The Art+Technology Zeitgeist

The Techno-Art Zeitgeist

I figured it was about time that I tackled a more detailed chronology of this Man-Machine 'spirit of the age' that 's been attracting artists of all kinds since the birth of Modernism in the mid-19th century. So here is a picture-essay of an idea that's been the driving motivation, aspiration and inspiration of much avant-garde art in the last hundred years:

Raoul Hausmann: The Spirit of the Age 1920

Of course there were hints of adaptations between men and machines - enforced by the imperatives of newly emerging free-market capitalism and rapid industrialisation - this photograph (anonymous) show a factory foreman and his colleagues at work in a manufactory c1890.

And just what is this 1880s-1900s lady doing with this ornate machine - looks like an early typesetter judging by the table bottom-right.

The famous Dadaist Raoul Hausmann (a co-inventor of photomontage) made this three-dimensional assemblage/construction in Berlin in 1920, following his 'invention' of photomontage (with Hanna Hoch, his co-artist/lover). Photomontage (c1918) is of course another example of the fusion of art and technology: - the artist searching, locating, cutting-out and arranging machine-made images (in Print or Photography), but in the assemblage of the Mechanical Head/Spirit of the Age Hausmann pictures the new zeitgeist of Art&Technology (Man + Machine) in three-dimensions - and it's his recognition and expression of the dominant spirit of 20th century culture in 1920, and this zeitgeist has been repeatedly alluded to over the last century.So let's look at this spirit iterated through our recent history:

Fernand Léger: Soldiers playing Cards 1917 - the robotic nature of soldiers in the first mechanised war - kepi's look as machine-made as helmets...

Lewis Hine: Mechanic at steam pump in electric power house 1920

Lewis Hine: Spinner at New England Mill 1913

Lewis Hine 86th Floor 1931 - the construction steelworkers were called steeplejacks as I remember...the job? to bolt or weld together the vast steel frameworks for skyscrapers...

Lewis Hine captured the impact of urban industrialisation in the USA in the first few decades of the 20th century: here are two images of construction engineers building the Empire State tower in 1931 - the skyscraper was more than a 'machine for living in' - it was a vertical city-block!

Sant'Elia: Apartments with external elevators, gallery, and covered passages on three street levels - his visionary drawing of a Futurist City in 1916...

Karel Čapek: Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots/RUR) 1921

The following year after Hausmann's aesthetic insight, in Czechoslovakia, the writer Karel Čapek presents his play Rossum's Universal Robots - in which he gives us a definitive suggestion for the man-machine archetype - the Czech word for a slave-worker: Roboti. In English the word Robot becomes the signifier for the man-machine hybrid - only recently being challenged by a cybernetic newcomer: cyborg - (a hybrid word invented in 1960 by the astrophysicist Manfred Clynes, and influentially used by philosopher Donna Haraway in her essay A Cyborg Manifesto (in The Socialist Review 1985).

Imagining a machine in the shape of a man - a mechanical metallised Golem - some early examples...(1921-1928) - of productions of R.U.R.

From Haraway: "Contemporary science is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that were not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg “sex” restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against hetero- sexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modem production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C³I, command-control-communication-intelligence - an $84 billion item in 1984's U.S. defense budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a flacid premonition of cyborg politics a very open field." (Donna Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto 1985)

Love the graphic shorthand of the cover-designer!

Richard Wagner: The Artwork of the Future 1849 where he argues for opera as an 'expanded-theatre or composite artwork...

Wagner introduces the idea of the Gesamptkunstwerk - the Composite Art Work - his vision of an idealised art-form combining music, visuals, dance (choreography and performance), costume, libretti, stage-design (and by implication, lighting, colour, chiaroscuro, sound-engineering, special sonic effects, etc) - a total-artform embracing all the senses, and therefor immersive in effect.

