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Automation |  |
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Robots & robotics.
Machines that resemble animals and people --called "automata"-- were developed as an exercise in virtuosity that took the form of amusement in the sixteenth century and were later used as adornments on clocks. Automatons like robots that build cars today are the symbol of post-modern automated machine tool complexes that sustain industry. The origins of such automata derived too, from the earlier eccelesiastical development of Roman Catholic church organs in the ninth and tenth centuries.
“You see the Robots have no interest in life. They have no enjoyments.”
Karel Capek, “RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots,”
Shown here, the Mars rover is a robot.
The term robotnik is Czech; meaning a serf; robota, is the root word for statute labor, those people compelled by law to work for others.
Automated machinery: origin & meaning in the recent & distant past.
| What? | transfer machines |
Cam controls |
thermostatic & mechanic controls |
| When? | LATE VICTORIAN | MEDIEVAL EURASIA | EARLY MODERN |
| Where? | Massachusetts | Spain, Italy, Flanders | England, France & USA |
| How? | web of components |
synergy of resource flows |
period of “fruitful” dialogue |
| For? | Waltham Watch Co. | Wine, leather, metals | steam, textiles, aircraft |
All successful technical developments involve ties among of a web of related components, a synergy of resource flows and “optimal conditions” over a long period of “fruitful” dialogue.
Each set of technical complexes may be viewed as revealing three aspects:
- technical materials comprising the tools, machines, or appliances,
- organizational and behavioral details of production,
- imaginative cultural and symbolic allusions.
What are optimal conditions?
Take the development of mainframe analog and later digital computers.
Babbage - Aiken - Von Neumann
Creative specialization, revision & revivals
Cosmological Symbolism
"creator" (inventor) God.
Critical resources
fuel --> metals --> electronics
resource base
The means of subsistence will never grow at a pace to outstrip population growth; instead the population grow geometrically as the agricultural base grows arithmetically so that over the long term arable land and sustained yield farming places a limitation on the size of human populations.
scarcity versus abundance
Land --- resources
Labor --- population
Capital --- invested wealth
How is the meaning of the myth of Narcissus when added to the myth of Daedalus & Icarus astonishingly accurate, as a portrayal of the contemporary attitudes about technology, tool use and technical advance?
Mistaking the self image for the real image
personal universal
imaginary actual
magical explainable
fantastic factual
fictional realistic
sentiment activity
ideological resource base
Can people accurately distinguish, for example, the sound of one’s own voice & a recording of that voice?
What if we mistake the image -- a "photo-shopped" photograph, for an actual "untouched" photo?
Are robots capable of being mistaken -- for the reality of being human -- and if so, is humanity at all defined by the other--the robot, with artificial intelligence?
The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing --a mathematician and scientist who helped break the German code during World War Two-- for the purpose of being able to tell a machine response from a human one.
Take for example this concept:
“At bottom it is the intensity of his belief in the land, as a locus of both
economic and moral value, which prevents him {Jefferson} from seeing what the machine portends for America.”
The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx, p. 150.
What determines the value of peoples' efforts?
William Greider, Who Will Tell the People.
Technology index 
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| Tools of Toil: what to read. | ||
| Tools are historical building blocks of technology. | ||
This page was created, by J. Siry.
