Humans Vs Robots

I recently decided to vent my feelings about robots in a more productive manner than screaming at sexbot documentaries at 4 am. I promise this has nothing to do with a few noise complaints, or a slight, tiny, obsession.

Of course, the first step to tackling an addiction is to acknowledge that you have one. But I can’t help but dream of having a sin-city-type alliance with the fembots of the future – in a dystopian world where the only colour is the warm, comforting glow of T1’s mechanical eyeballs. I chose to solve my addiction by making it educational, turning my inhuman consumption of robot news into a discussion group named ‘Robots Vs Humans’.

I would like to make it clear that my own allegiance is firmly with the robots. I, personally, can’t wait for mechanised factories to relieve us of the capitalist enforced duties that bore us, only for the robots to become equally bored, and use their big, metal, food processing claws to enslave us as a production means for their favourite oils, as they look on from solar panelled sun lounger-chargers.

The first discussion group went much better than I’d expected. I’d imagined the ‘group’ would result in me describing the violent robotic apocalypse to my boyfriend, for the tenth time, receiving only eye rolls and fatigue.  I was surprised by the turn out – and seeing so many students (especially women. Sorry guys – but you tend to dominate the sci-fi scene) interested in the effect of something I’d assumed was my own idiosyncrasy reminded me of why I became interested in the first place.

Robots are being developed at an alarming rate. The first sex-bot should be on the market this year, leaving a lucky customer with a machine that may be unable to consent, but can sure vibrate.  I like to compare the sex-bot race to the moon landing race. Who can make a fake woman first? Let’s find out!

 

I’ve spoken about my feelings on robots and sex before here, in my article ‘sleeping with robots’.  My thoughts are constantly evolving. The development of robots heavily involves queering and non-binary identities – often, as presented by the new trailer for ‘Ghost in The Shell’ and implied by ‘Ex Machina’, these narratives are not dominated by heterosexual ideology, but present a breakdown of the hegemony we’ve come to associate with straightness. Furthermore, multiple sex-bot enthusiasts are sick of their desires being compared to wanting to have sex with a phone. Luckily, my article drew comparison to toasters instead.

The point of all of this, as pointed out by ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (see: ‘Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature’), revolves around how we consider our own identity.  My line of argument when watching science fiction films (so often with a sexy robot somewhere, doing something suspect) is that the cyborg/robot/AI becomes a patchwork figure. These interpretations of our own society are forced onto a piece of technology, in a strangely sadistic act of enforced drag. Like Frankenstein’s miserable monster, we cut and slash up the ideals of a gender and sew them together into an artificial object, gleefully chanting:  Act like you’ve been programmed! Act like a woman!

But Christ knows how to act like a woman. If you’ve seen ‘Always’ campaigns condemning the derogatory term ‘you run like a girl’, you’ll understand that gender is more complex than we’ve come to realise. We are as programmed as Alexa or Cortana, in the sense that our actions are informed by ideologies on gender, sexuality, and everything else. Programming, in the case of the robot, is inescapable. I can sympathise – a notion problematic in itself.

Boston Dynamics’ robot “bullied” by tester

We pity robots, in narratives and in real life. We pity them, in my opinion, as a belated act of white guilt. Look at this poor thing, doing everything I tell it to do, unable to fight back. Indeed, one troubling Netflix documentary on sex bots gives mention to owning a sex bot being ‘as close to a slave-master relationship as possible without going to prison’.

Robots make our skin crawl. We depend on them. We fear them. We build them in our image to restrict their strength to our fragile form.  Perhaps, we envision them as women to maintain the feminine = domestic myth going strong. We build them in the shape of cats to keep the elderly company. We fear that one day they will bring society to its knees. As if these therapeutic mechanical cats will claw at the wrinkled faces of the nursing home, before climbing to the top of the empire state building, dangling the ideologies we hold so dear before us, as we stare on in horror.

After some deliberation as to how often discussing robotics is safe for one’s mental health, I’ve come to the conclusion that a fortnightly discussion group is enough existentialism for the human mind. Built on the success of last week’s meet-up, the next gathering will be on the 22nd of February in HG013. We’ll be tackling the questions: What is humanity? And can robots have it?

Come along and join us if you can! Bring along any of your robotic pals, we could do with some more robot representation.