Wagner's idea that we humans are the 'consciousness of nature' casts a new light on Artificial Intelligence and Chat-GPT Large Language Models (LLMs)...This is a twist upon the Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Barrow and Tipler 1986)

" If Nature then, by her solidarity with Man, attains in Man her consciousness, and if Man's life is the very activation of this consciousness - as it were, the portraiture in brief of Nature, so does Man's Life itself gain understaning by means of Science, which makes this human life in turn an object of experience. But the activation of the consciousness obtained by Science, the portrayal of the Life that it has learned to know, the impress of this life's Necessity and Truth, is - Art." (Richard Wagner: The Artwork of the Future 1849 - my italics)

The physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler (and others)

argue that the universe is so constructed that intelligent life is an inevitable result - that the universe somehow requires intelligent observers...

also humans in the 21st century are indeed beginning to craft an apparent 'artificial' consciousness - bringing to life, in ChatGPT, Bard and other Large Language Models (LLM) query devices - and soon in their extension as 'reasoning devices' - our commonly acquired and commonly-held huge trove of collected memories, documents, narratives, musings, reflections, academic and scientific papers, journals, archives, libraries, novels, films, operas, plays, analyses, critiques and all other collectively stored writings, dramas, documentaries - in what I have called the MediaPlex (all the media, often hyperlinked, that's stored in the Cloud or in the other hardware memories of our vast Web/Net data-stores)- in effect LLMs are mining, borrowing (or stealing?) or at least quoting from this vast collection of stored wisdom (and some idiocy?) of all mankind, through all our literate history. And LLMs are using not only our written media, but very cleverly our visual and audio-video media too. We can query a Chatbot now to create images in the style of a particular artist at a particular time period, or to create video (motion-images and sound) with similar criteria.

Raoul Hausmann: Tatlin at Home 1920 - a Thought-Montage portrait of Tatlin, the great Constructivist...

Vladimir Tatlin: Maquette for Monument to the Third International 1920 - model of an intended 400 m (1,300 feet) high building-cum-broadcasting station. It was never built, though when I was teaching at Central London Polytechnic in the 1980s, students built a 40ft high model of it, in the foyer if the Regent Street campus...

Vladimir Shukhov: Radio Tower - free-standing (un-stayed) hyperboloid diagrid structure: 350 metres (1,150 ft) high - a broadcast mast for radio...

The use of modern steel and glass materials and electrified mechanical elevators broke the chains of gravity for architects and engineers... architects and construction engineers - and geniuses like Sant'Elia, Tatlin and Shukhov, were the man-machine visionaries of the Twenties... and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes in the late 1940s and after.

Back in 2006, in an illustrated talk to film students at Arts University, Bournemouth, I predicted that in the near future we would be able to artificially construct, even replicate, the personality, not just the visual appearance - of an actor - that such actors might trade their persona in a kind of 'personality construct', much as they would charge a fee for their performance in a film - and further that we would have technologies for recreating dead actors, producing realistic models of Marilyn Monro, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and casting these avatars in new films...

Our ability to synthesise 'fake humans' based upon the collected LLM 'memories' of numerous filmed performances, motion-capture of actors and athletic models, the creation of sound-alike digital 'synthespians' voice-overs - and other contrivances yet to come no doubt, will make the creation or constructs of long-dead actors as trivial a feat as an advanced Chat-GPT can perform...

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We 1921 "We is set in the future. D-503 - a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W. Taylor-like. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society.The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State." (wikipedia)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc

Ridley Scott echoed these themes in his 1984 commercial for the launch of Apple Mackintosh - in 1984.

The spirit of the Apple Mac - ready to break the PC-MSDOS restrictive dominance in 1984 - the strapline 'why 1984 won't be like 1984 - Chiat Day agency genius married with Ridley Scott's film...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc

The robot cwoman from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)

The cover of Zamyatin's We hints at the already emerging megalopolis - the upward-thrusting New York City skyline, soaring upwards especially, perhaps, denoting the 1920s... The Surrealist poet David Gascoyne also uses the hybrid 'world-metropolis', in his teenage poem The New Isaiah (in Gascoyne: Other Early Poems 1932-35). And megalopolis is a 20th century expression of man-machine synthesis, as is Le Corbusier's comment that 'a house is a machine for living in'. Zamyatin was an engineer - a naval architect, and designed several steam-powered ice-breakers, including the St Alexander Nevsky 1916.

