Monday March 9th 2020 @ French Embassy in Tokyo

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The Ecotic Challenges:
Will there ever be a world without AI and robots again?
Are robots and AI the new plague?

Dominique Lestel (ENS, Paris)
Gentiane Venture (TUAT, Tokyo & AIST, Tsukuba)

The gommy-gluey-slimmy objects are objects that people attach to and attach to people. The objects that force their ways to settle down in people lives, in places they live or in places they work. Liquid intelligence is that which flows through troubles, that which prefers avoiding obstacles rather than tackle them up front. Liquid intelligence avoids showdown and prefers dissolution, fleeing away, or networking. Paradoxically, gommy-gluey-slimmy objects and liquid intelligence fit with each others remarkably. Smartphone is the perfect comtemporary example of such objects, but it is far from being the only one. A certain kind of robotics has resolutely chosen that path. More "companion robotics", rather than "social robotics". It would yet be quite a shortcut to consider that these objects or artifacts are a specifity of our time. These objects have certainly existed synchronously to humanity. Artifacts that were rapidely classified as religious or superstitious by archeologists. The connection with the relationship with stuffed animals is a fertile example of such bonds with objects that shake down simplistic explanations.

The aim of this second "ecotic" workshop is to gather philosophers, engineers, anthropologists, designers, artists and decision makers to think together technological objects that fall obviously outside of the conventional frameworks used to study artifacts and technology.

  • Will the “cute robots” enter into evolutionary competition with animals that we will find increasingly ugly, stinky and unsuitable (to our way of life)? In other words, will pleasing the human become a major survival parameter for other living species?
  • Might we think that robots are going to be friends who will allow us to (finally) get rid of all these (too-) human friends who still encumber us?
  • Can religions survive robots, or will the latter make them definitively obsolete?
  • Will robots profoundly transform the parent/child bond and eliminate this form of politico-economico-affective organisation that we call the family?
  • What will become of human societies if the majority of intelligences present are no longer human?
  • Should there be plans to make robots “idiots” and what might such an objective mean?
  • Does each of us have a favorite gommy-gluey-slimmy objects?
  • Are these objects proper to humans? Do animals also have some?
  • Can we put in the same category amulets, Teddys & smartphones?
  • Can we consider these objects has "partners" or "friends"?
  • Can they be dangerous?
  • Are they hybrid entities between "objects" and "beings"?