Category:Background
9. Background, RDE, 20/X/07
Weiss, Rick. "Dragonflies or Little Spies? / Scientists work on robot bugs that could gather intelligence." The Washington Post Weekly Edition 15-21 October 2007: 34.
Notes early on that dragonflies are "an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look," and moves from there to real-world developments toward, if they have not already achieved, remote-controlled flying craft the size and general construction of insects. DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and other "U.S. government and private entities acknowledge that they are trying" to deploy "insect-size spy drones"; approaches include "inserting computer chips into moth pupae […] and hatching them into healthy 'cyborg moths'"; the goal of this "Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project" is "to create […] camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities." Cf. blurring of organic/mechanical distinction in a general human view of insects and related genera—with dragonflies as just a particularly strong example—and very particularly in SF from H. R. Giger's Alien in Ridley Scott's ALIEN to the crab-like robots in RUNAWAY (q.v. under Drama in Clockworks [1]) to the evil-spirit-powered "clockwork spyfly" in Philip Pulman's SF-inflected fantasy, The Golden Compass (1995; film version, 2007).
Articles in category "Background"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 685 total.
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- A Cultural History of a Hybrid Genre
- A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age
- A User's Guide to the Postmoderns
- A.I.'s Big Year
- About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
- Academe, Issue on "Technology and Intellectual Property"
- Across the Space Frontier
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Agent of Good (television commercial)
- AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
- AI Job Interview
- AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines
- Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern
- The Air Loom
- Alan Turing Predicts Machine Learning And The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Jobs
- ALIENS: RIDE AT THE SPEED OF FRIGHT
- Aloff, Mindy: Dance Department
- American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
- The American Image of Techonology from the Revolution to 1840
- American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America
- American Sewing Machines
- Amusing Ourselves to Death
- The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve
- The Ancient Origins of Automation
- Anderson, Norman, Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History
- The Android and the Human
- Anno Domini 2071
- The Ant-Colony as an Organism
- ANT-MAN AND THE WASP
- Ape and Essence
- Aramis or the Love of Technology
- Arcology: The City in the Image of Man
- Are Computers Alive? Evolution and New Life Forms
- Are Robots the Solution to Understaffed Nursing Homes?
- Are We on the Verge of Chatting with Whales?
- Arguing Against Ice Cream
- Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man
- Artificial Life as Philosophy
- Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation
- Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines
- Asimov's Laws Won't Stop Robots from Harming Humans
- Assembling Bodies in Cyberspace: Technologies, Bodies, and Sexual Difference
- Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
- At Home in Chicago's Hancock Center
- Autonomous AI Killer Drone Used in Combat
- Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
B
- BABY DRIVER (film)
- BAROQUE CYCLE
- Battle for Your Brain: What the Rise of Brain-Computer Interface Technology Means for You
- Battlebots
- Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of This Century Alive
- A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
- Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
- The Betrayal of Words
- Better than People ("Why the Japanese want their robots to act more like humans.")
- Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives
- Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Skinner)
- Big Brother's Corporate Cousin
- Bigger Than Worlds
- Bing’s A.I. Chat
- Biomechanics and Constructivism (theatre movements)
- Bionic prostheses empower Ukrainians
- Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction
- Birth Days
- THE BLACK PHONE
- Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology
- Blaming Technology
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- Blood in the Machine
- Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
- Bodies and Machines
- Bodies in Cyberspace
- Bodies That Matter: Science Fiction, Technoculture, and the Gendered Body
- Bookending Cyberpunk (review)
- Boot, Max
- Borg Invasion 4D (part of STAR TREK: The Experience®).
- Bots: A Love Story and a Dream
- The Brain and Machine
- Brain Implants Are Here
- Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
- Buck Rogers Rides Again: RMA
- Buddha and Keyboard
- BULLET TRAIN
- Bureaucratic Structure and Personality
- Burke, James, Connections
- Burke, James, Connections, "The Wheel of Fortune"
- Busby Berkeley and the "Fascist Aesthetic"
C
- Can Thought Go on Without a Body?
- Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures
- Captain American and General Intellect: Abstraction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
- Carlisle, Robert B, "The Birth of Technocracy: Science, Society, and the Saint-Simonians"
- Cartesianism (Britannica article)
- CAST AWAY (mainstream film)
- Changing Metaphors of Political Structures
- Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science
- Chase, Alston, "Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber"
- ChatGPT
- ChatGPT Chief Favors AI Regulations
- Chinese Science Fiction: A Genre of Adversity
- Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776-1900
- Claim-Making In Artificial Intelligence Research
- The Clockwork Universe
- Clockworks 2
- The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
- Coal: A Human History
- Coates, James, "Just Think! A Mind-Reading Computer"
- Codrescu, Andrei, "A Report on the State of Revolutions, for Rosa Luxemburg"
- Codrescu, Andrei, "Fax Your Prayers"
- Codrescu, Andrei, "Video Crack"
- COLLECTIBLES, "Toybox"
- The Coming Technological Singularity
- The Coming Wave
- Computer Fictions: Narratives of the Machinic Phylum
- Computer History Museum
- Computer Power and Human Reason
- Computers can write Torah now
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence (article on "Turing Test")
- Connections
- Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumpion.
- Copernicus: On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
- Corporate: "Society Tomorrow"
- Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins: The Body and Cyberpunk
- Correspondence (novel)
- The Crack in Space
- Creepy Swiss Automatons
- Cryptonomicon
- CSI Skill Tree
- Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience
- Cyber(Body)Parts: Prosthetic Consciousness
- A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto
- The Cyber-Femme: Woman In The Machine
- Cyberbeing and ~space
- Cyberbolic Techno-Raptures (review of book on Cyberculture)
- Cybercultures (review)
- Cyberman (Personality Profile)
- Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
- The Cyberpapacy: The Sourcebook of Virtual Reality
- Cyberpunk (magazine coverage)
- Cyberpunk (story)
- Cyberpunk and Visual Culture
- Cyberpunk: Sourcebook for Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS)
- Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace
- Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Development
- Cyberspace: First Steps
- Cyborg (lower case)
- The Cyborg and the Kitchen Sink; or, The Salvation Story of No Salvation Story
- Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age
- The Cyborg Handbook
- A Cyborg Manifesto
D
- Dalek SARS-CoV-2
- Danger! (story)
- Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination
- Darwin Among the Machines
- Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence
- The Day the Universe Changed: "Infinitely Reasonable"
- Dead Center
- Deadline
- Death of Nature The: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution
- Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer
- Debating the Histories and Futures of Black SF
- Derian, James Der, "War Games: The Pentagon Wants What Hollywood's Got"
- Descartes, René (mechanism: cosmological, biological)
- Designing the Future: The Role of Technological Forecasting
- Designing the technology of BLADE RUNNER 2049
- Desire, Identification, and Virtual Embodiment in Feminist Narratives of Cyberspace
- The Dialectic of Sex
- Dialogues (by Stanislaw Lem)
- Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure
- Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault)
- The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself
- Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century
- Doing It Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity
- Doing It for Ourselves: Two Feminist Cyber-Readers
- Don’t @ us: The Problem with Tweeting
- DotComGuy: "Welcome to the world of DotComGuy"
- Dragonflies or Little Spies? / Scientists work on robot bugs that could gather intelligence
- Dreams and Nightmares: Science and Technology in Myth and Fiction
- THE DRESSMAKER
- Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works
- Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labour in Society
- The Dynamo and the Virgin
- Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide
E
- Ecology 101
- Efficiency and After: The Dilemma of the Technicized Society
- Electric Permanent Wave Machine
- Electronic 'Jailer' Makes Home Prison
- Electronic Literature
- Elementary: "The Man with the Twisted Lip"
- Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence Is the ‘Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization’
- Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (background)
- The empty brain
- Engines of Creation: The Coming Age of Nanotechnology
- The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties
- ENOUGH: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
- Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century
- Escaping Star Trek: Review by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
- An Essay on Liberation
- The Ethical Dimension of Cyberfeminism