What Differs Us From Machines?
8 Pages Posted: 2 Feb 2020
Date Written: December 14, 2019
Abstract
One of the most amazing things about reading R.U.R. a century after it was first published is noticing how many questions underlying the story are still current. It is worth noting that Čapek's robots are not mechanical, but living. In this sense, they are closer to artificial life than to artificial intelligence. One has to consider that the play was staged before the first electronic computers were built and before DNA was discovered (no mobile phones, no commercial aviation, no Internet). We still do not have agreed definitions of life nor intelligence, imagine how ambiguous these should have been a century ago.
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