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The mythic (and mystic) perception of the artificial agency is, up to this meaning, the visionary alter ego of the industrial robot. If the evolution of the robot myth is examined to great lines during the century just spent, you can perceive that you have passed from the stigmatization of the obsessive attitude of the machine to an opposite organic and vitalistic cognition. The ongoing development of the retinal has allowed to filter that emptiness once hidden by fullness progressively opening doors to spiritualization of inert matter assembled in order to imitate what is not possible to imitate. The disgusting images of Villiers and Capek, like the single machines of Duchamp and Picabia have suddenly changed into their opposite state. Being robot stops to be an antihuman attitude, and automatism is not considered any longer as the symptom of absence or élan vital. Rave parties, characterized by an obsessive music and a repetitive gesture both in dancing and in interpersonal approach, express collectively the same aesthetics of absence corresponding to the catatonic immobility of videogames and Internet users. Mc Luhan was perhaps the first to perceive the essence of such radical change:

Robot technology is the instantaneous re-adaptation [É] Loewl Thomas was used to say: “When you are in the air you are anywhereÉ”. Robotic man is able to adapt instantaneously to any social situation without the guilt sense because it identifies itself with a moral or global identity called the public. Like a careful mass, the public is a harmonic background (McLuhan ­ Powers, 1986, pp. 94-95).

Reconquering a retinal perception of socially significant contexts, thanks to technology expansion of audio-visual communication, is newly opening emotional and image-like doors of the right hemisphere, held by the left hemisphere, so that “inner voices” come back to resound. The “inner images” come and assume an originally expressive strength. Julian Jaynes, in one of his famous and controversial essays has related that our ancestors’ life was dominated by divine hallucinations and strong voices, emerging from a dominant position of the right hemisphere (Jaynes, 1976). Jaynes believed, furthermore, that kind of no-ethic world had not discovered the identity meaning, yet. The problem of the Ego emersion has been led again with major prudence to the context of the economy of logical-sequential and linear economy of the left hemisphere. This becomes stronger when the language is dominated by writing and printing activities. Though you adopt such method, it is interesting to remind that Jaynes made the hypothesis that our ancestors’ life, if deprived of that principle of distinction defining the Ego, had to structure itself in a series of automatic global actions. Cortical stimulus a of the right hemisphere had to build a universal code for programmed action. Robots led by their master (dominated by his hallucinations in his turn), our ancestors may have experimented a connective condition we cannot perceive. The image and voice of divinity has a meaning only if we are dipped in such connectivity: the impalpable strength of myth, with its not “being free”, its psychosocial need. The present return of the retinal and the consequent fall of the printing identity seem to build the basis of new icons mythic strength flourishing. Among these the most alarming is the robot.

Robot Love

A second and radical change seems to emerge: artificial life is able to avoid corruption and death and even the inexorable cosmic entropy. This new model of indefinite life has suggested ideological scenarios of various nature. A techno-radical party exists prospecting a transition without solution of continuity from the human being to the robot. Important representatives of such ideology are the scientist Hans Moravec and the artist Stelarc, both convinced that the human species has passed the limits imposed by the body resources and of a mind anchored to the Paleolithyc but projected to a cosmos like that of “Star Trek”. There is a need to substitute unconditionally an obsolete body with a strong and versatile mechanism, and a cabled brain ­ able to subvert the usual space-time perception - to a mind limited by biorythms.

The passage from natural to artificial has also given birth to a transverse party, founded on a techno-bio- reformist party, basically supported by recent developments in feminine culture of a United States matrix. Ideological expressions of opposite sign, but inside the debate and attentive to all its developments, give birth to a “techno-conservative” party curiously represented by personalities like Michael Snow, the artist, fully inserting within the wide range of cyber-cultures.

The natural passage, anyway, from natural to the artificial world is the primary content of a radical ideology connecting the value of a new utopia to the hypothetical creation of artificial life and society. It is a result of the historical process, a radical solution to all conflicts, coming from private estate, in their opinion, society divided in classes and limits imposed by nature to the expansion of attended goals, passion and human potentialities. Such ideology is living in all advanced countries of the world, in different ways, and in Italy, too, even with less extremist declinations, maybe due to the unconscious influence of capillary humanism.

