1. Introductio :: Ghost in the shell
2. Repetitio :: Datasphere
3. Questio :: Can machines live ?
   
4. Lectio ::
   • embedded systems
   • Limor Fried
   • robots, androids & co.
5. Disputatio :: Can machines live ?

Mamoru Oshii's (1995) depiction of a manga comics tells the story of a cyborg Motoko Kusanagi whose cyberbrain was hacked by an entity called Puppet Master who wishes to preserve itself and pass on its ideas as any biological creature would.

Please try to answer the question "What is life ?" by pondering following questions:

1. What entities do we normally label as "living" ?
2. What features a "living" entity must have ?
3. What entities do we normally label as "NOT living" ?
4. Are there features which a "living entity" MUST NOT have ?

• "(All) life-forms tend to preserve their existence."
• "(All) life-forms interact with their environment."
• "(All) life-forms have a material body."

• Merriam-Webster definition of embedded: "enclosed closely in or as if in a matrix : set firmly into a mass or material"
• majority of embedded systems are designed to do some specific task, rather than be a general-purpose computer for multiple tasks
• Can You give me examples of some embedded systems which are
  • present in this room ?
  • You use in Your every-day life?
  • dominate the planet Earth ?
• new industrial revolution: Raspberry Pi, Internet-of-Things (IoT) etc.

• not only embedded but also embodied
• word "robot" comes from Slovak/Czech "robota" meaning "labor, hard work"
• used by Karel Capek in his theatre piece Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R, 1920) to denote man-made man-like servants
• contrary to tokharian "Story of the mechanical girl" or E.T.A. Hoffman's Sandmann where man-like machines are just dumb puppets, Capeks "robots" attain a sort of awareness and rebel against their masters (e.g. similiar motive as in Golem or Frankenstein stories)
• Question: did we mention a story where a man-made entity attains awareness but DOES NOT rebel against its creator ?

• "Das Unheimliche" von Siegmund Freud (1919) and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Sandmann" (1816)
• WIKI :: The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.

Can machines live ?