ABSTRACT
This book explores how robots, imagined as human beings, were re-rendered as other artists as machines, and so as machine technologies develop, so too does a corresponding fear that they might rise up and become too powerful. It brings to a close by making final remarks on the themes of violence and love. Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots is the first fiction in which all humanity is destroyed. A robotic machine to be offered as a viable alternative to a human relationship shows considerable confusion about the nature of human attachments and how humans attach to one another. Robotic machines and artificial intelligence agents have become exemplars in showing us these new kinds of relational possibilities. The AI and robotic machines assume their ascendancy, a shift needs to occur in the modulation of what it means to be human. Finally, the book concludes that annihilation underscores the making of contemporary robotics and anthropological theorizing of the human and nonhuman relation.