Le Corbusier Villa Savoye 1931

But the Man-Machine zeitgeist iterates through many aspects of Twenties culture, reaching into the heart of Modernism at the Bauhaus:

Oskar Schlemmer: Bauhaus symbol 1922 The stripped-down male face stylised in verticals and horizontals - like a Mondrian painting of this time: Piet Mondrian: Composition No2 1922

Oskar Schlemmer: costumes for Triadische Ballett 1922

The various syntheses of geometry and man-machine tropes that Schlemmer uses in his costumes for his Triadische Ballett amplify the zeitgeist, with robotic fabrications much more machine-perfection stylised than Picasso's cubist-inspired inventions for Diaghilev's Parade of 1917.

Diaghilev + Picasso: Cubist costumes for Parade (1917)

GEORGE ANTHEIL: Machine-music and sound fx forBALLET MECANIQUE 1920-1921

During the making of ZeitEYE - my film of art+media innovations in the twentieth century (up to 2010) I must have listened to Antheil's Ballet Mecanique some hundreds of times, and really loved it. He mixes machine-made and machine assisted 'intruments', like factory and ship sirens and railway-recordings - as well as player-pianos and those noise-machines above.In 1923, the Russian composer Arseny Aavramov created his Symphony of Sirens to fully integrate the machine-noise instrumentation of the modern city in his live concert in Baku, Azerbaijan.

from my ZeitEYE film: https://mediainspiratorium.com/1930-1940/

Arseny Avraamov: Symphony of Sirens, Baku 1923

Fernand Leger _ Dudley Murphy: Ballet Mecanique 1921

Fernand Leger: Three Women 1921

With his painterly and pattern-making skills, Leger refined his idea of cubism in 1917-1921: "The post-Cubist painting scene still carried the cubist tropes of flattened perspective and simplified forms. Leger’s Three-Women anticipates the absorption of cubist symbolism into the geometric decorative arts (after 1925), but this painting is also – like much of Leger’s then recent work The Card Players 1917) – about man and machines – the mechanisation of society – the three women are reduced to stylised machine parts – geometric primitives. For Leger the machine age is not threatening – it holds the promise of a society bonded by the mechanization and mass production of all of mankind’s needs. The women here try to express Leger’s vision of the harmony of man and machine. His choice of a timeless art theme – the three graces - was also a nod to those in the early 1920s calling for a return to order after the creative chaos of DADA.."

Bob Cotton: Leger's Three Women in https://mediainspiratorium.com/1930-1940/

Fernand Léger + Dudley Murphy: Ballet Mécanique 1921 film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMnZgykH1Bk&t=43s

Man Ray's sometime lover and model, Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) and the avant-garde film-maker and director Dudley Murphy - with his wife Katherine Murphy, and with assistance from Man Ray himself - all feature in this short experimental film by Fernand Léger, intended to be put to the fabulous music of American composer George Antheil, who used player-pianos, factory sirens and other machine-noises in his exciting score. So. Some of the creative geniuses of the 1920s are involved in the making of this film...and recently I used Antheil's inspiration music in my film ZeitEYE (2010)

ZeitEYE by Bob Cotton at https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/14138351

Alexandr Medvedkin _ Dziga Vertov: Agit-Prop Train - reconstructed for Warren Beatty's film Reds (1981).

Reds Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqfg-VE1lfo

The conjunction of Art, Propaganda, and Social Education using the most powerful machines of the time - the radio, rhe film-camera, the graphic poster, and the railway steam engine - brought the Russian Civil War and it's causes and conflicting ideals to local peasant communities across the Empire as it became the USSR. The trains typically had theatre and cinema wagons, libraries, galleries and debate fora, and documentary films might be made in one town, developed and printed overnight on the train, to be shown in the next town, next day...

