Robotics and Art
The silent movie, Modern
Times, that stars Charlie Chaplin, provides a good characterization for the
mechanical automation that dominated the second industrial revolution. The
famous “Factory Scene” is very funny, but is also a critique of society, or a
critique of the direction that the filmmakers thought society was moving in.
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| Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times |
In Modern Times, “the
worker becomes an appendage of the machine,” not the other way around (“Chaplin: Analysis of Modern Times.”) It was
films like this one that led people in Western societies to be afraid of robots
and the industrialization that they bring.
Another movie that builds
on the Western cultural fear of robots and mechanization is The Terminator. Meia Chita-Tegmark
writes that “the prevalent visual representation of AI risk has become the
terminator robots,” and I think she is correct in assuming that Western society
fears the advancement of AI.
However, as Professor
Vesna mentioned in the lecture, Japanese society has traditionally been more
open to robots. This sentiment is expressed in the anime, Android Kikaider, where a humanoid robot develops a friendship with
humans and ultimately saves the day ("Android Kikaider: The
Animation.")
Outside the world of
fiction, robotics is being pioneered here at UCLA in Dr. Dennis Hong’s RoMeLa
laboratory. I have a friend that works in this lab, where he manufacturing
parts for a hexapod robot, and a humanoid robot, THOR. According to the group, “THOR-RD’s
humanoid form is ideal for the human centric environments encountered in
disaster areas.” (Team THOR.) Thus, humanoid robots are not only fear inducing
elements in science fiction; they are useful in real world scenarios.
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| RoMeLa's Hexapod Robot |
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| Disaster Relief Robot, THOR |
Amazingly, in the future,
robots may even be creating their own art, called algorithmic art! ("Creative
AI: The Robots That Would Be Painters.")
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| Algorithmic Art |
"Android Kikaider:
The Animation." IMDb. IMDb.com. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305046/>.
"Chaplin: Analysis of
Modern Times." Philosophy Philosophers. Web. 20
Apr. 2015. <http://www.the-philosophy.com/chaplin-analysis-modern-times>.
Chita-Tegmark, Meia.
"Terminator Robots and AI Risk." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meia-chitategmark/terminator-robots-and-ai-risk_b_6788918.html>.
"Creative AI: The
Robots That Would Be Painters." Creative AI: The Robots That Would Be Painters. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.gizmag.com/creative-ai-algorithmic-art-painting-fool-aaron/36106/>.
"Home." Team
THOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.
<http://www.thordrc.com/>.
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