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Alife 9 Tutorial
Robot ? a Word and a Machine in the
World
by
Jana Horáková
Dept. of Theatre and Interactive Media Studies, Masaryk
University, Brno, Czech Republic
and
Jozef Kelemen
nstitute of Computer Science, Silesian University, Opava,
Czech Republic
Robots are in
our society today much more than subjects of scientific, technical, and
economical interests. Robots considerably changed our world, our thinking, and
are changing our culture and us as the humankind. In the proposed tutorial
lecture we will sketch the beginnings and the early history of this phenomenon
for those interested mainly in the science and engineering of robots esp. in the
context of AI and AL.
In the Slovak
spa Trencianske Teplice a new word robot has been born thanks to brothers
Karel and Josef Capek during their summer vacation in 1920 ? instead of the
originally proposed by Karel and rejected by Josef word labor ? for
naming the 20th Century variation of an eternal dream appearing e.g.
in the Genesis (in the Old Testament), in Homer’s and Aristotle’s works, in
legends on the Golem (the most popular is perhaps that connected with Prague),
and then in numerous literal and dramatic works as well as in lot of movies.
This dream on creating human beings in an artificial way excites many thinkers
and mechanics and oriented their activities toward understanding the difference
between human beings and other kind of systems (Descartes, la Mettrie, Pascal)
and constructing human-like and alive machines constructed e.g. Jaquet-Droz,
Kempelen (he constructed his problematic chess playing Turk in Bratislava, the
today’s capital of Slovakia), and Vaucason.
After
sketching the prehistory of the above mentioned dream (with some curiosities
usually not mentioned in the literature or maybe generally unknown) which leads
in the 20th Century to robots and advanced robotics, and to research in the
fields of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence, we will concentrate in
the lecture to the 20th Century origin, development, and influence of
the idea of robots from several aspects (again with some generally not familiar
curiosities):
1)
We will recapitulate in short the social and political situation in the
first third of the 20th Century in Europe and in the USA in order to determine
the two important views of robots: the social view and the technical one. Karel
Capek’s original understanding of robots in his play RUR (1921) as in fact
worker-like beings (fabricated from a specific organic gel in specialized
factories) for doing hard, monotone, and stereotypic work. The understanding of
robots originated in USA (hand in hand with the first night of the play in 1922)
is significantly different. The basic difference is evident form realizing the
difference in costumes of robots form the first night in Prague (1921) and in
NYC (1922). While in Prague robots are dressed uniformly but as human beings,
the first run in New York uses costumes for robots looking like humanoid
mechanical machines.
2)
We will sketch the cultural background (not reduced to the RUR, but
including also several modernistic developmental lines of the European art at
the end of the 19th and the fist third of the 20th
centuries), and the influence of the concept of robots into the broadly
understood art, mainly into the literature (sci-fi), theatre, and film
production.
3)
We will sketch the development of the scientific concept of machines
during the 20th Century starting with A. M. Turing (and some other
logicians of the first half of the century) effort to formalize the concept of
?mechanizing“ computation, then with J. von Neumann ideas concerning computers
and the phenomenon of self-reproduction. From this moment we will follow two
routes of further development ? the route of AI and the rout of AL ? started by
the mentioned two pioneers. We will mention the (may be) surprising fact that
much more than AI, the AL movement may identify its roots in the original Capek-type
robots. The AI roots leads to the understanding of robots in the USA at the
beginning of the 20ties of 20th Century.
4)
Sketching the very brief history of the development of AI and AL from the
perspective of development of humanoid robots we will end with mentioning the
overall influence of the interests in robots, AL, AI (and some other relevant
disciplines) into the general, philosophical understanding of the
historic-cultural substance, the role and the future of the humankind, and we
will mention in this context esp. the different just appearing ideas of the so
called post-humanism.
The tutorial
lecture is intended for those interested in broader than purely scientific
and/or technical context, aspects, and history of robotics, AI, and AL. The
expected number of participants is approx. 50. The written version of the
tutorial will be prepared and it will be possible to distribute copies of it to
registered participants.
About the
authors:
Jana
Horáková (1971) studied classical ballet at
the Brno Conservatory. After graduation, she entered the ballet ensemble of the
Czech National Theatre at Prague. Then she finished her master study of
theatrology “prima cum laude” at the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University
in Prague and at the Masaryk University in Brno (2001). In the present she is
finishing her Ph. D. studies (focused to the cultural metamorphoses of the human
beings and the machines in the 20th century from
Capek’s robots to cyborgs) at the
Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (Brno), Czech Republic. She gives regular
lectures on new media and performance art at the Department of Theatre and
Interactive media studies at the same University.
Jozef
Kelemen (1951) received his degrees in mathematics
(Comenius University, Bratislava), theoretical cybernetics (Academy of Sciences
of the USSR, Moscow) and computing technology (Slovak University of Technology,
Bratislava). He was associated in the position of (assistant, associate, and
full) professor at the Comenius University and University of Economics,
Bratislava, Slovakia, L. Eotvos University at Budapest, and I. Szechenyi
University of Technology at Gyor, Hungary. Now, he is the full professor of
computer science and the head of the Institute of Computer Science at the
Silesian University at Opava, Czech Republic. Professionally, he is oriented to
problems on the interplays between artificial intelligence, cognitive science,
and artificial life. He is the author of tens of scientific papers, more than
ten books on these topics and some collections of essays reflecting the broader
cultural interplays between the above mentioned fields of scientific and
engineering interests and the general cultural development and future.
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