(Illustration by Yelena Bryksenkova for St. Louis Magazine/ybryksenkova.blogspot.com)

With his most recent book, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines,” Minsoo Kang tracked our love-hate relationships with robots, automata and other machines that mimic human behavior. The associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis further discussed the topic in a feature about his work that ran in St. Louis Magazine.

In Jeannette Cooperman’s article “Our Friends, the Killer Robots,” Kang touched on technophobia, what people in other parts of the world think about robots and the three basic theories about how our relationship with our cyber friends will evolve.

“Sooner or later, machines are going to gain sentience and rebel, and if we are lucky, we will win,” Kang told St. Louis Magazine of one possible future relationship scenario.

The other theories he discussed are perhaps a little more pleasant. One is a peaceful coexistence. The other would involve a merging of man and machine through an exchange of biological and mechanical parts.

More can be read about Kang and his book “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines” at UMSL Daily.