Fritz Kahn: Man Machine 1926

Fritz Kahn: Man-Machine c1926.

Kahn's industrial-mechanical parodies of mankind's body and senses are both fascinating and wildy misleading. It was his imagined image of the bio-mechanical eye - 'seeing' as if our brain acted like a camera - and 'the ghost in the machine' (our consciousness) inside our brain, watching the world like a cinema-film-show) that has mis-directed us all for decades. Despite this, and despite the fact that Kahn's illustrations seem rooted in the Industrial Age, they are still fascinating, ingenious, and have been enormously popular...

Fritz Kahn: "Earlier, we talked about the emergence of the man-machine symbiosis embodied in Raoul Haussmann’s ‘Spirit of Our Time‘ (1921) – a symbiotic relationship that seemed to dominate some of the great cultural innovations of the 1920s – for example, Robotics (Capek: RUR 1921), the glorification of man’s labour in the factory (Lewis Hine: Steam Fitter, 1920; Fritz Lang: Metropolis 1927 ), Leger’s Three Women 1921) – and the rest of the century from Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times 1936) to the current fascination in the potential of artificial intelligence (originally called machine intelligence), driverless cars and robotics). Fritz Kahn takes this trope to its reductio ad absurdam in his inventive and beautifully drawn and painted mechanistic explanations of biological human functions. The best book on Kahn is Ute and Thilo von Debschitz: Fritz Kahn (Taschen 2013) – a grand coffee-table collection of Kahn’s work replete with insightful essays. My own introduction to Kahn was this diagram as a component of a print by Eduardo Paolozzi, and in Paolozzi’s short film History of Nothing – then seeing the same diagram referenced in a short experimental film by Stan Vanderbeek."

Bob Cotton from mediainspiratorium (2010)

https://mediainspiratorium.com/1930-1940/

Of course, as we might expect, early science-fiction writers and illustrators, like Albert Robida and Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, had begun to explore the man-machine relationship some decades earlier:

Albert Robida illustrated popular magazines including Vingtieme Siecle (§901-2000, La Caricature (1830-1843) and La Guerre Infernal (1908), almost all including speculative flying machines, submarines, battleships

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895) - and it's colourful man-machine cover illustrations in the 20th century...

Robert Florey: For the Love of Zero 1927. Staged by William Cameron Menzies. The intricate experimental cinematography and optical special effects in The Love of Zero, mixed with the overtly sentimental love-story, staged in a violently expressionist setting, makes this film a triumph of man and camera-machine.

Robert Florey: The Love of Zero 1927/1928

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWm3Mm_aIwo

The Love of Zero is one of my favourite avant-garde films of this period - it's delightful because it embodies the same ultra-romantic Francophile tropes as Raymond Peynet's The Lovers of 20 or so years later...

Fritz Lang + Thea von Harbou: Metropolis 1927

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DukMPx6Fn_c

Of course the Harbou/Lang film is a different romantic vision, a love-story replete with an 'evil' professor: a man who can transmute the beautiful woman Maria into a female robot who is the amoral antithesis of Maria, in one of the most successful optical-effects movies of this period - Metropolis is probably the most expansive and expensive of the early sci-fi features...

Thea von Harbou: Metropolis - the book 1926

"Metropolis is a silent science fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and Thea von Harbou. Music by Gottried Huppertz. Lang and von Harbou, who were married, wrote the screenplay in 1924, and the story was novelized by von Harbou in 1926. It is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film stars Alfred Abel as the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son, who tries to mediate between the elite caste and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart worker Maria and the debased robot version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist who created the robot. Metropolis was produced in Germany in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA) and released in 1927 during a stable period of the Weimar Republic. The most expensive film of its time, it cost approximately 7 million Reichsmark to make. The film was cut substantially after its German premiere, and there have been several efforts to restore it." (Youtube description)

Eugen Schüfftan was the designer-cinematographer-engineer on Metropolis - he devised optical in-camera effects that married scale models to live-action footage...

