IDEA OF PROGRESS - FICTION & SCIENCE

IDEA OF PROGRESS

FICTION & SCIENCE

Does fiction draw inspiration from science or is it the other way around ?

The notion I'm going to deal with is “Idea of Progress”. The idea of progress can be defined as an improvement, a development or a change,a technical, scientific or social advance which contributes to making the world better.

The notion has various aspects, it can be related of the idea that the world and the society can change positively thanks to sciences, globalization and evolution.

Nevertheless, the idea of progress is still debate between those who consider that it’s beneficial and those for whom it’s dangerous.

PB : Does fiction draw inspiration from science or is it the other way around ?

I MAN MACHINE
II MACHINE MAN
III SHOULD WE FEAR PROGRESS

I MAN MACHINE

Firstly, Science fiction novels and movies are full of human like robots.

In a documentary film extract from Visions of the Futur, a theoretical physicist explains that our mastery of intelligence will keep improving in the coming decades and that we’ll soon create intelligent machines

He compares the huge and expensive machine to a mobile phone of today whose microchip is the size of a fingernail, which can process faster and is much cheaper.

He shows an intelligent car which can drive itself. While riding along in the car without steering or pressing the accelerator, the scientist explains that by 2020, intelligence will be in every object, not just in cars...

That's a revolution for humanity and the movies allow researchers to have other ideas to innovate.

After, Man machine is an intelligent machine like andoids. They have been designed to look like human beings .

Isaac Asimov devised the Three Laws to establish a set of rules organizing the fictional robot world he invented. The rules were designed to protect people from harm.We can imagine that even in a fantasy world he could not accept the idea of robots taking control over human beings. He certainly wanted to place limits on human- like robots / androids. He might have anticipated that, sooner or later, science fiction would become science fact and that the Three Laws would have to be incorporated into robots as safety features.

These robot could improve our quality of life in our homes and workplace, they can already perform household chores and also move, speak and rebuild facial expressions like humans with for exemple Robot HR

Man machine can become Machine Man

II MACHINE MAN

Machine man is a man with bionic lamb.

The bionic man has an artificial/mechanical arm attached to his body. When he was a young man, Professor Hugh Herr had a terrible mountaineering accident: he was caught in a blizzard and suffered frost bite. His doctor could not save his legs which had to be amputated..He was equipped with prostheses but dreamed of climbing again, Biomechatronics made this possible.

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