기계 체현과 모달리티

English Abstract

Since 2023, the convergence of artificial intelligence and robotics has moved beyond a generational turnover within the technology ecosystem and now signals a more fundamental event: machine agents have begun to enter the horizon of multisensory meaning-making alongside human beings. This working paper — the inaugural issue of the Modality Lab Working Paper Series — argues that this juncture, which it names the "Physical-AI era" (from July 2023, marked by the appearance of RT-2), cannot be adequately grasped as a mere technological trend. It must instead be re-read as a phenomenon of co-presence: a situation in which human and machine become two mutually dependent embodied subjects that jointly constitute a shared field of Modality.

The paper advances a single overarching claim: human-machine co-embodiment does not extend the human sensorium (as in the McLuhan tradition) but brings a new Modality into presence through the horizontal coexistence of distinct embodied subjects. To substantiate this, it integrates phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Ihde), Peircean semiotics, philosophy of technology (Simondon), posthumanist theory (Hayles, Barad), and science-and-technology studies (Suchman) into a four-tier communicative framework — Mode · Modal · Modality · Medium (the "M4 framework") — and introduces co-modal coupling as the abductive logic that drives the joint sign-action between human and machine.

From four diagnostic propositions the paper derives four design principles and a procedural checklist for designers, and closes by projecting the theoretical, practical, and regulatory implications for the Physical-AI era. The argument proceeds strictly one-directionally — diagnosis → design → implication — and rests only on verified primary-source industry data (2025-2026) and canonical theoretical texts.