Symposium 2009
TECHNOTOPIA!
The implementation of technology mostly depends on its potential to be associated with utopian relevance. By taking part in the development, testing, propagating and nationwide distribution of technological innovations, we – as developers, media workers, and consumers – are asked to also participate in the evolvement of a future in which technology will have tackled the problems of the present for good. These problems are usually nothing but effects and consequences of our techno-capitalistic past and present. And yet: the utopian scenarios of reparation are supposed to be capable of correcting these shortcomings in the future. This, after all, is the essence of the belief in technology, a belief which time and again prompts us to participate and invest our work, time, money, and of course, our hope in it.The future – when technology is thought to be implemented – therefore becomes a surrogate for political changes which are impossible in the present. Against this background, technology transcends into a messianic promise whose necessary cultural-theological counterpart is the fear of the (wrong) technology. This very notion (which inevitably emerges at the end of the 20th century) assigns a dystopian as well as a utopian potential to technology, and it is up to us to cultivate the right application of the enormous (and sometimes violent) possibilities it contains. The potential assigned to technology, namely to change reality, leaves us with no choice: we have to participate in its discourse, in theory and in practice, whether we believe in it or not. What might happen if we carelessly left it to the others is illustrated by the various narrations of how technology would cause big trouble in the wrong hands. During the war in Iraq, this narration has momentarily left the realm of fiction and then only became fictitious again when it was debunked as atrocity propaganda projected into the future. The promises of happiness and, yes, of salvation assigned to technology became exemplary in the 20th century, its magnitude already providing a glimpse of the imminent ardency between man and technology. In the literal sense, the robot embodies this promise: as a technical simulation of human workforce (in actual robotics), or, respectively, of working people (in the anthropomorphic or otherwise human-like Science Fiction bots which tend to become protagonists or important sidekicks of the narration).
Robots are an extremely vivid concretization of the promise of the bourgeois society: the scientific, political, economic, and technological revolutions which triggered the overcoming of the static medieval caste society and its replacement by a dynamic bourgeois societal system, allowed for a permanent improvement of the conditio humana. At a certain, yet, admittedly, always undefined point in time, they give rise to a utopian and at the same time post-historical societal system. In it, due to rationalization and automation, man would not (or hardly) have to work any more. Man would be able to invest all this newly found spare time in activities which correlate better with his or her predisposition as a cultural being. Only by delegating his or her economical estrangement and exploitation to artificially created ersatz-humans, man will obtain his full human form. This alone will enable the unleashing of human productive forces, permanently ensuring the basis of the emerging society of affluence without dearth and hardship.
The upper-class beneficiaries of the created prosperity were able to pretend to be avant-garde against the background of this promise of salvation. And it would rid them of the smell of being profiteers of the victims and injustices of techno-capitalism.
In the public fiction of this emerging affluence and leisure society, robots, AI-units and androids still play a key role. They are built and meant to disburden man of weary, draining, stupefying, or dangerous activities, for example as fightbots in the upcoming distribution wars of the 21st century. The vision of smart household robots or the fully automated ‘home of the future’ has embedded this promise into everyday life in an impressive way. And in spite of its being unredeemed for so long, the promise keeps circulating in new versions and variations.
Every technological innovation so far succeeded to reactive the old bourgeois promise of freedom, even if only as a necessary correction of an already broken promise, as was the case with web 2.0.
The development of decent household robots, too, is far from being ready for mass production, even though the predicted arrival date of the utopian robotic society has already been exceeded a couple of times. In this respect, 2009 does not differ all that much from, say, 1969 – at least not in the way in which it was imagined back then.
This certainly provokes the virulent question if the utopia of constantly available and universally operable robots will be realized in the foreseeable future. Their final implementation as a post-human class of servants, always available, inexhaustible, never complaining and morally non-problematic machine slaves is still a distant prospect, a part of the blurry future into which it was projected in the beginning of the 20th century. In the meantime, we have come down to earth where the utopia of the robot is recognizable as this vague vision of the future. Bit by bit, it has started to lose its pathos. In the meantime, it should be well understood that even tomorrow's robots will only serve one single purpose: the preservation of people’s faith in technology’s potential to revolutionize their present in the future, which is essential for capitalist societies to function smoothly.
Well, robots have been surrounded by wistful nostalgia for quite some time. This nostalgia, resembling a quotation, wishes to be reminiscent of a time in which the promises of robotics could still be believed easily: quite a few people today associate with the term ‘robotics’ merely outdated, naïve images of the future from the 50s and 60s.
Roboexotica 2009 will be dealing with ‚technotopia’ against this background. Within the framework of an ideological critique, the incongruities of a continuously re-established hope for a future which will finally be furnished with actually useful robots and the present application of production robots for economization purposes will be discussed. In order to be able to understand how this future expectancy is created, kept alive, and adjusted to the current scope of development and expectations of innovation, it will be necessary to scrutinize how future is (and also used to be) designed and predicted by means of historical presents: how is the present mirrored in our projections into the future it creates? Which future expectation can be deduced from which present and how is the respective image of the future created? Is this even possible? Were historical future images verified in the respective presents these futures have finally become? How much sense can promises still make anyway with regard to the current status of practical and theoretical technological evolution? And how probable is it that these promises can be delivered on? What are the societal preconditions for emancipatory future promises to be redeemable at all? Taking the current trends of progress into account, is a ‘utopian’ future even thinkable any more? Or are we already beyond the ‘dystopian turn’, faced with incalculable environmental disasters, dwindling raw materials, rapid impoverishment of a majority of the world population and similar scenarios of crises. And wasn’t it exactly our undaunted faith in technology that brought us here? How does this twin structure of technology - being the problem and the redeemer at the same time – work? Does it still make sense to discuss the complex topic of robotics or has its utopian potential become a mere empty promise, designed to lure us into a future which will hardly differ from our present? Does this promise of a better future only provide an excuse to keep going and maintain the status quo? Or does this fact provide the promise with a grain of truth which only has to be uncovered and turned against technology?
How, we ask, can we rid technology of mere progress optimism and reinterpret it so that, through all the delusions, there will actually be a trace of utopia? And how can especially robotics (being an especially vivid example of a fake future promise) help to separate the utopia from the publicity hype the cultural industry of technology has turned it into?
Talks and panels will be announced soon!