Back to the Future

Back to the Future

October 24, 2004

>anything we’ve studied in class

When is it okay to build a robot that exactly replicates a human (personalizing its features, expressions, feelings, thoughts and actions)? What are the restrictions to cloning or creating life from scratch? In Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard defines and analyses ideas related to assimilations and representations. Here, he demonstrates the many ways in which these ideas are often interchanged and in fact are quite different. These are terms that should appear familiar in the studying of abstract and futuristic recreations. Assimilation is a recreation of something and turning it into an artificial reality, like the themes captured in rides at Disneyland. In this situation these made up Disney themes are recreated and transformed into a “fake” reality. When applying this term to futuristic science fiction ideas of robots and humans coexisting there is the sense that we have taken something fake and made it a part of reality.

Is it truly possible to take artificial parts and make something organic? No. Once something is synthetic it will always remain so. Regardless of how close of a representation it is it can never fully become the real and original thing. Humans and technology are limited to imitations only. The idea of advanced technology in our future world is common in science fiction. Sometimes it can be very useful; but, in dealing with machinery, it is known that there will always be technical errors. So can we rely on this technology to safely clone humans or create human-like robots to live with us? Should we risk relying on the known faulty system to form a world better than necessary? Perfection is something impossible to achieve. Like the limitations in technological replications of living things, the limitation of perfection is near perfection; these things cannot be wholly achieved.

For the sake of today’s beautiful, yet flawed world, such drastic measures should not be taken to assimilate this utopia. Otherwise, it would be like diving head first into an empty pool.