Introduction: Beyond Common Sense Even in a scientific lexicon, some terms suffer from a sort of meaning inertness which seems to disappear only in actual use. Take, for instance, the adjective artificial: for almost everybody, it seems to designate something designed and produced by man, or anything that is not natural. In this way, is a simple substitute for technological, since all not-natural things, obviously, are made by means of some more or less refined human technology. Scholars including Herbert Simon', Jacques Monod 2, and others have taken this position, neglecting the teleological difference between a cathode tube and an heart. Actually, the perspectiva artificialis which Leonbattista Alberti and Piero della Francesca had in mind in the Renaissance was something quite different from this inertial meaning. In fact, everybody today also, understands the expression artificial kidney, while nobody would attach any meaning to the expression artificial telephone. The reflexion on technology has not yet come to a scientific theorization and, on the basis of illuministic or romantic attitudes, it confines itself to an analysis which deals with technological objects as something which man constructs, after Archimedes, as secondary and pleasant applications of the so-called pure sciences, such as mathematics or geometry. But, as a matter of fact, since the dawn of civilization, man shows a great, twofold constructive ambition: one, the Prometheus syndrome, aims at inventing objects and machines able to dominate the nature grasping its laws and adapting itself to them; the other, in turn, the Icarus syndrome, aims at reproducing natural objects or processes through alternate strategies,3 as compared to those nature follows. While the former may be called conventional technology, the latter should be called the technology of the artificial. From the wings of Icarus, attached by naive glue, to current techniques for replacing human organs, or to reproduce the capacities of the mind or the properties of life through ancient or recent automata, there emerges clearly a continuum worthy to be seriously considered as a man's specific turn, which today's and future technologies will greatly enhance. 1 H.A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), tr. it. Le scienze dell'artificiale (Milano: ISEDI, 1970) 18-9. 2 J. Monod, II caso e la necessita (Milano: Est Mondadori, 1972), 18. 3 R. Rosen, Bionics Revisited in H. Haken, A. Karlqvist and U. Svedin, eds., The Machine as Metaphor and Tool (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1993). 94-5.