I have to acknowledge The New Atlantis as comparable in quality to the kind of intelligent conservatism offered by Robert Manne (who has proven himself one of the most perceptive critics of the Howard era, in contrast to gasbags such as Andrew Bolt, Paddy McGuiness and Piers Akerman). The following piece appeared a while back, so it has taken this long to clear my schedule enough to mention it here. I see it as a companion piece to not only my earlier posting on "Mangobot" and Japanese robotics, but the documentary Arguing the World, which captured my attention many years ago, and traced the origins of the neocon intellectuals, such as Irving Kristol, who were contemporaries of sociologists such as Daniel Bell that later moved to the Right; this is significant because in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism Bell in effect breathed new life into longstanding fears (e.g Culture and Anarchy) about the corrosive effects of cultural populism (later focused by other critics on postmodernism/cultural studies) as well as the emergence of the postindustrial "information society".
It is fitting then that The New Atlantis continues in this vein, and manages to do so by sounding like common sense, that is empirically grounded, rather than devolving, in the final instance, on some conception of an unchanging "human nature". Or rather, it is underwritten by a peculiar form of essentialism, perhaps with an elective affinity to Intelligent Design advocates, that we humans are too protean and complex to be programmed or imitated by any form of Artificial Intelligence.
This is exactly the kind of claim that Artificial Life advocates have more explicitly set out to challenge with their references to autopoiesis crosscutting all lifeforms. This does little in itself though to challenge the observation that even in the so-called "robot kingdom", Japan, such initiatives have been generally unsuccessful thus far in gaining acceptance (anyone watching the clip I've included of Paro, will quickly see why it failed in hospitals; it is simply annoying).
On a more theoretical plane, one can easily picture an army of Lacanians waiting in the wings to seize on the implications of the following statement (the "mirror stage" writ large):
"It is important, Breazeal emphasizes in her published dissertation Designing Sociable Robots, “for the robot to understand its own self, so that it can socially reason about itself in relation to others.” Toward this goal of making conscious robots, some researchers have selected markers of self-understanding in human psychological development, and programmed their machines to achieve those specific goals. For example, Nico, the therapeutic baby bot, can identify itself in a mirror. (Aside from human beings, only elephants, apes, and dolphins show similar signs of self-recognition.) Kismet’s successor, “Leo,” can perform a complicated “theory of mind” cooperation task that, on the surface, appears equivalent to the psychological development of a four- or five-year-old. But these accomplishments, rather than demonstrating an advanced awareness of mind and self, are choreographed with pattern recognition software, which, though no small feat of coding cleverness, has none of the significance of a baby or an elephant investigating himself in a mirror".
And this is to say nothing of the fitting critique of Rodney Brooks' materialist reduction of humans to "nothing more than machines", letalone the delightful skewering of David Levy's Love and Sex With Robots:
"The latter half of Levy’s book, a frighteningly encyclopedic treatise on vibrators, prostitution, sex dolls, and the short leap from all of that to sex with robots, scarcely deserves mention. Levy begins it, however, with the familiar story of Pygmalion, in a ham-handed act of mythical misappropriation".
Very entertaining to be sure, but more compelling from a sociological perspective is the observation that sociality is not something that can be simply programmed in advance, but is in need of continual structuration (to employ Giddens' apt phrase). This is something I've noticed a lot recently, not only in regard to Randall Collins' work on interaction rituals and Artificial Life, but also in efforts to apply Sennett's conception of "craft" to ethnographies of virtual environments. The necessity here is one of gaining an understanding of the world as something which resists us, thus prompting a need to continually refine an autotelic self; hence repetition ideally implies an articulate, rather than compulsive, engagement with difference (in effect lending a new inflection to one of my favourite terms, seriality).
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