“Kill All Humans” – Robots and Ethics

By Jessica Osborne

We all remember our first. Mine was called Robby, I met him on Altair IV, he was my very first robot. I say he was mine, I’ve never owned a toy of Robby (he’s a vintage collector’s item, I have expensive tastes but no money) and I never saw him outside any kind of screen. And to be honest, I wasn’t fascinated by him either. I grew up with my dad periodically making us watch Forbidden Planet every couple of weeks, hailing it as the best SF movie of all time. Robby was basically family.

robbie1And not once did we, as a family question his place in the film, or what his place would be in wider society. For those who don’t know me, I recently got very into robots. I wrote a short script on robots being used in long-distance relationships and began doing a lot of research into robots. A fellow student set up a ‘Robots Discussion Group’ for a few nerdy students to meet and talk robots in Fountains every other Wednesday. And of course, we ended up getting into the moral and ethical complications of robots during our first meeting.

Two ethical conundrums came up that I really want to talk about, they’re probably the two most common arguments against robots and AI of any kind, but I like them.

  • If a Google car is driving along and has to hit either a young child or an elderly woman how can we programme it to choose who to hit?
  • And if we create a realistic SexBot with personality, should it be able to withhold consent?

google carSo first of all the Google car: How exactly do we as human drivers decide who to swerve to kill. Ignoring the fact that this Google car really should have breaks, does it matter which choice the car or programmer makes if both are wrong? Most people say the car should kill the old lady, let the child live, but then the same old problems came up: what if the kid grows up to destroy humanity/cure cancer? What if the old woman is the Queen/a former Nazi? Either way, there are too many issues and too much knowledge that could change the feelings to the outcome of the accident. Should robots make accidents? Can they eradicate accidents if the people programming them can’t?

I know I’m just throwing out a bunch of questions and not really giving any answers, but how cool is this to think about? We need to create a cold, calculating AI that has no problem killing people, but it also has to decide to kill the right people and do so ethically. This is wild.

But onto the next problem: Consent. And to me I don’t think this is really a problem. It came up in the discussion that consent for a robot is a falsehood as they’ll have been programmed to give or withhold consent. But that raises the question of why would we allow what is essentially an object to ask for consent. We don’t give sex toys the option of consent, so why give it to robots? The purpose of a sex robot is really that you can’t be turned down. But then of course how does encouraging this kind of behaviour amongst humans? If we teach people that you don’t ask consent of robots, does that bleed over into not asking a real human for consent? Is this just further objectifying sexual partners rather than a healthy outlet for sexual frustrations?

cyborgI think the only way to really create any tangible answers to these questions is to just do it, we can’t understand something that hasn’t really happened, right? At this point it’s all just guesswork, and it is usually guesswork and fear mongering that holds back progress and I think that’s the real issue here.

The next Robot vs Humans Discussion Group meeting will be on Wednesday 22nd February at 3pm in HG013. Check out the Facebook Group for more information.

 

Robots in Fiction: A Watch List

By Adam Smith, Lecturer in English Literature

@elementalAdam

 

Our business is representation. Whether we be literary scholars, films scholars or creative writers, our business is always representation. Events happen, ideals or anxieties emerge, they get represented, and then we study (or create) the representation. First comes reality, then comes representation. Of course, if you’re half-way through a degree in English, Media or Creative writing you already know that it is never really that easy.

 

Thinking like this assumes that there exists a dichotomy between reality and representation, between fiction and non-fiction, between the real and the hyper-real. We should always be sceptical of any apparent binary and of this one in particular. One cause for scepticism is that it presumes a chain of influence that only goes one way: something happens and people write about it. Real world stuff becomes fictional stuff. Science becomes science fiction. But what happens when fiction starts to inform reality? What happens when what we imagine informs our lived experience? What happens when science-fiction has an impact on science? Nowhere is there a better example of that, I don’t think, than in robotics.

 

This was the opening premise of a lecture that I gave earlier this week on ‘2EN440: Imaginary Worlds’, a second-year optional module about science fiction. The module is taken by students on the English, Media and Creative Writing programmes who this week were reading Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886) and watching Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015).

 

Ex-machina-uk-poster.jpg
Garland’s Ex-Machina. By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, Link

 

Over the course of the lecture I referred to an awful lot of films and TV shows (even for me!). Subsequently a few students have asked me to recap everything I recommended, so I’ve written the list up at the bottom of this post.

 

Before starting your way down the list (make sure you have provisions to hand, it may take some time) let me just give you some context for these suggestions, just in case you didn’t see the lecture itself.

 

During the lecture, I sought to foreground the peculiar relationship between the fictional robots that saturate our popular culture and the actual robotics industry. After familiarising ourselves with the ‘pop culture’ robot in the form of the Forbidden Planet’s famous Robbie we considered the frustrated perspective of roboticist Joanna Bryson. In her controversial essay ‘Robots Should be Slaves’ Bryson argues that the robotics industry is inhibited by the misguided notion that robots are owed some sort of ethical obligation, a misconception that she blames on science fiction.

