Walter Benjamin once noted that the art of narrating touched to the end, when regretting the ‘disappearing of the beauty of genre’32 that had been produced by narrators through the European literary tradition. Benjamin’s profound insight into the fate of narrativity has returned to relevance in today’s unprecedented technological context. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, we are becoming accustomed to the emerging phenomenon of conversational robots. Considering the growing interest in ‘chatterbots (chatbots, bots)’ and their spreading popularity over diverse sectors, academic scholars like us feel more than ever forced to seriously take them into account and entered into debates on the crucial topics surrounding them. As the chatterbots mechanically mimic human language, a fundamental question can be raised: one day in the near future will they be able to replace human conversational partners? Ultimately we must ponder whether chatterbots really can use human language and how artificial language comes to the symbolic level, a distinctive feature of the former. For these problematic lines of questioning, the concept of narrative intelligence (Paul Ricoeur) can provide an interesting argument with a particular aspect constituting personal identity: ipseity and alterity. Following this hermeneutic stance, we can say that personal identity is of great importance. As for personal identity, we can distinguish two levels: identity as sameness (performance) and identity as alteration (diversité) following P. Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity. Accordingly, the question of personal identity is closely aligned with the question of the self (le soi). In particular the concept of le soi should not be thought of without considering that of ipseity. The very idea of ipseity is located at the level of the self (le soi) on which all aspects of the self (myself, yourself, himself, ourselves, yourselves, and so forth) can be distributed respectively. P. Ricoeur accurately pointed out that this question of self as le soi is not the question of what, but rather of who. Not only are the ipseity and le soi rendered over the temporal dimension, but they are also involved in the ethical level, because the question of self can not be separated from the agent of an action as the ‘assignation of an agent.’ Correspondingly the other humanistic perspectives like Ernst Cassirer’s ‘symbolic pregnance’ conception and Merleau-Ponty’s ontological phenomenology can naturally join with the Ricoeurian hermeneutic perspective to further investigate how closely interconnected the bodily function and mechanism of gennerating meanings[Bedeutung]. To our knowledge, this distinctive genuinely human characteristic makes a decisive difference between robotic artificial intelligence and human narrative intelligence. Therefore no matter which forms chatbots take in the future, we can hardly imagine that they could access the symbolic level of human language.
고려대학교 응용문화연구소 [Center for Applied Cultural Sciences]
설립연도
2005
분야
인문학>기타인문학
소개
비트와 컴퓨터에 기초한 현대 테크놀로지와 미디어는 문화, 사회, 경제, 정치, 교육 등 전 방면에 걸쳐서 급격한 문명사적 변형을 동반하고 있다. 고려대학교 응용 문화 연구소는 이 같은 문화적 흐름에 부응하기 위해서 인문학, 과학, 예술, 테크놀로지 등을 아우르면서 새로운 대학 교육과 연구의 전범을 마련하고자 한다.
본 연구소는 미디어, 예술, 현대 문화, 디지털 영상문화등과 관련된 다양한 이론, 비평, 역사에 대한 연구를 진행시킴은 물론, 단순한 학술적 논의와 사변적 연구 차원에서 머무르지 않고, 작게는 고대의 문화 기획을 도와주면서 더 넓게는 다양한 예술 문화 기획 전시, 미디어 비평 및 교육 등에 대한 기획 등을 추진하고 있다.
아울러 본 연구소의 중요한 기능은 한국의 문화 지형도를 읽기 위한 연속적 노력의 경주이며, 그 같은 노력의 일환으로 미디어, 문화, 예술 분야에서 두각을 나타내는 전공자 또는 석학 등을 초빙하여 학내 구성원들에게 그 분들의 생각을 전달하는 기회를 마련, 타교 또는 외국의 연구소와 공동 연구 등을 수행하고 있다.
요컨대 응용 문화 연구소는 인문학, 사회과학, 컴퓨터 과학, 정보 테크놀로지, 경영학, 정치학 전공자들이 다 함께 참여하여 지적 향연을 벌일 수 있는 상생적 문화의 장을 마련하고자 한다.