Religion and Robots: Towards the Synthesis of Two Extremes
- PDF / 1,933,067 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 78 Downloads / 200 Views
Religion and Robots: Towards the Synthesis of Two Extremes Gabriele Trovato1 · Loys De Saint Chamas2 · Masao Nishimura3 · Renato Paredes4 · Cesar Lucho5 · Alexander Huerta-Mercado6 · Francisco Cuellar7 Accepted: 25 April 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Humanity has been dreaming of robots since the ancient times. Historically, robots — originally called automata — have been the products of technology and faith. The relationship between robots and religion has disappeared in the last two centuries, as science and religion parted ways, and have typically been seen in opposition. Nowadays, as robots and AI are going to spread in human society, new possibilities and new ethical challenges are on the horizon. In this paper, we summarise the state of the art in robotics and religion, and propose a taxonomy for robot morphology that takes into account the factor of religion. The taxonomy encompasses the novel concept of ‘theomorphic robots’, referred to robots that carry the shape of something divine. Keywords Religion · History · Design · Social robots
1 Introduction
B
Gabriele Trovato [email protected] Loys De Saint Chamas [email protected] Masao Nishimura [email protected] Renato Paredes [email protected] Cesar Lucho [email protected] Alexander Huerta-Mercado [email protected] Francisco Cuellar [email protected]
1
School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, 11-1430, 1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo-to 169-8050, Japan
2
Notre Dame de Vie Institute, 205 Chemin de Sainte-Garde, 84210 Saint-Didier, France
3
Graduate School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University, 1-24-1 Toyama, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8644, Japan
4
5
Department of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Av. Universitaria 1801, San Miguel, Lima, Peru Department of Industrial Design, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Through history, religion has moved between different steps of technology. The oral tradition of the beginnings turned into writing; from handwriting to printing books. The invention of printing press had an important impact, for instance, on the diffusion of the Bible and at the same time on the strict control of the content by the Catholic Church. Even icons followed the same evolution—from painted to printed: the industrialised iconography may lower the spiritual level of the art, because of the lack of human dedication, although it facilitates diffusion. A controversy of this kind arose about the Saint-Sulpice style [1] stained glasses. The advent of mass communication brought the questioning whether a ritual has the validity if attended by phone or by television. The common thought that at each technological leap, religious authorities are typically cautious, being servant of the tradition and of the status quo, is not always true [2]. The Catholic Church also historically revised its own model in order to face different contexts [3].
6
Anthropological Section, Department of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Pe
Data Loading...
