This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams” held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at “Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams”.

Products of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have mostly been formed by the views, opinions and goals of the "insiders", i.e. people usually with engineering background who are driven by the force that can be metaphorically described as the pursuit of the craft of Hephaestus. However, since the present-day technology allows for tighter and tighter mergence of the "natural" everyday human life with machines of immense complexity, the responsible reaction of the scientific community should be based on cautious reflection of what really lies beyond AI, i.e. on the frontiers where the tumultuous ever-growing and ever-changing cloud of AI touches the rest of the world. The chapters of this boo are based on the selected subset of the presentations that were delivered by their respective authors at the conference "Beyond AI: Interdisciplinary Aspects of Artificial Intelligence" held in Pilsen in December 2011. From its very definition, the reflection of the phenomena that lie beyond AI must be inherently interdisciplinary. And so is this book: all the authors took part in a mutual transdisciplinary dialogue after explaining their views on AI not only to a narrow selection of their usual close peers with the same specialisation, but to a much broader audience of various experts from AI engineering, natural sciences, humanities and philosophy. The chapters of this book thus reflect results of such a dialogue.

This book is an edited collection of chapters based on the papers presented at the conference "Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams" held in Pilsen in November 2012. The aim of the conference was to question deep-rooted ideas of artificial intelligence and cast critical reflection on methods standing at its foundations. Artificial Dreams epitomize our controversial quest for non-biological intelligence and therefore the contributors of this book tried to fully exploit such a controversy in their respective chapters, which resulted in an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts from engineering, natural sciences and humanities. While pursuing the Artificial Dreams, it has become clear that it is still more and more difficult to draw a clear divide between human and machine. And therefore this book tries to portrait such an image of what lies beyond artificial intelligence: we can see the disappearing human-machine divide, a very important phenomenon of nowadays technological society, the phenomenon which is often uncritically praised, or hypocritically condemned. And so this phenomenon found its place in the subtitle of the whole volume as well as in the title of the chapter of Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers at "Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams".

Products of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have mostly been formed by the views, opinions and goals of the "insiders," i.e. people usually with engineering background who are driven by the force that can be metaphorically described as the pursuit of the craft of Hephaestus. However, since the present-day technology allows for tighter and tighter mergence of the "natural" everyday human life with machines of immense complexity, the responsible reaction of the scientific community should be based on cautious reflection of what really lies beyond AI, i.e. on the frontiers where the tumultuous ever-growing and ever-changing cloud of AI touches the rest of the world.

The chapters of this boo are based on the selected subset of the presentations that were delivered by their respective authors at the conference "Beyond AI: Interdisciplinary Aspects of Artificial Intelligence" held in Pilsen in December 2011.

From its very definition, the reflection of the phenomena that lie beyond AI must be inherently interdisciplinary. And so is this book: all the authors took part in a mutual transdisciplinary dialogue after explaining their views on AI not only to a narrow selection of their usual close peers with the same specialisation, but to a much broader audience of various experts from AI engineering, natural sciences, humanities and philosophy. The chapters of this book thus reflect results of such a dialogue.

"

Why is the question of the di?erence between living and non-living matter - tellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this di?erence and to overcome it using the ?rmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Arti?cial Life? Cont- plating such questions, one of us has recognized [6] the existence of the eternal dream of the man of the West expressed, for example, in the Old Testament as follows: . . . the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis, 2. 7). This is the dream about the workmanlike act of the creation of Adam from clay, about the creation of life from something non-living, and the con?dence in the magic power of technologies. How has this dream developed and been converted into a reality, and how does it determine our present-day activities in science and technology? What is this con?dence rooted in? Then God said: "Let us make man in our image. . . " (Genesis, 1. 26). Man believes in his own ability to repeat the Creator's acts, to change ideas into real things, because he believes he is godlike. This con?dence is - using the trendy Dawkins' term - perhaps the most important cultural meme of the West.

This volume contains 6 invited lectures and 13 submitted contributions to the scientific programme of the international workshop Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence Research, FAIR '91, held at Smolenice Castle, Czechoslovakia, September 8-12, 1991, under the sponsorship of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, ECCAI. FAIR'91, the first of an intended series of international workshops, addresses issues which belong to the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence considered as a discipline focused on concise theoretical description of some aspects of intelligence by toolsand methods adopted from mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science. The intended goal of the FAIR workshops is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and results in a domain where theoretical models play an essential role. It is felt that such theoretical studies, their development and their relations to AI experiments and applications have to be promoted in the AI research community.

This volume contains the texts of the tutorial lecture, five invited lectures and twenty short communications contributed for presentation at the Sixth International Meeting of Young Computer Scientists, IMYCS '90. The aim of these meetings is threefold: (1) to inform on newest trends, results, and problems in theoretical computer science and related fields through a tutorial and invited lectures delivered by internationally distinguished speakers, (2) to provide a possibility for beginners in scientific work to present and discuss their results, and (3) to create an adequate opportunity for establishing first professional relations among the participants.

The volume contains selected contributions from the scientific programme of the 5th International Meeting of Young Computer Scientists (IMYCS '88) held at Smolenice Castle (Czechoslovakia), November 14-18, 1988. It is divided into five chapters which approach the three crucial notions of contemporary theoretical computer science - machines, languages, and complexity - from different perspectives. The first chapter contains contributions dealing with problems of decidability, hierarchy, and complexity. Papers concerning different types and problems of automata theory form the second chapter. The contributions in the third chapter cover the large field of algorithmics from the study of program complexity to the domain of computational geometry. The two contributions of the fourth chapter are devoted to logic programming and inductive inference. The final chapter deals with problems of cryptography and contains the text of the IMYCS '88 tutorial on cryptography and data security delivered by A. Salomaa. The book will be a useful source for orientation in contemporary theoretical computer science and related fields such as software engineering and artificial intelligence for researchers and graduate students.