Carlo Mollino,Lago Nero Sledge-Lift Station, (1946-1947)
Mollino’s reinforced concrete structure, Lago Nero Sledge-Lift Station in Salice d’Ulzio explores spatial form, structural expression and separation of materials. The finished geometry is indicative of current modern design – only Mollino was experimenting with these forms 60 years ago… and getting them built.
Artificial superintelligence, I was repeatedly told, was a dangerous prospect precisely because of how unlike us it would be, how inhuman, how immune to anger and hatred and empathy. But a sidelong reading of this cryptic eschatology suggests itself: perhaps this fear of what might be done to us by our most sophisticated technology, by our last invention, is a kind of sublimated horror at what we have already done to the world, to ourselves. We are already, many of us, controlled in ways we barely reflect on by machineries we barely understand; and the history of science and technology, at its best and at its worst, is a history of the conquest of nature, of the curing of diseases and the eradication of vast numbers of species. And so perhaps this apparition of a vengeance wreaked upon us by our own evolutionary successor is an expression of an existential shame. Perhaps it is a transfigured form of original sin, a return of the repressed, a neurotic avatar of some deeper terror. Nothing stranger to us than our own image.