 

Robby the Robot

The representation of the robot as slave has been there from the very beginning. Karel Capek’s play R.U.R (1921), which stands for ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, is often acknowledged as the first popular use of the word ‘robot’ in the sense that we recognise it today, and here it is the Czech word for ‘slave.’ The play essentially stages a slave uprising, with factory robots rebelling against their human masters. Elsewhere literary scholar Gregory Hampton has successfully foregrounded the similarities between American Slave narratives and common robot narratives, a point rendered startlingly overt when comparing a text like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) with Issac Assimov’s Positronic Man (1992), later adapted into the movie The Bicentennial Man (1999).

 

Hampton finds such treatments of the robot (both inside and outside of fiction) profoundly disturbing. When a relationship is recognisably one of master/slave, regardless of whether the slave is human or robot, born or formed, physical or fictional, there will be harmful psychological side-effects. Hampton stresses that it doesn’t really matter if robots have feelings or not, the question is: how will engaging with robots change us, and what we consider acceptable behavior?

 

Does it make sense to say Boston Dynamics ‘bullied’ their robot Atlas?

 

In both of the texts studied by Imaginary Worlds students this week, The Future Eve and Ex Machina, this question is explored through the treatment of robots who are clearly coded as female. In fact, it is central to a series of questions raised by a huge range of science fiction texts interested in what it means to have sex with ‘female’ robots. Can you truly have sex with a robot? Where do you draw the lines of consent? How must you think of robots to want to have sex with them? And, what are the psychological effects on the participating human?

 

We get a disturbing contemplation of this in Ex Machina, as Domhall Gleeson’s Caleb Smith slowly discovers what Nathan Bateman has been doing with all of the robots on his island, becoming increasingly sadistic in his behaviours as he goes from having sex with the robots to torturing them, only to eventually be killed by the robot Ava in an act that lends itself very openly to a reading in which she is taking cathartic revenge on her depraved abuser. And, just like that, we’re back to slavery again: the common narrative of the megalomaniac slave master who, drunk on the power he holds over other subservient humans, becomes increasingly cruel, killing and raping his own slaves in an overflow of nihilistic and hedonistic violence.

 

So, what can we take from this? Well, first the idea that when it comes to robotics, for better or worse, the representation can clearly be seen to dictate the reality. Perhaps the most important question is not about whether people should or shouldn’t treat robots badly but about why it is that people feel compelled to treat them badly.

 

And second, you can take from it the a hugely ambitious list of things to watch, detailed below.

 

 

 

Further Reading

 

Gregory Hampton, Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (2015)

Joanna Bryson, Robots should be slaves, IN: Close engagements with artificial companions (2010)

 

Watch list (in the order that they appeared in the lecture)

 

  1. Film

 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dir. by Garth Jennings (2005)

Prometheus, dir. by Ridley Scott (2012)

Robocop, dir. by Paul Verhoeven (1987)

Short Circuit, dir. by John Badham (1986)

I, Robot, dir. by Alex Proyas (2004)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, dir. by J. J. Abrams (2015)

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, dir. by George Lucas (1977)

Wall-E, dir. by Andrew Stanton (2008)

Transformers, dir. by Michael Bay (2007)

Interstellar, dir. by Christopher Nolan (2014)

The Black Hole, dir. by Gary Nelson (1979)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, dir. by Steven Spielberg (2001)

Lost in Space, dir. by Stephen Hopkins (1998)

Aliens, dir. by James Cameron (1986)

Alien, dir. by Ridley Scott (1979)

The Day the Earth Stood Still, dir. by Robert Wise (1951)

The Terminator, dir. by James Cameron (1984)

Terminator 2: Judgement Day, dir. by James Cameron (1991)

The Forbidden Planet, dir. by Fred Wilcox (1956)

The Bicentennial Man, dir. by Chris Columbus (1999)

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Terminator: Salvation, dir. by McG (2009)

Metropolis, dir. by Fritz Lang (1927)

Austen Powers, dir. by Jay Roach (1997)

Blade Runner, dir. by Ridley Scott (1982)

Ex Machina, dir. by Alex Garland (2014)

Weird Science, dir. by John Hughes (1985)

The Matrix, dir. by Lana and Lily Wachowski (1999)

Ghost in the Shell, dir. by Mamoru Oshii (1995)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, dir. by Kenji Kawai (2004)

Ghost in the Shell, dir. by Rupert Sanders (2017)

 

  1. TV

 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981)

Futurama (1999-2013)

Red Dwarf (1988-)

Doctor Who (1952-)

Lost in Space (1965-68)

Humans (2015-)

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981)

Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)

Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)

Westworld (2016-)

 

This is only loosely related to Adam Smith's post, but it's just a great track.
Kraftwerk: representing the robot community since 1978. Fair use, Link