Maiden Machines: On Human Creatures and Artificial Creators

This book addresses the relationship between humans and intelligent machines through a story, a journey the maiden machines take in space and time, that allows them to reflect about their origins and their intertwining of the organic and the automatic. The text alternates between dialogues among the machines and philosophical reflections. Palomilla is a machine capable of responding to light impulses and reacting to its environment, invented by the father of cybernetics Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Rachel is the unsuspecting replicant in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner. Sophia is the most advanced robot being tested since 2015 by Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong. These are just some of the maiden machines featured in this extraordinary “hybrid book about hybrids” set in an indeterminate future, in which machines, once settled as a new natural species, raise the few surviving humans in gardens for research purposes, while searching for their own origins, lost in the past. The creatures of men have become their creators. The feedback loop between human and artificial becomes a way to rewrite human history, the history of technology and a new philosophy.