[Kim Heeyoon's Bookshelf] Finding the 'Vaccine for the Mind' in Humanities During the Pandemic Era

Artificial Intelligence and Soil
'Encyclopedia of Imagination' in Humanities for Overcoming Reality

The ancient Greek poet Homer sang of the ‘Golden Secretary,’ which is similar to today’s artificial intelligence (AI). This being, with the appearance of a living girl, possessing intelligence and voice with emotions, and knowledge of works learned from gods of strength and immortality, closely resembles the culmination of the AI services we use today. Photo by movie Ex Machina still.

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] In the 8th century BC, the ancient Greek poet Homer sang of the ‘Golden Secretary,’ a figure similar to today’s artificial intelligence (AI). This being, with the appearance of living girls, equipped with intelligence, voice, and strength imbued with emotions, and having learned works from immortal gods, is essentially an embodiment of the AI services we use today. The role of AI speakers like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri was encapsulated in ‘voice,’ and the machine learning function, which learns from big data to provide new services, was installed by learning ‘works’ from immortal gods. Additionally, recognition functions that analyze human expressions and voices through cameras, 3D sensors, and microphones to read emotions were incorporated as ‘intelligence with emotions’ within the girl’s appearance. Through the Golden Secretary, Homer actually envisioned a perfect AI robot that was ahead of current technology.

The ancient mythological imagination of molding humans from clay expanded into the realm of reality combining imagination and reality during the Renaissance. To restore lives and lands devastated by the Crusades and the Black Death, Renaissance people summoned ancient imagination and focused on devising solutions that materialized even the human body. Leonardo da Vinci’s approach of placing his naked self in the center of a circle and square to explore body proportions is interpreted as the Renaissance person’s intuitive self-awareness that gathered science, art, philosophy, literature, and even religion within the body.

Moreover, the Renaissance people’s desire for ‘voluntary transformation’ led to an unexpected rhinoplasty craze. The Renaissance era, which was open to sexuality beyond decadence, faced syphilis as an unavoidable unwelcome guest. The symptoms of syphilis, which began with rashes all over the body and progressed to numb skin and necrosis causing the nose to collapse, were soon regarded as a stigma of sexual corruption. Rhinoplasty devised to restore this was already being developed in various surgical methods centered in Sicily in the early 15th century. The rhinoplasty techniques, incorporating those of ancient Greek Hippocrates, 11th-century Persian Avicenna, and ancient Indian Sushruta, evolved from initially transplanting skin tissue taken from the cheek and forehead to the nose, to the more refined stage of transplanting skin from the arm.

Contemporary Italian anatomist Gaspare Tagliacozzi argued in his work ‘De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem’ that “We restore, reconstruct, and make whole the parts given by nature but taken away by fate,” and “This is not to please the eye but to restore the soul and comfort the hearts of those who suffer.” He elevated rhinoplasty for syphilis patients from a mere cosmetic procedure to a realm of recreation for restoring the original form of the body and reconstruction for an ideal shape.

Artificial Intelligence and Soil / Kim Dong-hoon / Minumsa / 18,000 KRW. Photo by Minumsa

The materialized body, as time passed, soon met surrealism and evoked new emotions. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori presented the ‘uncanny valley,’ a graph of human affinity and aversion toward humanoid figures like wax dolls. The discomfort toward humanoids, realized through medieval fashion dolls and modern mannequins, is rooted in fear of human imitations and substitutes. However, the discomfort toward humanoids, where life and death coexist, transforms into pleasure amid confusion, and this is freshly consumed through zombies, which have recently gained attention as a theme in content.

Artificial intelligence and clay summon and interpret reality connecting imagination and reality mined from the humanities through various objects. The author points out that the COVID-19 pandemic is a warning to humanity and that the Renaissance perspective?where people rediscovered their own bodies in daily life, not through spirit or ideology, to recover humanity after the Black Death?is urgently needed for us experiencing COVID-19. Recovering the ‘sensing body’ dulled by the scars of COVID-19, such as normalized mask-wearing and social distancing, might be a mental vaccine and healing that precedes the physical vaccine.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.