Hubots

The future is now. Here come the hubots! Using increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and embodied intelligence (EI), a new generation of robots is being designed to look, act and even think just like humans! Hubots, or human-inspired robots, are expanding the boundaries of what robots can do. For example, they can fight fires on the high seas, set up colonies on other planets and provide humans with companionship. This book introduces readers to ten different robots, the challenges they were each designed to meet and the superpowers that enable them to take on tasks humans can’t. Human-like robots live among us!

Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, Ruth Millikan argues that the intentionality of language can be described without reference to speaker intentions and that an understanding of the intentionality of thought can and should be divorced from the problem of understanding consciousness. The results support a realist theory of truth and of universals, and open the way for a nonfoundationalist and nonholistic approach to epistemology. A Bradford Book

Science fiction is often presented as a source of utopia, or even of prophecies, used in capitalism to promote social, political and technoscientific innovations. Science Fiction and Innovation Design assesses the validity of this approach by exploring the impact this imaginary world has on the creativity of engineers and researchers. Companies seek to anticipate and predict the future through approaches such as design fiction: mobilizing representations of science fiction to create prototypes and develop scenarios relevant to organizational strategy. The conquest of Mars or the weapons of the future are examples developed by authors to demonstrate how design innovation involves continuous dialogue between multiple players, from the scientist to the manager, through to the designers and the science fiction writers.

In the past decades, developments in the fields of medicine, new media, and biotechnologies challenged many representations and practices, questioning the understanding of our corporeal limits. Using concrete examples from literary fiction, media studies, philosophy, performance arts, and social sciences, this collection underlines how bodily models and transformations, thought until recently to be only fictional products, have become a part of our reality. The essays provide a spectrum of perspectives on how the body emerges as a transitional environment between fictional and factual elements, a process understood as faction.

Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.

The future is now. Here come the hubots! Using increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and embodied intelligence (EI), a new generation of robots is being designed to look, act and even think just like humans! Hubots, or human-inspired robots, are expanding the boundaries of what robots can do. For example, they can fight fires on the high seas, set up colonies on other planets and provide humans with companionship. This book introduces readers to ten different robots, the challenges they were each designed to meet and the superpowers that enable them to take on tasks humans canêt. Human-like robots live among us!

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2017, held in December 2017, in London, UK. The 12 revised papers presented together with 2 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 83 submissions. One of the biggest challenges of the Love and Sex with Robots conference is to engage a wider scientific community in the discussions of the multifaceted topic, which has only recently established itself as an academic research topic within, but not limited to, the disciplines of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, robotics, biomedical science and robot ethics etc.

2183 A.D. T.R.I.G.O.M. rules the blue planet. Physical exertion and interaction between humans is discouraged. Most of the humans retreat into Avatar worlds to escape reality. Only a chosen few are still looking out and observing the dramatic changes occurring on the planet known as Earth. But even they are terrified of the threat of the Red Zone... In a world of A.I. and Hubots this is a story of the struggle for humanity and a search for what makes us all human. We are taken on a journey with Torri and Joshua, two characters whose destinies are intertwined. Uncomfortable with the Avatar lifestyle and shunned for loving the outdoors, they unknowingly hold the key to the continuation of the human race into the final Epoch.