In Praise Of Useless Robots | The MIT Press Reader

Afew months ago, I visited the Futurism retrospective organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s death at the National Gallery in Rome. The rooms were filled with archives of an ultra-modernist machinic dream: posters, paintings, and sculptures coexisted alongside engines, telegraphs, cars, and airplanes. It was impossible to ignore the voice of the visionary ideologue of Futurism echoing through the sober neoclassical halls of the museum: “We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” For the Futurists, every machine was, essentially, a time-machine: more than tools designed to perform a specific task, technological objects were the historical embodiment of humanity’s universal drive toward progress. Looking beyond the notoriously controversial implications of its political affiliations, the genius of the Futurist avant-garde was its intuition that the evolution of machines could capture cultural transf

Afew months ago, I visited the Futurism retrospective organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s death at the National Gallery in Rome. The rooms were filled with archives of an ultra-modernist machinic dream: posters, paintings, and sculptures coexisted alongside engines, telegraphs, cars, and airplanes. It was impossible to ignore the voice of the visionary ideologue of Futurism echoing through the sober neoclassical halls of the museum: “We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” For the Futurists, every m