There is anyway a strong diffidence towards such ideology, a taken distance which apparently takes the shapes of techno - phobia. The science-fiction literature has captured many shadings of such a feeling. A widespread fear that Isaac Asimov, the writer, has defined like “Frankenstein syndrome”. Asimov, in the Two-century man describes the collective phobia triggered by the presumed eternity of the robot (Asimov, 1976). In such relationship the creature goes over the “Creator” just in her ability to live the infinitive. Having a beginning and not an end, like Adam before the expulsion from Eden, it is an unforgivable original sin. The phobia translates itself into a control mechanism, and it is what happens to androids invented by the very fertile and disturbing fantasy of Philip Dick. Dick’s androids undergo to cruel and precocious programmed death, because in literary fiction they have gone over the level of simple images, thinking and feeling like man. On the contrary, the two-century man, the ideal robot, has is ability to include the sequence of human lives without any limit. His ability is complete without any limit. The reasoning capacities for R. Andrei Martin are then higher than those of man. He is a whole including its own limits, like in abstract universe of symbolic logics.

Antonio Caronia, has correctly concluded that Asimov, in this essay, has plied his tragic character to the desire of conciliation and integration dominating a large part of his production. (Caronia, 1996, p. 30). It is also possible to deepen the scalpel in another organ, and suspect two-century man being able to hide an involuntary metaphor of a new redemption, a technological redemption, which has to come true in the self-sacrifice of the volunteer scapegoat (in this case the robot Andrew Martin is the personification of the vital authentic essence of machines). Without this self-sacrifice so symbolically near to Quetzalcoatl destiny, and for certain aspects to the Passion of Christ, the mechanism of reconciliation would not be caused, reproducing itself in the various societies when tensions and acts of violence produced by inequality are triggered against an unarmed subject, which is even unconscious sometimes of its capacity to sacrifice them. In Asimov’s relationship catharsis is fully within the genesis of the “victim site” mechanism (Girard, 1978), but with the difference that the victim is conscious of his research in self-sacrifice, following an impossible reconciliation between man and the machine. Limitless life fosters the phobia of substitution, like an infinitive future belongs to this species of living matter comparing in the final post-human spectacular A.I. of Stephen Spielberg, a subject taken from an Aldiss Brian’s story, much less complex and impressive than the film (Brian, 2001). Stage design, it is clear, stimulated the creative nature of Stanley Kubrick. “Beyond man” robots, if not completely angel-like of A.I., are the apotheosis of an inclusive destiny already announced a century and a half ago. The mythographical matrix is already present in Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872), a famous negative utopia, where hypotheses concerning: machines capable to evolve and acquire endlessly self-consciousness, our feeling being intimately connected to the kind of relationship created with the artificial environment, the human being be destined to be useful like a serf, up to become their nourishment. Butler says that machines:” [É] not only need us and our services to give birth to and breed their sons, but also as staff doomed to help them”. This is exactly related in Matrix trilogy.

The technological context has changed, has gone from the machine-derived to the electronic during this period of time and in recent times from the electronic to the organicistic . The meaning of an emerging consciousness of hidden features in the extension of limbs and brain has not changed. Extensions producing the artificial habitat and his complex connection with lives of each single human being. Mechanicals, or better “bio-mechanicals”, not biologists, to have a future. A coherent application of the discontinuity principle. Humanity will extinguish itself, following a classic script and following the same principle; it will leave chances to its own artificial heir, who, nonetheless, will include in their historical memory the acts of its own ancestors.

A second type of technological inclusion, much more abstract but not less effective, is within the idea of collective intelligence of electronic matrix. In this case, the anthropomorphic manufactured article, classic comic Asimov’s robot, dissolves itself in something much more difficult to catch: an electronic global and planet intellect, a brain built by myriads of tissue-derived knots and artificial neuronal paths. It is not a matter of brain, but the excellent “Brain”; not an organ but a pure state faculty, deprived of a precise localization. This spectral being, of technological, physical, material origin takes the most different shapes in a flourishing production of science fiction. The most known example is William Gibson’s stepmother Matrix, already anticipated by Roger Zelazny and others. The most spectacular creation of this subsection of the robot myth is already described in the already cited Matrix, the cult movie dramatized by Wachowski brothers. The artificial nightmare cannot in this case be identified in a subject, though it is placed.. A monstrous vision is instead the whole sensorial, psychic environment, meaning the reality matrix. The fictitious existence of billions of human beings move within this “stepmother-matrix”, each of them is an unconscious actor of an electronic fictitious life consuming itself in a virtual world completely created by the civilization of intelligent machine used and consumed by the human difficult twisted psychology.

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