Massimo Negrotti's research while affiliated with Università degli Studi di Urbino "Carlo Bo" and other places
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Publications (38)
Since the work by Herbert Simon, no particular attention has been paid to the distinction between conventional technology and technology directed at the reproduction of natural instances. Nevertheless, if we had a general knowledge of the methodological aspects that any attempt to reproduce natural objects or processes unavoidably requires, then we...
The contribution by Hubert L. Dreyfus to the debate on the feasibility of AI projects has been surely of great relevance because of his pointing out specific limits of the machine as compared to the human mind. His critics, along with the actual difficulties encountered in the advance of a pure symbolic AI, induced a wide discussion that in some me...
Discussing the mind, we face a clear asymmetry: While the brain can be scientifically observed, the mind cannot. However, in order to reproduce something, we need to observe it. The claim according to which the artificial reproduction of some mental activities would be helpful in understanding the mind is weak in principle. For instance, what any s...
A famous Latin saying states: senatores boni viri, senatus mala bestia (senators are good men, but the Senate is a bad beast). In general terms, this means that the coexistence of single entities of a given kind may give rise to a very different sort of whole which cannot be explained by or limited to, the ‘qualities’ of its components considered i...
The human ambition to reproduce and improve natural objects and processes has a long history, and ranges from dreams to actual design, from Icarus’s wings to modern robotics and bioengineering. This imperative seems to be linked not only to practical utility but also to our deepest psychology. Nevertheless, reproducing something natural is not an e...
Whoever has some familiarity with an electronic copier knows exactly what is meant with the term ‘copy’: the reproduction of a document or an image onto another sheet of paper. The copy may be black and white or color, but, in any case, it is nothing but a photograph, at a given resolution, of the original document.
Deception, in the broader sense intended here, illusion, through a whole series of side effects, and also the potential utility of the artificial, converge, in the end, in Virtual Reality technology. This technology consists of devices which generate three-dimensional moving pictures on a stereoscopic monitor applied in front of the eyes in a speci...
The choice of an observation level and an exemplar are the first two steps in the process which ultimately leads to the design of an artificial object. Nevertheless, the choice of an exemplar is not the final conclusive defining moment of what will be done. As soon as the problem of the delimitation of the exemplar—which we discussed in the previou...
Every organized system defends its boundaries in order to safeguard its identity, and biological systems are masters at this. In this sense we can assert that the theme of biocompatibility and biofunctionality sums up well a part of our comments regarding the difficult and perhaps, beyond certain limits, prohibitive ambition of reproducing natural...
The situations within which scientists and technologists act, above all those regarding the technology of naturoids, are surely complicated, permanently, by our incapacity to place ourselves simultaneously at more than one observation level. Though scientific methodology has developed several techniques for controlling more than one variable, de fa...
In 1983, in one of the rare works dedicated to the artificial, the Italian biologist, M. Rizzotti, though orienting his discussion towards an understanding of this concept.
One of the most important conclusions that we reach using the theory of naturoids is that, given any exemplar, its faithful and overall reproduction is hindered, first of all, by the impossibility of describing it fully and faithfully. This insurmountable obstacle, as we have seen, is a result of the selective character of our observation: we canno...
An artificialist’s greatest aspiration, needless to say, is the reproduction of man. Marvin Minsky, among others, maintains that exploiting robot and artificial intelligence technology in order to repair our body.
The exemplar and essential performance always involve an unlimited number of observation levels, but, as we might imagine, designers can only consider the levels they have knowledge of or, from among these, the ones that seem more easily approachable from both a scientific and a reproductive standpoint. The exemplar and essential performance always...
History and mythology agree to assign to the human ambition to build objects inspired by nature a very ancient origin. It is certain that the ambition to reproduce and improve natural objects and events constitutes for humans a sort of constant goal, almost an imperative whose achievement seems to be linked not only to practical utility, but also t...
