Summa Technologiae

Notes

NOTES TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION 1 Peter Butko, “Summa Technologiae—Looking Back and Ahead,” in The Art and Science of Stanisław Lem, ed. Peter Swirski (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 84. 2 Stanisław Lem,“Thirty Years Later,” in A Stanisław Lem Reader, ed. Peter Swirski (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 70. 3 Butko, “Summa Technologiae,” 102. 4 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 113. For more on this issue, see Joanna Zylinska, “Playing God, Playing Adam: The Politics and Ethics of Enhancement,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7 (2010): 2. 5 See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Cary Wolfe, “In Search of Posthumanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela,” in The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part I, special issue of Cultural Critique 30 (1995): 33–70; and Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 6 Peter Swirski, “Stanisław Lem: A Stranger in a Strange Land,” in Swirski, A Stanisław Lem Reader, 6. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 As Lem himself puts it in the essay titled“Small Robots,”“we cannot exclude the possibility that machines equipped with sovereign will may at some point begin to resist us. I am not thinking, of course, 364 NOTES TO TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION of a robot rebellion against humankind, so beloved by all primitive purveyors of cognitive magic. My only point is that, with the rise in the degree of behavioral freedom, one can no longer preserve the ‘good and only the good,’ because this very freedom can also give rise to a touch of‘evil.’ We can see this in natural evolution only too well, and this reflection may perhaps temper our intention to endow robots with free will.” Lem, “Small Robots,” in Lemistry: A Celebration of the Work of Stanisław Lem, ed. Ra Page and Magda Raczynska (Manchester, U.K.: Comma Press, 2011), 15–16.This line of thought was already visible in Lem’s essay“The Ethics of Technology and the Technology of Ethics” (originally published in 1967), in which he positions morality as a form of“applied technosocial control.”Cited in Peter Swirski,“Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science (Personal Interview with Stanisław Lem, June 1992),” in Swirski, A Stanisław Lem Reader, 50. 10 N. Katherine Hayles,“(Un)masking the Agent: Stanisław Lem’s ‘The Mask,’” in The Art and Science of Stanisław Lem, ed. Peter Swirski (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 29. 11 Peter Swirski,“Lem in a Nutshell (Written Interview with Stanisław Lem, July 1994),” in Swirski, A Stanisław Lem Reader, 115. 12 Ibid., 114. 13 See Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 180–95. 14 Jerzy Jarz bski, “Models of Evolution in the Writings of Stanisław Lem,” in Swirski, The Art and Science of Stanisław Lem, 115. 15 Ibid., 111. 16 See Paisley Livingston, “Skepticism, Realism, Fallibilism: On Lem’s Epistemological Themes,” in Swirski, A Stanisław Lem Reader. 17 See Swirski,“Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science,”31. 18 See Hayles, “(Un)masking the Agent,” 43. 19 Swirski, “Lem in a Nutshell,” 93. 20 Swirski, “Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science,” 56. 21 Jarz bski, “Models of Evolution,” 105. 22 Ibid., 115. 23 Andy Sawyer,“Stanisław Lem—Who’s He?”in Page and Raczynska, Lemistry, 258. 24 Swirski, “Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science,” 27. 25 Swirski, “Lem in a Nutshell,” 116. 26 Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Meditation as a Vital Process (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012). NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 365 27 Butko, “Summa Technologiae,” 83–84. 28 Cited, in Polish, on Lem’s official website (http://www.lem.pl). 29 Swirski, “Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science,” 54. 30 Lem, “Thirty Years Later,” 68. 31 Stanisław Lem, “Dwadzie cia lat pó niej” [Twenty Years Later], in Lem, Summa Technologiae, 4th exp. ed. (Lublin, Poland: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1997), 327. 32 Swirski,“Reflections on Philosophy, Literature, and Science,”55–56. 1. DILEMMAS 1 [Although the prophet Isaiah–inspired version of the phrase that mentions beating swords into plowshares as an act of replacing warfare with peaceful coexistence is more frequently evoked (Isaiah 2:4), the Bible also mentions the opposite activity (Joel 3:10), which is...