Daniel Maddock: Reframing Cinematography 2018

Eugen Shufftan: invented his optical effects process to marry live-action with models - an in-camera effect once the detailed models had been laboriously contructed...

Before 2001 A Space Odyssey. Westworld, Blade Runner and Terminator, Metropolis was the definitive human-machine film statement. But there were other more subtle fusions of man and machine - the man (Boris Kaufmann - the director's bother) becomes a cameraman-machine in Vertov's 1929 classic of Kino-Pravda, and records a kind of day in the life of the man with a movie camera.

Dziga Vertov: Man with A Movie Camera (1929 (trailer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOCFNAZX3r8

And the man-machine zeitgeist echoes still further in Chaplin's magnificent Modern Times (1936)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17PkUsTVa7g

These are mega-budget, Hollywood blockbuster levels of filmic expertise, echoed in filmed musicals by the extravagance of Astaire and Rogers dance sequences

Thornton Freeland: Flying Down to Rio 1933 filmic-choreography on biplanes!

It was in movies like these - where new styles of dance, choreography and cinematic tricks were in great demand to satisfy and distract depression audiences - that the use of optical-printers became essential, this expensive rig that combined projector(s) and camera to make composites that used matte-boxes to combine live-action with background scenary - or dancing girls on the wings of a fragile bi-plane - as in Flying Down to Rio aerial sequences. The cinematographer/optical effects supervisor here was Linwood Dunn, who went on to develop a highly sophisticated optical printer in 1944:

Woman-Man-Machine choreography: Flying Down to Rio proved Berkeley's talent as a choreographer, Linwood Dunn as special effects designer - but his real tour de force is The Gang's All Here - a decade later, in 1943:

Busby Berkeley: The Gang's All Here: Polkadot sequence - some highlights

These ‘storyboards’ of the Polka Dot sequence give you some idea of Busby Berkeley’s inventive ‘cine-choreography’, where cinematography, sets, choreography and optical special effects are orchestrated to create a masterly finale to The Gang’s All Here’ Berkeley is playing with optical effects here as if it was 1967 or even onto the digital CGI of the 1990s (see Christopher Chapman: A Place to Stand, 1967 and Stanley Kubrick: 2001 A Space Odyssey 1968). This is the kind of optical montage that foreshadowed the digital compositing of the 21st century.

Bob Cotton: https://mediainspiratorium.com/1940-1950/

Sergei Eisenstein: 'storyboard' analysis of his Alexander Nevsky in his Film Sense (1943)

It was with great joy that I discovered this art-paper printed gatefold in Eisenstein’s The Film Sense – a 1943 edition, that looked too 'wartime' to have such a glossy insert. Eisenstein was trained as an engineer, and I admired the way he had dissected this sequence from his famous film Alexander Nevsky (1938), which I first saw at art college in Portsmouth in about 1964 – the deep mysteries, mysticism and scheming of the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the brutality of the Teutonic (proto-Nazi) invaders, the panoramic battle on the ice, the victory of Nevsky – all these fragments seared themselves on my brain. Nevsky is also a call to arms – protecting the homeland against German invaders. Discovering this diagram in the 1980s – I was able to use it in my book Understanding Hypermedia (1993) – brought Eisenstein’s film back to me with a jolt. I’ve used his meticulous analysis in lectures on story-boarding, pre-visualization and hypermedia authoring. (Bob Cotton from my mediainspiratorium 2010.

It's a never-ending story of course - especially as we approach Ray Kurzweil's Singularity - the time when, according to Moore's Law and Kurzweil's law of accelerated returns, we have the computing power to simulate a human brain... c2029 - just five years away...

