Manuel de Landa
De Landa and the Robot Anthropologist.
Manuel De Landa is a Cultural critic who writes about technology.
His book `War in the Age of Intelligent Machines' studies warfare and it's history from a broad concern for technological impacts on society. It is written from the point of view of a robot anthropologist considering the evolution of their own race from it's beginnings.
Implicit in this approach is the understanding that human civilisation was an early stage in the development of a robotic culture, just as we study the patterns of behaviour of Gorillas to gain further insight to our own behaviour. He examines the leaps in robot evolution by reference to the `machinic phylum' or spontaneous evolutionary leaps across into new ways of thinking about technology.
Along the way De Landa examines Chaos Theory, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and the growth of the computer network as a paradigmatic leap in the creation of the robot race. Great reading!