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Writer/Director Brian Knappenberger
Produced by Joe Arnao
Ambrose Video Publishing, 2002
45 minutes
Platinum Award, Houston Film Festival
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Robotics
Film
Into the Body
This is the age of new technology - robotics, gene therapy, artificial intelligence, genetically modified foods, cochlear and other body implants. We are developing the potential to fundamentally change ourselves as a species. But what is appropriate and inappropriate? What does it mean - and what will it mean - to be human?
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Essay
The Natural and the Artificial
Science and technology today provide powerful instruments for understanding and controlling not only the world around us, but ourselves as well.
Mankind has always harbored an ambivalent attitude towards our sometimes daunting powers to understand and to control the natural world. In the 1960s, the novelist Norman Mailer wrote: "There is a primitive residue in man which is far from convinced, face to face with the presence of a machine, that the engine is not possessed with a variety of spirits benign and wicked. An enormous anxiety of technology remains." The roots of the ambivalence are the exhilaration of technical creativity--being godlike--and the fear of divine retribution for that hubris...
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Suggested Reading
Robots among Us: The Challenges and Promises of Robotics. Baker, Christopher W. 48 pages. Millbrook, lib. ed. ISBN: 0-7613-1969-7. (2002).$22.90 Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. Menzel, Peter; D'Aluisio, Faith . Paperback. 240 pages. MIT Press. ISBN: 0-262-63245-4. Reprint edition. (October 1, 2001). $19.95 Superhumans: A Beginner's Guide to Bionics. (Future Files). Beecroft, Simon. Paperback. 32 pages. Copper Beech Books. ISBN: 0-761-30636-6. (April 1998). $8.95.
For younger readers More suggested reading ››
Recommended Films
Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001) PG-13.
A futuristic Pinocchio tale with Haley Joel Osment as a highly advanced robotic boy able to "love" his mother. Bicentennial Man (1999) PG.
Based on Isaac Asimov's story, Robin Williams plays an android who over two centuries develops thought and emotion - artificial intelligence. The Bionic Woman (1975) not rated.
After a crippling accident, a woman is rebuilt with bionic parts turning her into a better-than-human cyborg. A spinoff of the Six Million Dollar Man. More Films ››
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