
with android actresses and AI replicants, that is probably because
Japan's version of the robotic future already anticipates a new
future of robot-human affectivity, one in which questions of
strangeness and the uncanny are rendered into indispensable
dimensions of the new normal of the robotic future. In this sense,
what is brought to surface by the specifically Japanese realization
of the full complexity of robot-human interactions is the very shape
and direction of individual and cultural psychology in the future.
While _Geminoid F_, the android actress, will probably never really
challenge boundaries between the human and the robotic, since it only
represents a direct extension of the theatre of simulation that is
mass media today, an android replicant is something very different.
When the alter ego finally receives physical embodiment in the form
of an android replicant, the question may arise whether in fact an
android "selfie" might potentially be perceived in the soon-to-be
realized robotic future as the very best self of all.
Robots of (Integrated) Intelligence
———————————–
While American approaches to designing the robotic future often focus
on questions involving the projection of power, and Japanese robotics
research explores subtle psycho-technologies involved in robot-human
interactions, European versions of the robotic future often privilege
the complicated wetware interface involved when swarms of robots
intrude into what, from a robot's perspective, are alien spaces,
whether the industrialized workplace, human domestic dwellings, or
animal, plant, and insect life. Much like the European Union itself,
where the value of integration is the leading social ideal, EU-funded
robotic research has quickly attained global leadership in its
creative studies of the bifurcations, fractures, and complex fissures
involved with the extrusion of robots into the alternative
environments of humans, plants, objects, and animals. For example, a
press release titled "Robots can influence insects' behavior"
publicizes advances in robotic research under the sign of the
European (AI) cockroach:
Scientists have developed robot cockroaches that behave so
realistically they can fool the real thing. They were created as
part of an EU-funded study for testing theories of collective
behavior in insects, using groups of cockroaches as a model.
Researchers working as part of the LEURRE project introduced the
devices into a group of insects and studied their interactions.
A report in the journal Science showed that the cockroaches'
self-organisational patterns of behavior and decision-making
could be influenced and controlled by the tiny robots, once they
had been socially integrated.
Little larger than a thumbnail, the cube-shaped "insbots" were
developed under the EU-funded 'Future and Emerging Technologies'
(FET) initiative of the Fifth Framework Programme. They were
equipped with two motors, wheels, a rechargeable battery,
computer processors, a light-sensing camera and an array of
infrared proximity sensors. When placed among cockroaches, the
machines were able to quickly adapt their behavior by mimicking
the creatures' movements. Coated in pheromones taken from
cockroaches, the insbots were able to fool the insects into
thinking they were the genuine article.
Coordinator Dr. Jean-Louise Deneubourg from the Université Libre
de Bruxelles said, 'In our project, the autonomous insbots call
on specially developed algorithms to react to signals and
responses from individual insects.' The journal _Science_
reported that once the robots were accepted into the group, they
began to take part in and influence the group decision-making
process. For instance, the darkness-loving creatures followed
the insbots towards bright breams of light and congregated
there. [5]
The report concludes by noting that the next stage of development for
autonomous devices will involve building "groups of artificial
systems and animals that will be able to cooperate to solve problems.
So the machine is listening to and perceiving what the animals are
doing and the animals are in turn perceiving and understanding what
the machines are telling them." [6] In other words, not so much a
study of AI robot cockroaches drenched with pheromones (all the
better to attract the attention of unsuspecting naturalized
cockroaches) but a brilliant futurist probe into the new order of
robotic communications, that point where robots learn to communicate
with insects and, by extension, with plants, objects, and humans, and
those very same plants, objects, and humans actually have a form of
quick robotic evolution of their own by finally learning what it
means to "perceive", "understand," and perhaps even "influence" the
otherwise autonomous actions of robots. In this evolutionary
scenario, a fundamental transformation in the order of
communications, beginning with insects and then rapidly propagating
through other species–plants, animals, and humans–anticipates a
future in which the integrationist ideals of the European Union are
inscribed, unconsciously, unintentionally, but certainly wholesale,
on a newly emergent Robotic Union. The lowly cockroach, then, once
coated with pheromones, as perhaps a fateful talisman of a possible
future in which autonomous robots learn to "mimic" behavior with such
uncanny accuracy that humans, like those "darkness-loving creatures"
before them, follow the multiple robotic insbots of the future
"towards the light and begin to congregate there." In this situation,
the only question remaining has to do with the meaning and direction
of the "light" of the robotic future towards which we are
congregating, certainly in the future as much as now.
The Psycho-Ontology of Future Robots
————————————
The future of robotics remains unclear, still clouded by essentially
transhuman visions projected onto the design of robots, still not
willing or able to reveal its ultimate destiny, that point when
robotic intelligibility takes command and in doing so begins finally
to trace its own trajectories in the electronic sky. Yet, for all
that, there is much to be learned from reflecting upon contemporary
robotics design–lessons not only about robotic technology and
creative engineering but about that strange universe signified by
complex encounters between robots and humans that takes place in
otherwise relentlessly scientific labs around the world, from Japan
and the United States to Europe. If the future will be robotic–at
least in key sectors of the economy as well as network
infrastructure–it is worth noting that the overall direction of that
robotic trajectory already bears discernable traces of human
presence, whether in terms of conflicting perspectives on robotic
design or what might be prohibited, excluded, and disappeared from
our successor species. Not really that long ago, an equally strange
new phenomenon–the human "self"–was launched into history on the
basis of key ontological conditions, some visible (the complex
learning process associated with negotiating the human senses) and
some invisible (the order of internalized psychic repression). In the
same way, contemporary society witnesses, sometimes in
mega-mechanical robotic expression and, at other times, in
specifically neurological form, the technological launching of a
robotic species that, while it may eventually posses its own unique
phylogenetic and ontogenetic properties, will probably always bear
the enduring sign of the human. Not necessarily in any particularly
prescriptive way, but in the more enduring sense that the trajectory
of the robotic future hinted at in the creative designs of robotics
engineering may well culminate in investing future robots with a
complex history of internally programmed psychic traumas that will
powerfully shape their species-identity, both visibly and invisibly.
In this case, contemporary fascination with robots may have its
origins in a more general human willingness, if not eagerness, to
displace unresolved anxieties, unacknowledged traumas, and, perhaps,
grief over the death of the human onto identified prosthetics, namely
robots. Could the future of robotics represent, in the end, the
ethical ablation of the human condition, including the sinister and
the creative, the compassionate and the cruel, in purely prosthetic
form? If that is the case, are robots, like humans before them, born
owing a gift–the gift of (artificial) life–that they can never
repay? In this case, what is the future psycho-ontology of robots:
unrelieved resentment directed against their human inventors for a
gift of life organized around "compulsory servitude" or the supposed
joy of (robotic) existence?
Notes
—–
[1] Oliver Wainwright, "SociBot: the 'social robot' that knows how
you feel," _Guardian Online_ (April 11, 2014),
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/11/socibot-the-
social-robot-that-knows-how-you-feel (accessed May 15, 2014).
[2] Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny,"
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf (accessed July 28, 2014).
[3] Ibid., 15.
[4] See http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_cheetah.html (accessed
May 14, 2014).
[5] "Robots can influence insects' behavior," _European Commission:
Research and Innovation_,
http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocenter/article_en.cfm?id=/research/
headlines/news/article_07_12_07_en.html&item=Infocenter&artid=5813
(accessed May 19, 2014).
[6] Ibid.
_____________________________________________________________________
*
* CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory,
* technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book
* reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as
* well as theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the
* mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Paul Virilio (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Turin),
* Stelarc (Brunel University/Curtin University, Perth), DJ Spooky
* [Paul D. Miller] (New York City), Eugene Thacker (The New
* School), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl
* (Boston College), Timothy Murray (Cornell University), Andrew
* Ross (New York University), Mark Featherstone (Keele
* University), Steve Dixon (LASALLE College of the Arts,
* Singapore), Anna Munster (University of New South Wales), Ted
* Hiebert (University of Washington Bothell), Paul Hegarty
* (University College Cork), Frances Dyson (University of New
* South Wales), Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia),
* William Bogard (Whitman College), Joan Hawkins (Indiana
* University), Siegfried Zielinski (Academy of Media Arts,
* Cologne), Warren Magnusson (University of Victoria), Andrew
* Wernick (Trent University), Maurice Charland (Concordia
* University)
*
* In Memory: Jean Baudrillard and Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Assistant: Shaun Macpherson
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
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* The Editors would like the thank the University of Victoria for
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* Editors would like to thank Dr. Catherine Krull, Dean of Social
* Sciences; Dr. D. Michael Miller; Associate Vice-President
* Research; and Dr. Jon Muzio, Department of Computer Science.
*
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