Jozef Kelemen

Petr Sosik

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the ?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: . . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: “Let us make man in our image. . . ” (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator’s acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is – using the trendy Dawkins’ term – perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

6th European Conference, ECAL 2001, Prague, Czech Republic, September 10-14, 2001. Proceedings

Advances in Artificial Life

Jan Romportl

Eva Zackova

Products of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have mostly been formed by the views, opinions and goals of the “insiders”, i.e. people usually with engineering background who are driven by the force that can be metaphorically described as the pursuit of the craft of Hephaestus. However, since the present-day technology allows for tighter and tighter mergence of the “natural” everyday human life with machines of immense complexity, the responsible reaction of the scientific community should be based on cautious reflection of what really lies beyond AI, i.e. on the frontiers where the tumultuous ever-growing and ever-changing cloud of AI touches the rest of the world. The chapters of this boo are based on the selected subset of the presentations that were delivered by their respective authors at the conference “Beyond AI: Interdisciplinary Aspects of Artificial Intelligence” held in Pilsen in December 2011. From its very definition, the reflection of the phenomena that lie beyond AI must be inherently interdisciplinary. And so is this book: all the authors took part in a mutual transdisciplinary dialogue after explaining their views on AI not only to a narrow selection of their usual close peers with the same specialisation, but to a much broader audience of various experts from AI engineering, natural sciences, humanities and philosophy. The chapters of this book thus reflect results of such a dialogue.

Contemplations, Expectations, Applications

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams” held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams”.

The Disappearing Human-Machine Divide

Jan Sokol

Ivan M. Havel

Stanislav Komárek

Luboš Kropáček

Antonín V. Líman

Milan Nakonečný

Tomáš Sedláček

Jiří Stehlík

Marek Vácha

Sborník Hlavou zeď 2011 je první pokus představit čtenářům myšlení vybraných českých osobností – zástupců současné vědy, kultury, duchovních, filosofických i jiných směrů. Sborník by měl být určen jak pro čtenáře hledající vědecké poznatky, tak i pro ty, kteří se zajímají o informace z oblasti futurologie a lidské imaginace. Doufáme, že se nám podaří inspirovat a podněcovat k neotřelému myšlení.

Úvahy nad civilizací a její budoucností

Hlavou zeď 2011

Jozef Kelemen

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