Książka używana.
Stan: 5- / 4+ (oznaczenia biblioteczne).

Opis:

Few scientific disciplines are as ripe for ethnographic study as artificial life, known as a-life, a hybrid, high-tech field with practitioners who routinely suggest that the self-replicating computer programs they design not only mimic but actually are living creatures. As Stanford anthropologist Stefan Helmreich convincingly demonstrates, it takes more than just chutzpah to advance such a claim--it takes a powerful belief system. The belief system Helmreich fingers is the complex web of historical, mythical, and religious narratives that form the fabric of modern Western culture.

Of course, a good deal of solid science goes into a-life's elaborate digital simulations of the biological world, and Helmreich takes care not to let his cultural analysis drown that science out. Indeed, his descriptions of the theories and techniques behind some researchers' attempts at concocting artificial life--ranging from simple computer viruses to Tom Ray's globally distributed Tierra system for breeding digital "organisms"--are occasionally more compelling than his own attempts to read disturbing racial and sexual mythologies into those experiments.

Ultimately, though, what fascinates Helmreich about a-life is neither the biology nor the mythology, but the way this unique discipline highlights the intersection of the two. A-life researchers may or may not have created new organisms, but what they have created, Helmreich argues, points the way to a new and more sophisticated understanding of the delicate relationship between science and culture. --Julian Dibbell

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Though it grew out of a dissertation and often reads like one, Stanford anthropologist Helmreich's study is a startling, cutting-edge look at the emerging field of Artificial Life (an offshoot of Artificial Intelligence), many of whose practitioners believe that the self-replicating computer programs they create are not mere representations of life but actual life-forms set loose to mutate, reproduce, compete and behave unpredictably in an alternative cyberspace universe. Helmreich, who interviewed a mix of AL scientistsALos Alamos physicists, ecology-minded biologists, hackers, ex-hippies, roboticists, chemistsAattributes this hubristic conceit to the influence of science fiction, Judeo-Christian creation imagery, the American frontier spirit, New Age mysticism and the pervasiveness of TV in melding artificial worlds with reality. Some AL scientists see themselves as the vanguard force of evolution, on a mission to colonize new realms with their offspring, using programs such as Tierra, which conjures "digital organisms" to mimic biological evolution. Other AL scientists, though atheists, seem to embrace the field as a sort of religion, buttressed by their private, Zen-like experiences. In a scathing pro-feminist critique, Helmreich argues that the AL field, dominated by white males, is permeated with masculine imagery; cyber-organisms and automata are often referred to or portrayed by AL practitioners as "primitive," "childlike," female, dark-skinned or highly competitive. This, charges Helmreich, betrays the discipline's Eurocentric, corporatist, even sexist and racist assumptions. His sophisticated inquiry challenges the underpinningsAphilosophical, scientific, financial, politicalAof the Artificial Life enterprise.