Findings of prostheses have been brought to light since the fifth Egyptian Dynasty. Recently, on the border between Iran and Afghanistan, an artificial eyeball was found dating to 5,000 years ago and constructed of lightweight materials derived from bitumen paste which was carefully finished with the design center of the iris and an effective gold...
The use of the term ‘naturoid’ calls for the resolution of an ambiguity that involves the concept of ‘artificial’ in many contexts. From a linguistic standpoint, the term artificial (artificiale in Italian, künstlich in German, artificiel in French) covers a heterogeneous area which should be clarified before we proceed. In all languages, this conc...
Although the expression ‘artificial brain’, which was somewhat accepted in the 1950 and 1960s, is now obsolete, artificial intelligence research seems to be once again heading towards this objective after almost 50 years of attempts in which terms such as ‘artificial mind’, ‘reasoning’, ‘understanding’ and ‘intelligence’ have been used instead of ‘...
Whoever wants to design a naturoid, i.e., a man—engineer, artist or other who is attracted by the idea of reproducing something natural—is strongly characterized by a special way of viewing the world.
There is a region of the “naturoids kingdom”, called the region of automatisms, which is found at the boundary between conventional technology and the technology of naturoids. We can find examples of automatisms dating back to ancient times, including the Egyptian technology of the pyramids. What dominates in this area is what we could define as th...
While naturoids always need to interface with nature through ad hoc devices, the naturoid itself can appear as an interface. This is the case for a whole series of objects or devices, which have been used in military camouflage. Such devices and objects are now coming out on the market, especially in the US. Their purpose is to protect local enviro...
Among the objects of nature which are today most often assumed as exemplars, we can find elements of the landscape or climate, such as rocks, snow, grass, rain, islands, caves, mountains, ponds, lakes and many others.
Using our reasoning, we can now propose a classification of naturoids on the basis of their main features. First of all, we have seen how the technology of naturoids has always led to two opposite kinds of activity depending on the concrete or abstract nature of the ‘substance’ by means of which the final product is designed and realized. Since man...
It is said that the Rigveda, an ancient Indian poem, contains the first reference to a prosthesis. Written in Sanskrit between 3500 and 1800 B.C., it tells the story of a warrior, Vishpala, who, having lost a leg in battle, was fitted with a metal leg so that he could continue to fight. Likewise, the Celtic god New Haw was said to have four silver...
As we said, the exemplar is the natural object or process which is chosen as the target of the reproduction. More precisely, we should say that a naturoid is the reproduction of the representation of the exemplar, which the artificialist generated in his own mind. Models, even purely mental ones—in the technological design as well as in art—are exa...
At a high level of ion, it can be shown by analogy that attempts to reproduce natural phenomena occur not only in technological endeavors but also in human communication and the arts, including music. This paper presents the parallel development of artificial devices—or "naturoids"—in the fields of technology, message communication and musical comp...
Neither animals nor human beings accept the natural context they live in just as they find it. Instead, they try to improve their chances of survival and well-being by manipulating their external world. In human cultures, the manipulation goes further, becoming technology, whose starting point is design, and whose outcome is something artificial, i...
Usually, the shape of the future is seen as the result of a cultural flow that, according to some privileged cultural variable, like technology, goes undisturbed towards its own outcome. This is a quite naive attitude that has been very rarely successful. Both conventional technology and technology of the artificial show that, within culture, ‘demo...
The intimate character of a musical work, particularly if purely instrumental, is difficult to explain. Yet philosophical, musicological, psychological and sociological reflections have constantly been directed towards a rational, almost scientific, explanation of the musical phenomenon. Philip Ball’s book offers not only a rich analysis of the res...
Deleuze and Guattari develop a notion of “minor literature” in their short book on Kafka, and the opposition major/minor has been used with varying degrees of success by critics working in a range of disciplines including architectural ...
The human ambition to reproduce natural objects and processes has a long history, and ranges from pure dreams to actual design: from Icarus's wings to modern-day robotics and bioengineering. The concept of naturoid has been introduced in the last decade or so, for referring to man's attempts to reproduce natural phenomena. The development of naturo...
