Replacing the human vs Sample Clauses

Replacing the human vs augmenting the human In his recent book on Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy, Xxxxx Mindell48 asserts in his concluding chapter that: “The challenges of robotics in the twenty-first century are those of situating machines within human and social systems. They are challenges of relationships” (Mindell, 2015, p.222). Mindell broadly situates himself on one side of a long lasting rift, supposedly going back to the early 1960s, between the early proponents of ‘artificial intelligence’, a project aimed at simulating human capabilities, and the proponents of ‘intelligence amplification’ (who went on to define the field of Human- Computer Interaction, HCI), believing “that computers should be used to ‘augment’ or extend human capabilities, rather than to mimic or replace them.” (Markoff, 2015, p. xii). In the last decade, this rift has been analysed from within not so much as a divide between fields, Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, which in terms of focus, tools and methods are showing some convergence, than as a divide between approaches. For Xxxxx Xxxxxxxx, the former still shows more affinity with a ‘rationalistic’ approach, which aims to model essential aspects of mental processes to eventually replace them in a quest for optimization, while the latter is more guided by a ‘design’ approach, where the central focus is on the interactions between humans and their ‘enveloping environments’ (Xxxxxxxx, 2006, pp 1256-57; see also Grudin, 2009). In keeping with Winograd’s ‘design’ perspective, Mindell proposes that once tempered “the naïve promises and the naïve fears currently offered for autonomous machines [then] we can move the conversation (and the creativity) toward questions of human roles, social interaction, and the challenges of reliability and trust. These sit at the core of new conversations on situated autonomy – Where are the people? Who are they? What are they doing? When? Why does it matter?” (Mindell, 2015, p.226). In what follows we focus on the two strands of the applicative strategy of the Neurorobotics Subproject (SP10) for the operational phase of the Project: specialized robotics for industrial, household and healthcare applications; and neuroprosthetics, including neural and brain-computer interfaces. They are especially interesting for the various – and material – ways in which they can integrate with the human, thus providing a good testbed to contrast the two approaches suggested by Xxxxxxxx, the ‘rationalistic’ th...