Cultural robotics : The culture of robotics and robotics in culture

Copyright 2013 Samani et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedIn this paper, we have investigated the concept of "Cultural Robotics" with regard to the evolution o social into cultural robots in the 21st Century. By defining the concept of culture, the potential development of culture between humans and robots is explored. Based on the cultural values of the robotics developers, and the learning ability of current robots, cultural attributes in this regard are in the process of being formed, which would define the new concept of cultural robotics. According to the importance of the embodiment of robots in the sense of presence, the influence of robots in communication culture is anticipated. The sustainability of robotics culture based on diversity for cultural communities for various acceptance modalities is explored in order to anticipate the creation of different attributes of culture between robot and humans in the futurePeer reviewe

L’INTELLECT INCARNÉ: Sur les interprétations computationnelles, évolutives et philosophiques de la connaissance

Modern cognitive science cannot be understood without recent developments in computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, neuroscience, biology, linguistics, and psychology. Classic analytic philosophy as well as traditional AI assumed that all kinds of knowledge must eplicitly be represented by formal or programming languages. This assumption is in contradiction to recent insights into the biology of evolution and developmental psychology of the human organism. Most of our knowledge is implicit and unconscious. It is not formally represented, but embodied knowledge which is learnt by doing and understood by bodily interacting with ecological niches and social environments. That is true not only for low-level skills, but even for high-level domains of categorization, language, and abstract thinking. Embodied cognitive science, AI, and robotics try to build the embodied mind in an artificial evolution. From a philosophical point of view, it is amazing that the new ideas of embodied mind and robotics have deep roots in 20th-century philosophy.Die moderne Kognitionswissenschaft kann nicht verstanden werden ohne Einbeziehung der neuesten Errungenschaften aus der Computerwissenschaft, künstlichen Intelligenz (AI), Robotik, Neurowissenschaft, Biologie, Linguistik und Psychologie. Die klassische analytische Philosophie, wie auch die traditionelle AI, setzten voraus, dass alle Arten des Wissens explizit durch formale oder Programmsprachen dargestellt werden müssen. Diese Annahme steht im Widerspruch zu den rezenten Einsichten in die Evolutionsbiologie und Entwicklungspsychologie des menschlichen Organismus. Der größte Teil unseres Wissens ist implizit und unbewusst. Es ist kein formal repräsentiertes, sondern ein verkörpertes Wissen, das durch Handeln gelernt und durch körperliche Interaktion mit ökologischen Nischen und gesellschaftlichen Umgebungen verstanden wird. Dies gilt nicht nur für niedere Fertigkeiten, sondern auch für höher gestellte Domänen: Kategorisierung, Sprache und abstraktes Denken. Die verkörperte Erkenntniswissenschaft, AI und Robotik versuchen, den verkörperten Geist in einer artifiziellen Evolution zu bilden. Vom philosophischen Standpunkt gesehen ist es erstaunlich, wie tief die neuen Ideen des verkörperten Geistes und der Robotik in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts verankert sind.La science cognitive moderne ne peut être comprise sans les progrès récents en informatique, intelligence artificielle, robotique, neuroscience, biologie, linguistique et psychologie. La philosophie analytique classique et l’intelligence artificielle traditionnelle présumaient que toutes les sortes de savoir devaient être représentées explicitement par des langages formels ou programmatiques. Cette thèse est en contradiction avec les découvertes récentes en biologie de l’évolution et en psychologie évolutive de l’organisme humain. La majeure partie de notre savoir est implicite et inconsciente. Elle n’est pas représentée formellement, mais constitue un savoir incarné, qui s’acquiert par l’action et se comprend en interaction corporelle avec nos niches écologiques et nos environnements sociaux. Cela n’est pas seulement vrai pour nos aptitudes élémentaires, mais aussi pour nos facultés supérieures de catégorisation, de langage et de pensée abstraite. Science cognitive incarnée, l’intelligence artificielle, ainsi que la robotique, tentent de construire un intellect incarné en évolution artificielle. Du point de vue philosophique, il est admirable de voir à quel point les nouvelles idées d’intellect incarné et de robotique sont ancrées dans la philosophie du XXe siècle

The Humanities and the Digital

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020The long history of human biological and cultural co-evolution has been, in its entirety, a history of the composition between the human and the non-human, a history of interactions and media- tions between the physical, biological, technological and symbolic dimensions of existence.The full recognition of this reality dictates the need for an extended ecological thinking that also imposes on the humanities. Their contribution to a general ecology is, in fact, crucial, as the latter cannot do without a critique of the Anthropos’s spiritual and cognitive primordiality and his exter- nalization in modes of perceiving, thinking and acting upon the world. Media studies have been central to this critique and to the post-human epistemology that emerged, in particular, through digital culture. Ecological thinking thus requires a cognitive ecol- ogy which, in turn, constitutes itself as a critique of mediation, increasingly necessary, as both cognition and existence are now permeated by informationalization, computation and algorithmic governance, forming a planetary scale digital environment.publishersversionpublishe

Do organisms have an ontological status?

