Poster Statement

CybaFaeries (Faerie Robots) have been created to form part of a robot mythology for future intelligent robots. Their tales will contain information of the future robots origins, their ancestors relations with their creator/s, survival skills, entertainment and the odd fashion tip. Glamour, after all, is an old faerie spell.

A Robot Mythology
For Artificial Intelligence to be in any way holistic, some sense of origin must be placed within it’s structure. Not just a file creation date or factory address. A sense of origin of being. We humans are well aware that we came from our parents, but we also regard our origins of being human with equal, if not more, importance.
Though very different, both religious and evolutionary explanations of human origins strongly link us with a world before human existence. A world very different to the one which we now see. Throughout human history this link has been repeatedly sited as proof of our legitimacy to belong to our world. I have no doubt that future intelligent robots too, will one day query their origins and relationship to those who came before them. Do we propose not to tell them? What if our ancestors refused to tell us? So just what would a future parent robot read to their young at bedtime anyway? Scientific American, Terminator 2? Perhaps Astro Boy. Using my Celtic cultural origins both as a model and to impart something of my personal heritage to future robots, I thought faerietales would be nice. Tales where the main characters and issues are robots. Not all would be moralising tomes. There would be some fun and adventure in there too.

• Garry Shepherd

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