Currently robotic technologies developments raise great expectations about the extension of human capabilities and the improvement of many aspects of human life, including freedom from repetitive jobs and fatigue, more precise and less invasive surgery, effective assistance for elderly and disabled people, new forms of support in education and entertainment. These expectations of the robotic technologies fall squarely in the wake of the classical view of technological progress put forward by Bacon and Descartes. This view rehearses, in terms that are more acceptable to modern sensibilities, the Promethean promise of compensating the extending and deficiencies the powers of human biological endowment by means of man-made tools and devices.
Robotics adds a very distinctive flavor to classical myths and modern age expectations on the technology. Robots are very special kinds of machines: the coordinated unfolding of their sensing, motor, and information processing abilities enables one to achieve goal-oriented and adaptive behaviors. Goal-oriented and adaptive behaviors were, by and large, an exclusive prerogative of biological systems until the rise of robotics. For this reason, the human enterprise robotics is more related closely than previous technological undertakings to mythical tales concerning the origin of animate beings from inanimate matter. The first human beings were assembled by divine entities from fire, clay, air, and other material constituents. Now, human beings are able to assemble from inanimate matter entities manifesting adaptive and intelligent action. This manifestation of human ingenuity through robotic systems and technologies is, at the same time, a manifestation of human hubris, insofar as robotics allows human beings to usurp and arrogate to themselves a divine prerogative. Thus, robotics adds a new dimension to the Promethean association of sin and burglary to technological progress, insofar as robotics enables one to alter in distinctive ways the “natural order” and “deflect” natural processes towards the achievement of human goals.
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