ENTERING BRAVE NEW SOCIALITY WITH SUPER INTELLIGENT, EMOTIONAL, AND WET BRAINED ROBOTS

During the last decade robotics has intensively developed several variants of humanoid robots that resemble human. In the article the author discusses the origins of this tendency, which she follows to the antique concepts and into the Christian thought. She links the contemporary development of robotics with the interest for automatons, which grows at least since the eight century, when the early automatons were conceptualized by the Muslim and Byzantine inventors, and which Western culture in renaissance and particularly in Baroque constructs after the human figure. Today robotics proceeds from improving motoric functionality to some new orientations of developing humanoid robots. Research focuses on the interaction between robots and people. There are to be found attempts to surpass cybernetic limitations of robots in the sense of more human-like intelligence and feeling, e.g. with combining technology with biological systems, in some cases in addition with an ambition to create a species, which would in its features be superior to human. These shifts lead to a contemporary re-examination of the questions, what it means to be human and how do we comprehend sociality.