Robot Dreams

For decades science fiction writers have amazed us and terrorized us with their portrayal of the world of artificial intelligence - from armies of cyborgs to legions of programmed zombies. Today we are now living in that future age of robots and artificial intelligence and all those dreams of the past are coming true. Mechanical robots will soon be outdated with biologically created humanoids connected to each other across the globe. They will self-repair, gather energy from the sun and live forever. They will be all-knowing and all-powerful like Gods that will walk the Earth. This future world is now inevitable and cannot be stopped. The greatest brains on Earth today have warned us about the consequences of getting this new technology wrong. They have predicted catastrophe. Prepare to meet your future.

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.
Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West.