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Week 3: Robotics+Art

Gutenberg's Printing Press
In week 3’s lecture, Vesna discussed how the industrial revolution changed the process of production and the types of innovations created. Mass production became the main mode of production, shifting from hand crafted artwork that required much skill to an assembly line of simplified jobs that made a day’s work much more efficient. It seems as if the industrial revolution altered metal work and inventions from intricate works of art to mass productions of technology. I initially never considered the printing press as a work of art, but after this lesson, I now understand more clearly that technology and robotics is just a form of mechanical art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mLmHUbC240
What really surprised me was that the invention of what we know in the modern culture as robots was actually created for theater. Just as Benjamin and Douglass considered that every type of art can be reproduced mechanically, robots are just that. They have been replicated in digital forms, such as in the movie Robocop, and have changed the meaning of art and its connotations of how we perceive robotics in our modern society. Technology has had to adapt to the ever-changing strides we make in science, and with that, so has the way inventors create their new concepts and complex, mechanical forms of art.

Now, with technology becoming more sophisticated, robots are becoming more and more human-like. Just as Descartes and other philosophers discussed, the distinction between human and robot will become blurred and it will be hard to differentiate between the two. Although no robot has yet to crack the Turing Test, a test of an artificial intelligent being to think and behave as a human, everyday robots are getting closer to being able to think like humans.





Sources:

Vesna, Victoria. “Robotics + Art.” Lecture 3.

Quiah, Priscilla. “Disruptive Innovation.” N.p., n.d. Web. 2015.
<http://cronkitehhh.jmc.asu.edu/blog/2015/04/disruptive-innovation/>

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" from Illuminations. New York, Schocken Books, 1968, Pgs. 217-251

Davis, Douglas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995).” Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 381–386. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1576221.

Reingold, Eyal. "The Turing Test." N.p., n.d. Web. 1999.
<http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/ai.html>





Comments

  1. brontehalliganApril 23, 2018 at 7:05 PM

    Lia, I really liked your discussion of robotics and theatre. The digital forms of technology has adapted to the world today, and like you said I do believe we are taking strides within science and the technological world, to try and keep up with our consumer identities that we have today. Great post! I enjoyed it

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 23, 2018 at 10:36 PM

    I found your post really interesting, I think it is really crazy to think that robots are getting closer to thinking like humans in the near future. However, it is somewhat scary to me, I am scared of robots.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousApril 24, 2018 at 7:48 PM

    I loved how you brought up the overlap between human and robots. I think the idea of creating some artificial being that can simulate the human behavior and emotion is an intrinsically artistic approach toward the nuts and bolts of the modern technology.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownApril 25, 2018 at 5:46 PM

    It's interesting how you talk about machines being artistic in their own way. I feel like there are a lot of machines that have had to not only operate well be aesthetically appealing. Prime examples would be cars and phones which we buy just as much for performance as appearance.

    ReplyDelete

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