Technological imagination and actual technological achievements have always been two very different things. Sudden and unpredictable events always seem to intervene between our visions regarding possible futures and the subsequent concrete realizations. Thus, our ideas and projects are continually being redirected. In the field of naturoids—that is...
There is a great distance between two pairs of concepts that are consistent in their own fields; namely, information/control
and knowledge/decision. Although contemporary techno-sciences and common sense tend to neglect this distance, its intrinsic
implications sometimes make it difficult to understand what is going on in our cultural events and de...
Citations
... Each artificial reef unit comprises blind crevices and through holes leading to chambers and smaller or larger cavities constituting microhabitats and refuges for targeted benthic and benthopelagic organisms. The concept of "naturoid" was recently introduced referring to man's attempts to reproduce natural objects [18]. These objects are identified under the name naturoids, in order to be distinguished from other technological products which are not actually inspired by natural phenomena and are thus not intended to reproduce natural objects or processes [19]. ...
... The intensity of today's technology, both artificial and conventional, makes such theoretical work legitimate both on technical grounds and also because of its urgency socially and culturally. " (Negrotti, 1993). If we are to design 'true' units of artificial intelligence we must be certain to clearly (AI) The subfield of computer science concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolic inference by computer and symbolic knowledge representation for use in making inferences. ...
... In the latest wireless technologies advances such as AR and VR, consumers are enabled to engage emotionally with their applications, especially in tourism industries. AR (Sowmya, Parthipan, & Sriram Kumar, 2015) and VR (Negrotti, 2012) have been around for more than two decades. The applications of these technologies were mainly implemented behind closed doors and with Personal Computers (Li, Yi, Chi, Wang, & Chan, 2018). ...
... In his fable On Rigour in Science, Jorge Luis Borges depicts an empire in which the discipline of cartography became so exact that the empires' map arrived at the size of empire (Borges, 1946) -illustrating the pointlessness to aspire to absolute homology: It is impossible to rebuild nature, because such task would imply nature's duplication. Therefore, designing from nature with materials and processes quite different from nature -a constraint we will have to accept for some time yet -will inevitably result in objects and systems with their own nature (Negrotti, 2008). The outcomes from nanotechnology, genetic or tissue engineering research show how difficult it is to transpose these results due to the issues associated with scale-invariance. ...
... In the future, AI can free humans from repetitive, regular, and simple tasks that take a lot of time, leading to a significant increase in productivity. But Massimo Negrotti believes that "The analysis-simulation" inherently mentality makes AI unable to handle things like creativity which is a kind of abilities with ambiguity, complexity and integrity [18]. Although artistic creation is considered to be a vivid expression of human creativity and emotional thinking, there are also non-creative labor parts in artistic practice, such as the process from unfamiliar contact to skillful use of tools, the mental labor process of cultivating creative skills and hands-on ability, which require the artist to invest a lot of time and energy to learn, hindering the exertion of creativity. ...
... The concept of "naturoid" was recently introduced referring to man's attempts to reproduce natural objects [18]. These objects are identified under the name naturoids, in order to be distinguished from other technological products which are not actually inspired by natural phenomena and are thus not intended to reproduce natural objects or processes [19]. We adapted this term for HCMR innovative artificial reef units in order to emphasize their major difference from the numerous other man-fabricated artificial objects that have been used for the same purpose [14]. ...
... This happens also in the art, but here the transfiguration is not perceived as a limit. Rather, in the art, the transfiguration becomes the intentional goal of the artist since he wants to express what he sees through his own poetics (Negrotti 2012). ...
Reference: The old doom of a new technology
... De modo que, lo artificial depende de un principio exterior a sí mismo que le concede características constitutivas. Lo artificial consiste en el resultado de esfuerzos intencionales cuyas estrategias difieren de lo natural, esto es, lato sensu tecnológica (Negrotti, 2000). ...