The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the “phenomenology of organic life” in the 20th century, with authors such as Kurt Goldstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem. In this paper I try to reconstruct some of the main interpretive ‘stages’ or ‘layers’ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might ‘organism’ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of ‘organismic’ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the ‘projective’ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying

Embodied conversations: Performance and the design of a robotic dancing partner

This paper reports insights gained from an exploration of performance-based techniques to improve the design of relationships between people and responsive machines. It draws on the Emergent Objects project and specifically addresses notions of embodiment as employed in the field of performance as a means to prototype and develop a robotic agent, SpiderCrab, designed to promote expressive interaction of device and human dancer, in order to achieve ‘performative merging’. The significance of the work is to bring further knowledge of embodiment to bear on the development of human-technological interaction in general. In doing so, it draws on discursive and interpretive methods of research widely used in the field of performance but not yet obviously aligned with some orthodox paradigms and practices within design research. It also posits the design outcome as an ‘objectile’ in the sense that a continuous and potentially divergent iteration of prototypes is envisaged, rather than a singular final product. The focus on performative merging draws in notions of complexity and user experience. Keywords: Embodiment; Performance; Tacit Knowledge; Practice-As-Research; Habitus.</p

Evolving robot software and hardware

This paper summarizes the keynote I gave on the SEAMS 2020 conference. Noting the power of natural evolution that makes living systems extremely adaptive, I describe how artificial evolution can be employed to solve design and optimization problems in software. Thereafter, I discuss the Evolution of Things, that is, the possibility of evolving physical artefacts and zoom in on a (r)evolutionary way of creating 'bodies' and 'brains' of robots for engineering and fundamental research

From evolutionary computation to the evolution of things

Evolution has provided a source of inspiration for algorithm designers since the birth of computers. The resulting field, evolutionary computation, has been successful in solving engineering tasks ranging in outlook from the molecular to the astronomical. Today, the field is entering a new phase as evolutionary algorithms that take place in hardware are developed, opening up new avenues towards autonomous machines that can adapt to their environment. We discuss how evolutionary computation compares with natural evolution and what its benefits are relative to other computing approaches, and we introduce the emerging area of artificial evolution in physical systems

Envisioning Cyborg Hybridity Through Performance Art: A Case Study of Stelarc and His Exploration of Humanity in the Digital Age

In this paper I argue that artistic representation has historically been and continues to be a valuable medium for envisioning new bodily forms and for raising important questions regarding changes in what it means to be human in an era of rapid technological advancement. I make this claim using Stelarc, an eccentric Australian performance artist, as a case study. Stelarc’s artistic exploration of the modern-day cyborg enacts and represents philosophical and ontological concepts such as identity, hybridity, and embodiment that are subject to change in the digital age. In order to arrive at this claim, Chapter 1 will trace the cyborg back to its use in 20th century Dada art. I do this to demonstrate how artists have historically depicted shifts in human subjectivities along with their changing technological landscapes. In Chapter 2, I define more precisely what the “cyborg” means for the 21st century and outline a selection of cyborg narratives pertaining to futurist lines of thought. Here I introduce Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg but return to it more extensively in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 examines the scientific and philosophical context of Stelarc, beginning with a discussion of the Extended Mind Hypothesis as a neurological background or frame of reference for his art. It continues with a close look at Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a philosophical foundation that Stelarc engages with in his performance pieces. Chapter 4 gives a thorough background on Stelarc and the central themes he explores throughout his work. Chapter 5 closely analyzes two of his pieces, Prosthetic Head and Ear on Arm, in order to explore how his art both enacts and moves beyond Haraway’s cyborg as he questions and blurs notions of embodiment, awareness, prosthesis, and ‘natural.’ Chapter 6 summarizes my argument and concludes with remarks about the importance of Stelarc, our relationship to technology, and the new technological implications of what it means to be human