Massimo Negrotti’s research while affiliated with Università degli Studi di Urbino "Carlo Bo" and other places

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 would understand why, as a rule, no artificial device can ‘converge’ to its natural counterpart and why, on the contrary, the more it advances, the further away it goes from it. As a result, our efforts should be oriented to deeply investigate the artificial as it were a truly new ‘nature’ in itself.

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 measure stimulated other ways to follow for reproducing human abilities. Nevertheless, a curious fact characterizes the history of AI regarding the problems raised, among the many, by Dreyfus. While in the first era the main concern by the opponents was to certify the limited power of computers as compared to humans, it seems that today the main concern is exactly the opposite, namely the growing and threatening power of AI devices, both software and hardware based, such as robots. Maybe the reason of that has been, and is today too, the imbalance assigned to the discussion, on the one side, of what human faculties are and work, and, on the other, on what the artificial is and can work. Designing the artificial, in every field, means to give birth to devices that consist of a sort of overlapping of nature and technology, and, therefore, they deserve to be named naturoids. This implies that, to understand them, we need to study their genuine ‘artificial nature’ in general terms, bringing further what H. A. Simon called the ‘science of the artificial’.

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 school of A.I. tries to reproduce is not the mind but a model of it coming from a specific psychological or ontological paradigm that assumes the existence of the mind as something given. Therefore, the “eradication” of the mind from the brain evolution and activity adds a further degree of arbitrariness to the unavoidable bias and transfiguration that characterizes every attempt to reproduce natural objects, that is, to design naturoids.

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 has always possessed and shown a distinct tendency to reproduce whatever surrounds him—and also whatever has a primary origin in himself, such as feelings, self-portrait, etc.—it is not surprising that the entire history of man is intensely characterized by the invention and development of the most varied technologies aimed precisely at the material expression, communication or reproduction of exemplars of every kind.

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 easy enterprise, and the actual replication of a natural object or process by means of some technology is impossible. In this book the author uses the term naturoid to designate any real artifact arising from our attempts to reproduce natural instances. He concentrates on activities that involve the reproduction of something existing in nature, and whose reproduction, through construction strategies which differ from natural ones, we consider to be useful, appealing or interesting. The development of naturoids may be viewed as a distinct class of technological activity, and the concept should be useful for methodological research into establishing the common rules, potentialities and constraints that characterize the human effort to reproduce natural objects. The author shows that a naturoid is always the result of a reduction of the complexity of natural objects, due to an unavoidable multiple selection strategy. Nevertheless, the reproduction process implies that naturoids take on their own new complexity, resulting in a transfiguration of the natural exemplars and their performances, and leading to a true innovation explosion. While the core performances of contemporary naturoids improve, paradoxically the more a naturoid develops the further it moves away from its natural counterpart. Therefore, naturoids will more and more affect our relationships with advanced technologies and with nature, but in ways quite beyond our predictive capabilities. The book will be of interest to design scholars and researchers of technology, cultural studies, anthropology and the sociology of science and technology.

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.

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 examples of formalized representations which function as pilot maps or schemes of the natural object or process which we wish to reproduce.

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 previous section—is solved, we are faced with a new and decisive step. This moment could be defined as the choice, or the attribution, of an essential performance for the exemplar.

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 objects—for example, human beings—capable of engaging in normal relationships with the rest of the environment or organism.

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.