But my favourite vision of a possible future of AI-intelligence is Hans Moravec's description, prefaced by his abstract for the paper Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1998):

Robots and Cyborgs 1920-2024 - from the original man-machine visions of Čapek, Hausmann and Fritz Lang, through 1950s fantasies to HAL9000, Trumbull's Huey, Dewey and Louie, to Lucas' C3PO and Crichton's cyborg Westworld to Ridley Scott's and Philip K. Dick's epic Replicants in Blade Runner, Verhoevan's Robocop, Cameron's awesome Terminator and T2, Alex Garland's Ava in ExMachina, Rupert Sanders' Major Killian (Scarlett Johansson) in Ghost in the Shell, the cyborg virtual agent Smith in The Matrix, Gerard Johnstone's M3gAN, Spielberg's heart-breaking David in AI, and Pablo Berger's Robot from Robot Dreams...and there's lots more you could add...The robot/cyborg has become the the definitive man-machine archetype. Next - Moravec's disembodied AI?

"Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine."

And read this: (Exes are ex-human intelligences)

"Chapter two estimated that a human brain equivalent could be encoded in less than 10¹⁵ bits. If it takes a thousand times more storage to encode a body and surrounding environment, a human with living space might consume 10¹⁸ bits, and a large city of a million human-scale inhabitants might be efficiently stored in 10²⁴bits, and the entire existing world population would fit in 10²⁸bits; Thus, in an ultimate cyberspace, the 10⁴⁵; bits of a single human body could contain the efficiently-encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies--or a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of a human mind. Because it will be so more capacious than the conventional space it displaces, the expanding bubble of cyberspace can easily recreate internally everything of interest it encounters, memorizing the old universe as it consumes it. Travelling as fast as any warning message, it will absorb astronomical oddities, geologic wonders, ancient Voyager spacecraft, early Exes in outbound starships and entire alien biospheres. Those entities may continue to live and grow as if nothing had happened, oblivious of their new status as simulations in the cyberspace--living memories in unimaginably powerful minds, more secure in their existence, and with more future than ever before, because they have become valued parts of such powerful patrons." (Moravec: State of Mind from Robot: Simple Machine to Transcendent Mind 1998)

Moravec continues: "Earth cannot escape the transformation forever. The potent process that converts normal space and time into cyberspace will eventually become too subtle to be resisted by the hobbled, slow-evolving robots defending the planet. Boring old Earth also will also be suddenly swallowed by the cyberspace. Afterwards its transformed substance will host astronomically more meaningful activities than before. Perhaps its old life will continue, in simulations occupying a tiny fraction of the new capacity. Simulated tame robots will defend simulated biological humans on a simulated Earth - in one of many, many stories that play themselves out in the vast and fertile minds of our ethereal grand-children."

(Moravec: State of Mind op cit)

Wow!

Take a look at the wonderful Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime too - people trying to escape the singularity described so well by Moravec - and read Kurzweil too, and originally, Irving John Good in his 1965 paper 'Speculations concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine' (in Advances in Computers Vol 6). Good had worked with Turing in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, and later at Manchester University on the Manchester Mk1, still later on Bayesian statistics - so well qualified to speculate on the 'singularity'.

This wonderful blend of approaches to ultraintelligence - computational, statistical, science fiction, technology forecasting, reflects the inter-disciplinary nature of speculative fiction and technology forecasting.

Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)@ Archer2 (Cray EX supercomputer from c2013

Costing £43 million, Archer2 delivers 28 petaflops/sec performance. Below the HP Enterprises Frontier - the fastest supercomputer in 2024, capable of a quintillion (10¹⁸ )FLOPs.

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can farsurpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Sincethe design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there wouldthen unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind (see for example refs. [ZZ], [34],[44]). Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention thatman need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tellus how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously." (Irving John Good: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine 1965)

Science Fiction (SciFi) is an essential ingredient in what I've called Futurecasting - in SciFi we have a huge variety of future speculation - of what futurists call scenario forecasting, which we can assess critically, alongside other scenarios and forecasts and bind together in futurecasting...

HP Enterprises: Frontier

robots become cyborgs 1920-2020ish