1st Global Conference
Conference Programme
Session 7: Fiction, Science and Science
Fiction: Visions of the Future
Chair: Albrecht Fritzsche
Science Fiction-What is it Good For?: Practical
Issues for Embodied AI as Articulated in Science Fiction
Lisa Nocks
Drew University, Madison, N. J., USA
Science Fiction that deals with robots has tended
to focus more closely on the ethical and political implications of
a human/robot culture than on the mathematical or engineering details
of their vision. Nevertheless, their descriptions of both the practical
value of the humanoid configuration and the sorts of practical obstacles
that robotics engineers will face in producing sociable, intelligent,
autonomous machines have often been remarkably similar to those articulated
by AI and robotics experts. SF writers have created scenarios in
which the potential and limits of issues like motivation and choice,
situated learning, human/machine socialization, the value of haptic,
vision, and audial sensing, and "natural" kinetics are
played out in mundane terms.
Contrary to SF critics who have in the
past characterized the genre from two extremes--as either predictive
or merely derivative--or confined their value to providing a metaphorical
framework for discourses of race, class, and gender, I will suggest
that there is a fundamental link between between imaginative and
practical invention; that SF is the analytic component of invention.
My paper will focus on the sub-genre of embodied AI--tales of the
humanoid robot or android, an idea whose roots reach into antiquity.
I will focus on just a few of the issues for embodied AI as they have
been described by AI specialists, and describe the way that SF writers
have envisioned their solutions and problems. Although a thorough discussion
of the cognitive, physiological, and evolutionary studies that might
support my thesis is beyond the scope of this brief presentation, my
intention is to inspire discussion among attendees with these interests.
As a jumping off point I offer a comment by Gregory Benford, physicist,
astronomer and science fiction writer based at U California, Irvine.
Benford once told an interviewer that storytelling allowed him to deal
with "crucial issues that the
narrow mechanisms of science and academic philosophy wouldn't".
He equated both experiences as "the unconscious set free".
(McCaffrey, 1990). Benford's remark is reminiscent of SF writer Sprague
deCamp, who called SF "a bridge between science and art, between
the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity." (Bretnor,
1974) I would add that Science Fiction writers share with scientists
an acceptance that what seems implausible or untrue of the universe
or our ability to modify it today may be found to be possible and
practicable tomorrow; that therefore investigations about their implications
are not only interesting but warranted.
I proceed then, on the assumption
that both the practical and imaginative methods of thinking about
science, (in this case embodied AI) indicate a division of labour
in which humans analyze their inventive activity, whether retrospectively,
prospectively, or concurrently. Both activities, I argue, have to
do with ensuring our survival.
Pinocchio & AI
Mariana
Meyer
Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brazil
Considering the differences in the historic context,
text and the means of communication used to storytell, my objective
is to investigate in which way the film Artificial Intelligence by
Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick updates the classic of children
literature The
adventures of Pinocchio , by Carlos Collodi. Either by carpentry
or by robotics, both texts present “dummies” created to fulfil human
life's solitude. However, the discussion of man-machine/creation
must be introduced ahead the possibility of an affectionate complicity
between their subjects, thus also asking in which way this relationship
takes place: how much they invest and believe in it, what the limits
between real and virtual are.
David is an intelligent robot. Nevertheless,
when his mom says the magic words, another intelligence is triggered:
he becomes able to love. The robot which gets little by little
her maternal affection starts to scare her: for how long will
she be able to take it ahead? Won't she be surrendering to a lie
played by the robot and be traveling to a non-reality?
According
to Dziga Vertov's eye-cine, machines are human being extensions.
The eye of the camera sees what human beings are unable to realize:
the truth, says Vertóv. The virtual reality might not be
an opposition of the real, but its extension. The robot is the
extension of those families who cannot have children. An extension
of parents-children relation.
The other being is always the unknown,
a threat. To accept him may mean to deny ourselves, or at least,
to argue us. An extra-terrestrial is an strange creature, from
another world, who is born by our society's anguish, inhibition
and fears. The Artificial Intelligence is a human creation. It
does not represent neither fear, nor mystery, but knowledge and
one's need to overcome oneself. In the myth of believing that intelligent
machines will overcome men lies the pleasure of redemption. The
humanity perpetuated through its creation, its kin: David searches
to be real and to go back to his mom. Pinocchio only manages to turn
into a real boy by protecting and returning to the paternal image
of Gepetto.
Visions of the Future and the Role of AI
Natalia L. Rudychev
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA and St. Petersburg State University,
Russia
Works by Dr. Jean-Claude Latombe, one of the leading
researchers that work on the problem of A. I. at the present moment,
show that currently we are very far from creating robots that would
in any approximation resemble the robots of science fiction. Most
of the robots that exist right now are even unable to move freely
in any kind of space that resembles the space of the furnished apartment.
The robot cannot differentiate between different obstacles. For example,
it cannot tell the difference between a pet cage and a couch.
At
the same time there is no lack of futuristic visions both in literature
and in film of societies in which robots successfully cope with various
tasks that are much more complicated than differentiation between two
kinds of obstacles. Moreover, such films as A. I. , Bicentenial
Man , Blade Runner , Matrix and Matrix
Reloaded explore very complicated ethical questions dealing
with problems that arise in the society in which robots have become
virtually indistinguishable from humans.
I find these futuristic visions
very important because they make us ponder over such crucial questions
as: what is it to be human; what is the measure of our responsibility
for the things that we create; what kind of thinking can lead to
the anti-utopian societies of the future in which humans would have
to fight the machines in order to survive.
To put it in Deleuzian
terms the human and the robot form a block of becoming. This is the
becoming which is involutional and creative. Creative involution of
the human and the robot is shaped by three continually intermingling
lines. The first line it the molar line
which gives the impression that everything can be foreseen and calculated
in advance. This line deals with macropolitics that concern states,
institutions and classes. The second line is the molecular line
which deals with micropolitics and tends to evade the determination
of the first line. The third line is the line of flight which
is a pure abstract line. This line does not deal with institutions
and segments like the previous two do. It is the exploration of the
two other lines that runs in between. Involution of the human and
the robot that is shaped by three intermingling lines is capable
of turning in to either creative or deadly. It is our responsibility
to ourselves as humans to try to shape our thinking in such a way
that we would take a responsible position towards the things that
we create.
