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2 results

Understanding Life in the Universe
  • Wallace Arthur
  • Published online:
    28 October 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • The two most fascinating questions about extraterrestrial life are where it is found and what it is like. In particular, from our Earth-based vantage point, we are keen to know where the closest life to us is, and how similar it might be to life on our home planet. This book deals with both of these key issues. It considers possible homes for life, with a focus on Earth-like exoplanets. And it examines the possibility that life elsewhere might be similar to life here, due to the existence of parallel environments, which may result in Darwinian selection producing parallel trees of life between one planet and another. Understanding Life in the Universe provides an engaging and myth-busting overview for any reader interested in the existence and nature of extraterrestrial life, and the realistic possibility of discovering credible evidence for it in the near future.

  • Chapter 6 - Machines, AIs, Cyborgs, Systems

  • from Part II - New Objects of Enquiry
  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book:
    After the Human
    Published online:
    26 November 2020
    Print publication:
    10 December 2020, pp 91-104

  • Summary

    Machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems arise as images of the posthuman within the discourses of posthumanism and transhumanism. From the side of technoscience, advances in cybernetics and systems theory have been the prime movers of the posthuman imaginary. AI and its elaboration in the cultural imaginary is particularly instructive with regard to transhumanist visions of transcendence. Where cybernetics spread across organic bodies, computational devices, and the social dynamics of communication, AI bypassed multiple cybernetic couplings to concentrate on the design, construction, and study of computational agencies. AI discourse ran alongside the development of SETI—the scientific program dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Both AI and SETI foreground how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. The 2015 novel Aurora overcomes the AI imaginary as previously constituted by bringing ecological realism to the relations to machines, AIs, cyborgs, and systems.