Robot poetics

This month’s theme on the Empyre listserv is Robot Poetics. The terms have been taken very widely with context being obviously germane to the issues. As one would expect there is quite a lot on robot poetics and on robots and on poetics on the internet. The artificial neural networks (ANNs) that keep the internet running smoothly (mostly, in my humble opinion) and their similarities/differences with the human brain are immediately of some interest to poetry. But then it isn’t only brain that is involved in robotics. Movement comes in, somatics, visual and aural perception…. Are humans (ever) robots? Would it be preferable to answer yes? Then again, what does poem mean? As a neophyte in robot studies I’ll limit my post to this. I believe the Empyre-l discussion offers a lot both as introduction and continuation. It’s free to follow the listserv. One example of what the current discussion deals on dreaming is by Ben Bogart (scroll down for video):

http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2017/watching-blade-runner-2016/