Call it a cyborg, android, or humanoid. In a time when many of us are infatuated with our robots, loving them, hating them, or allowing them to dominate our dreams and social life, we are essentially caught in a narcissistic loop of human-machine simulacra. The issue that ought to concern us here is not that “the distinction between us and robots is going to disappear” as proclaimed by Rodney Brook some years ago, but something more profound and uncanny, namely, are human beings evolving into some type of Freudian robots even as AI engineers design their robots to resemble humans more and more closely? In short, is the Uncanny Valley becoming a two-way street? To begin investigating these human-machine simulacra, we need to move beyond the sociological diagnosis of social media or familiar cultural criticisms.  I reexamine the entanglements between psychoanalysis (Freud) and cybernetics at the foundation of AI technology (Minsky, et al) in order to address the following question: what is the psychic life of intelligent machines?

Tags