Cherry and Mint
I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence lately. Since it seems these days we don’t think of it as much of a case of ‘can’, but ‘when’, it’s important to review the media which depicts this probable future, if only to see what kind of expectations we have for this age in technology.
Most of the movies i can think of that propose artificial intelligence presupposes that the ‘brain’ would be housed in a thing that looks exactly like us, and not in a desktop tower, which is far more likely. Movies like ex machina and AI, tv shows like the british ‘humans’, all pair artificial intelligence with the trappings of a human body. Part of the reason for this is of course that there are more human actors in Hollywood than robotic ones, but it still goes to show what we expect, and that we might take anything else far less seriously. And i think that’s something we should address. Maybe future AI would see this as a form of racism…..
One thing that I’ve noticed about how we see artificial life, is that we expect to pork it. There’s a percentage of the population that eagerly awaits robots to not only look like us, but to be anatomically correct, subservient sex toys. Not most people, but it’s still disturbing that some of our finest minds in the field of robotics are no doubt toiling in labs, waiting for a eureka moment to occur, and realize this dream. No judgments from me, but since even our best attempts at ‘real dolls’ still look like surprised corpses, I don’t think we’re at the precipice of a breakthrough in this field.
I think it’s fair to say we don’t all look at artificial life as broadly as we could, seeing as how much of the media we produce seems to imply the height of the achievement would be to reproduce, or at least mimic sexuality. Not humour, or empathy, or even real love and hate, but possibly the least complex aspect of us. And what does that say about how we see humanity?
A movie to check out, but not necessarily a recommendation — Cherry 2000 (1987)
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n the far off year of 2017, some sort of tragedy has befallen the world, leaving cities full of soulless corporate drones, and everything outside the cities as lawless deserts. maybe trump won in 2016? who knows. Prophecies of fun times yet to come.
In this brave new world, sex is a commodity haggled for by lawyers in clubs, but some find this arrangement tedious and have forgone the impersonal personal touch, and have semi intelligent robots to fulfill the need for intimacy. Come to think of it, switch some nouns in there with ‘online dating’ and ‘porn’ and we’re already there.
The basic plot is as follows. A guy gets his sex robot wet (no, seriously, dishwater) and it short circuits. So, instead of launching a lawsuit against whoever made a robot less resistant than an iphone to water damage (cause why would a sex robot come in contact with fluid?) he takes out her brain chip, and embarks on a campaign into some forbidden zone, to hunt down a replacement body.
Playing opposite the sexbot, before she became an artificial lifeform in her own right, is Melanie Griffith, which is kind of a weird choice of casting when you’re trying to display the ineffable beauty of human on human connection. Griffith recently played a sexbot herself, in Automata. but her corporeal self was also shed in this case, as they used just her voice for a fully cg’d clunky robot. an odd decision for an odd movie. Again, not a recommendation.
Naming her cherry, being slang for pristine, had to be intentional. But now that i think of it, she was hardly ‘mint in box’. Salvaging the brain of a robot, which was without a doubt, the most useless aspect of her, and putting everything on the line to swap out a body with one that’s the exactly the same, all to preserve a banal personality seems ridiculous. There’s a joke about Hugh Hefner’s marriages in there somewhere, but damned if i can find it. Little help?
A very good point, that. When you do watch it, please let me know what you think!
I agree with all of you (especially the “fleshlight in a toaster” comment). It is like being able to build something as technically complex as a human body but not being able to quite figure how to get that “spark” of life. Forcing yourself on a basically inanimate object and programming it to react to you might give you your fix, but until it can feel the same way it is just fancy dressing.
Cherry 2000 was a really enjoyable movie, for all that the wifebot really DIDN’T have any personality to speak of. He might as well have been looking for parts for the dishwasher that broke her. My favorite AI movie is (don’t judge me) Bicentennial Man. It was advertised to appeal to families with kids, with the trailers focusing on Robin Williams’ artificial body flailing around and cracking jokes, but it is a seriously deep and heartbreaking story about how future AI will be treated/received when they aren’t mindless sex drones.
you know, i’ve never seen Bicentenial Man. i’ll add it to my viewing queue, if only for a different perspective.
i think to write a really good story about AI, you have to understand humanity better than most people. most movies on the subject focus on questions like ‘how does it process emotions?’. well, how do the rest of us? if you focus on the disparities between your concept and reality, you’re just making it less relatable.
Re: “much of the media we produce seems to imply the height of the achievement would be to reproduce, or at least mimic sexuality. Not humour, or empathy, or even real love and hate, but possibly the least complex aspect of us. And what does that say about how we see humanity?”
It might merely imply that humor and empathy are rightly seen as close to unattainable artificially, while there’s a purely mechanical aspect to sex that seems quite achievable.
I just watched a short video about a guy that is doing exactly what you are talking about–trying to make a doll that a person will feel that they have a relationship with. It was really interesting to hear his perspective, it’s basically like an art project to him. I apologize for bringing it up while having no idea where I saw the video, maybe this is enough to google. I think they were connecting an AI to a RealDoll (or maybe it’s two words). It was really interesting to see how…I don’t know how to explain it. How “technical” it was to him. It’s a project, trying to achieve an artistic ideal. Maybe not what people would picture, I guess.
well, you can stick a fleshlight in a toaster, and call it darling, but that doesn’t mean it feels the same way about you. if you’re predisposed to feel emotions for ‘things’, you can project whatever you want on them. we might get to the point where we even program them to react to us, but until they act upon us, we haven’t produced anything that will pass the turing test.
i think i saw the same thing you did. it had a virtual element to it, to gloss over the crude aspect of the real doll. but it felt to me like the same thing could be achieved with chat bots we already have on the internet, and watching porn. not really AI, but sensational enough to get hits and attention i suppose.
I like Charles Stross’ novels about pre- and post-singularity culture and tech. Perhaps his past life as an IT worker has something to do with the more realistic perspective. His take on interstellar travel, for instance, where instead of trying to send fragile meatbodies across interstellar distances, we fire a coffee-can-sized radiation-hardened machine with an entire community of human minds uploaded to a virtual environment. Of course this would limit the type of, to borrow a trekkie phrase, away missions the crew could perform. Still, observation and data gathering…. I also like his concept of the Eschaton, a nearly god-like AI that just picks up and leaves rather than deal with we limited life forms. Just polices us to make sure we don’t mess around with time travel and prevent it’s rise in the first place.
those are interesting concepts, but i haven’t heard them before. i think books as a medium offers more latitude in how far out your concepts can be, while ideas for tv and movies have to be more palatable for a wider audience. in the end, what we usually see is creativity by committee, which isn’t going to push the borders quite as much. not always, but alot of the time.