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The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines
Eric G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University and the author of Coleridge's An Anatomy of Limbo and The Spiritual History of Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination .
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 7, 2023
Overall decent reflexion on the different motivations for "android" making as well as the different types of androids produced, although I personally think it could have been more well structured and better written.
I'll just leave bellow some quotes that I find worthy of note.
“This is the double bind of the digital age, a bind fully illuminated by the old golem: we want to trade our decaying bodies for eternal machines; we wish to escape mechanistic prisons for undying vitalities.”
“The humorous android makes us ponder the possibility that machines might be more human than actual human beings. If a machine can be more emotionally intelligent than a human, is the machine then an ideal, a realization of biology?”
“The mummy illuminates our vexed technological attempts to extend mortality in the material vessels. The golem sheds light on our troubled essays to transcend the temporal world in time-bound engines. The automaton reveals our undying machines as manifestations of death drive.”
I'll just leave bellow some quotes that I find worthy of note.
“This is the double bind of the digital age, a bind fully illuminated by the old golem: we want to trade our decaying bodies for eternal machines; we wish to escape mechanistic prisons for undying vitalities.”
“The humorous android makes us ponder the possibility that machines might be more human than actual human beings. If a machine can be more emotionally intelligent than a human, is the machine then an ideal, a realization of biology?”
“The mummy illuminates our vexed technological attempts to extend mortality in the material vessels. The golem sheds light on our troubled essays to transcend the temporal world in time-bound engines. The automaton reveals our undying machines as manifestations of death drive.”
April 25, 2018
The author guides readers through an impressive timeline for the origins of 3 of the creatures popular in science fiction - mummies, gollums, automatons, going as back as ancient times. It is an interesting exploration, especially in case of automatons as that story is not well explored at this point. His main point is that the "machines" are a mirror reflection of the human and his desires but the entire thing is too deeply engulfed in Freudian rhetoric and forms a very biased and one-sided point of view.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews