WHY AI? Science Fiction and Science Facts: The Story of the Future.
The lack of a narrative in science other than a general teleology, and an endless search for observable ‘truth’ in an infinite universe; means that science fiction is often used to provide a source of focus, inspiration, and narrative meaning for those working within science and technology. Science and technology don’t exist ‘objectively’ in isolation from the rest of human culture, but enfolded within it. An individual scientist or technologists motivation as to what they would like to research, develop and invent, arises out of the culture they inhabit, and the stories and imagined futures of that culture.
Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, states in the first line of his book The Technological Singularity (2015)
“ Like many others who have dedicated their working lives to research in artificial intelligence, I was inspired as a child by science fiction”
however he finishes the same paragraph
“The primary purpose of science fiction is to entertain, albeit in an intellectually stimulating way. It would be a mistake to use it as a guide to thinking”.
The core motivation for Shanahan’s life’s work, researching and building AI inspired by experiencing science fiction narratives, can be conveniently jettisoned as a childish whim. His initial inspiration has now been ‘moved beyond’ and relegated behind the ‘serious business’ of science. This is despite those fictions having initially provided a vision of a future he wants to achieve, and subsequently guiding the direction of his life in working towards creating robots and AGI. If thinking is measurable through action then the science fictions he enjoyed can be said to have very much guided Shananhan’s thinking and life path ongoing. (How this is possible and can be quickly passed off a rational move, is discussed in other WHY AI? Essays [https://medium.com/brass-for-brain/why-ai-magical-technology-doing-the-work-of-the-gods-2e5715c1ddb1] [https://medium.com/brass-for-brain/why-ai-making-god-metaphysics-science-and-technology-d393541c9d46]. )
The containment of the paradox Professor Shanahan illustrates above, is traceable back to the very roots of science and technology and its foundational belief in its own neutrality. Science operates within its own dialectical construction enabling it over time to deny the motivating power of myth and imaginary at its core that motivates its trajectories. The idea of scientific neutrality also enfolds within itself a belief in an intrinsic general teleology of science, a simple belief that the more we know and discover, the more data we have , the better things will get. This is not to deny that scientific ‘facts’ are genuine ‘facts’. Scientists and researchers do incredible work and have revealed huge amounts of important knowledge, that help us make important decisions, gain understanding, cure diseases, generate power. But in an infinite universe of possibility, conscious or instinctual decisions about what, when and where to conduct scientific research, have been made resulting from particular combinations of environmental, cultural and economic factors, and we have to examine these. Prevailing economic and bureaucratic systems define what research is deemed worth funding (efficient public transport systems of self-driving individually-owned cars?). Culture deems what, when, who it is acceptable to explore. Our current cultural location in time and space serves as a scientific apparatus in itself. Choices made resulting from these circumstances, enable decisions and possibilities about what scientific research looks at, and where, when and how to look.
As well as the historical, social and cultural factors resulting from their economic and cultural location, the ethics, morals and desires individual scientists have is also hugely important. (The movie Oppenheimer (2023) raises and reflects on many of these questions). Does a scientist desire wealth and fame, are they on a moral quest? or do they perform a job they find morally questionable just to get paid and survive? Do they have a desire for a particular type of knowledge? for power? We have to examine the desires, culture and mythologies of those working in AI and technology to help us understand where we are at, and what cultural apparatus they are adopting.
Science fiction is hugely popular amongst technologists working for the big tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, as revealed by the research of the anthropologist Dr Sally Applin back in 2018. Applin describes how science fictions often show technology as being used and adopted in imaginary societies, which conveniently fit the imagined society to the technology. Many of the technologies in science fiction work and function well because they operate in a world and society designed for them, and not the other way round as is necessary for design in the real world. Also we often find in science fiction that gadgets and technology are invented simply to serve the fictional narrative, eg. transporter beams, light-speed drives, mind-reading apparatus; and also Robots and ASI’s. Many popular science fictions take a current culture, idea, or economic system and create imaginary technology that demonstrates how correct and immutable a particular contemporary understanding and social structure is. Hence we have a plethora of dystopian hierarchical cyberpunk narratives, as by rarifying the present we can only expect a distilled version of current readings of late-capitalism, so in a lot of the less imaginative stories we get more of the same, but in excess, bigger and more brutal, with robots and AI’s.
These future fictional societies are often devoid of difference or hide difference in order to make the technology and imagined world within it function; for example many sci-fi stories feature mono-cultural planets, often disabled people are not present, and even aliens are often variations on humanoid bipedal body types. The Black Mirror episode USS Callister (Netflix, 2017) demonstrates and explores these ideas in an entertaining way.
In the story of USS Callister, we meet Robert Daly, a computer coder who runs a successful VR games company. He is dissatisfied with what he deems a lack of respect by his co-workers. Secretly sampling his work colleagues DNA he creates sentient digital clones of them, and traps these clones in a private virtual universe modelled on the 1960’s sci-fi tv show Star Trek. In this walled virtual universe Daly is the hero captain in the model of James T Kirk. In this perfect virtual world, Daly can command and control his workmates; everything in his created world works as he feels it should. This is an example of what is termed expectation-bias in technologists and engineers; they expect the technologies they build inspired by science fiction to be adopted and used in the way they are in the fictions they read, watch and love; when in actuality the real world is a lot more varied and complex. When Daly’s crew act in ways that don’t fit with his particular vision of how the Star-Trek inspired universe he created should function, he punishes them or alters their physical form.
The narrative of USS Callister uses imagined cloning technology to enable this particular ‘revenge of the nerd’ narrative, but in doing so it makes a strong satirical point about the desires of sci-fi inspired technologists to control and manage the world in a way they deem is ‘correct’, which is often based on science fictions. Elon Musk is an archetypal example of this, a huge sci-fi fan in his youth his overwhelming desire is to (re)make the world in a way as he sees fit, with the main aim to eventually go to Mars and build his own ‘correct’ world from scratch. Technologists and engineers are often driven to develop technology that can make the real world more like the world and societies they admire in the science fictions they love.
Intelligent robots and AI’s are found frequently in literature, theatre and film from the late 19th century onwards. These narratives that feature characters imbued with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super-Intelligence) explore understandings of what it is to be human. Prominent examples are: Carol Kapeks RUR Rossum’s Universal Robots (1925); Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); James Cameron’s Terminator (1984); the Wackowski’s The Matrix (1999); Alex Garland’s Ex machina (2014); Spike Jonez Her (2013); and popular TV series such as Humans (2015), and Westworld (2016). In these fictions the line between human and non-human is blurred, the robots demonstrate the best and worst aspects of ourselves. These narratives bring into question the instrumentalist theory of technology — which describes technology as a neutral tool, something simply picked up or out down for use by a biological human subject. When the tool can pick up or put itself down, the idea of a separation between humans and their technology becomes harder to justify. The fears around ASI in these narratives reveal the suspicion and knowledge that we are in fact not so separate from our technology as an instrumentalist theory would have us believe. This presents in fiction through the anthropomorphism of robots and ASI. It becomes clear in these stories that our very humanity is expressed and enacted through our relationship with technology. This understanding is not new, it is clearly expressed in the creation myth of humanity in Greek mythology.
The greek titans and brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus had the task of populating the earth with fauna. Epimetheus, is the god of hindsight, the result forgetting, absent-mindedness. Epimethius had the task of applying different positive traits to each different animal, such as speed, strength, etc; and he successfully did this. However when he got to humans Epimethius’s lack of foresight, his absent mindedness meant that he had run out of traits. So to provide humans with something unique Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and arts from Athena; thus providing man with technê — power and artfulness, technology. Thus the ‘fault’ of Epimetheus led to the creation of humanity as a technological being; we are human because of our technê, coming between animals and gods. The creation of an ASI can be seen as the desire of engineers to ‘fix’ this original fault, to perform the ultimate technological feat to leave behind our animality and utilise technê to become god-like. ( This is similar to Francis Bacons wish to build ‘New Jerusalem’ and enter heaven through technological advancement. This idea is further explored in [https://medium.com/brass-for-brain/why-ai-making-god-metaphysics-science-and-technology-d393541c9d46].)
It’s very apparent that the inclusion of AI and Robot non-human intelligence’s in numerous science fiction narratives, and their popularity amongst technology workers, inspires a desire to create them in the real world, to make the science fiction a reality. But this often means that the real world has to be ‘fixed’ and made ‘correct’ to fit the computational intelligence of the ASI. Anyone who has tried engaging with a service companies chatbot to solve more nuanced problems encounters this issue ! It becomes an interactive example of what theorist Mark Fisher terms “Market Stalinism”, and a Kafkaesque parody of the idea of customer service. If you have a different or unusual problem, it’s often the case that you are told this issue simply does not or can not happen — the machine says yes or no — what you say happened doesn’t compute . In these situations we often need to find a human who can correlate the version of reality the bot has been programmed with to the actual lived experience we have had. These renegade customer service agents like Robert DeNiros hero heating engineer in Terry Gilliams movie Brazil (1985) work around the organisational structures and restrictions to help us find a way through to actually serve the customer, often through the use of ‘white lies’. Although we are also likely to come up against someone who just goes along with the chatbot, it’s luck of the draw.
In Science Fiction, people, places, practices that don’t fit with the story being told about a new technological world view, interface or apparatus are ignored or discarded. Sometimes their omission is justified by purely economic factors, eg. this demographic, won’t make us money ! Or it’s simply not catered for through ignorance on the part of the designers.
This desire to re-engineer the world to make it ‘correct’ means that in science fiction worlds the technologist and their invention, often an ASI, are shown to be the ultimate power. This vision of the future is seductive to a technologist, as it shows them with wealth, fame and power, and so their work contributes towards creating this future. In much of Science Fiction technology and technologists are the real hero and AI is the ultimate technology (it these sort of narratives that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg etc; enact and sustain).
That the creation of ASI becomes the ultimate expression of scientific achievement as created through technology — it becomes a can-do-everything better machine; means it can offer a focused exploration of what it means to be human. Many science fiction narratives featuring AI explore the idea that our technology is an integral expression of our being, our humanity. In giving technology a voice, agency, these stories call to account the values expressed in the creation of non-human intelligence.
In 1921 the world was introduced to the word robot, through Czech playwright Karel Capeks production R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots). Kapek creates a future whereby humanity has created robots, not of shiny metal, but more like the replicants in the film Blade Runner. The robots are there to work as slaves and fulfil the promise of full automation, to work long hours with minimal requirements, freeing humanity from labour. However the robot slaves rise-up and destroy their human masters, when the last surviving human asks ‘Why?’, the leader of the robots depressingly replies “you have to conquer and murder if you want to be people”. We can see that the history of technology aligned with capitalism and colonialism, is one in which millions have perished through slavery, and the imposition of modern industrialisation, which are systematically causing the alteration, destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems. In fictions such as R.U.R., The Terminator, The Matrix, the autonomous intelligent products of a technological society rise up and destroy humanity, our own technology and inventions turn on us. RUR and similar narratives, hold a mirror up to our capitalist, technologically based society, and the replicants, robots, become us, but stripped of our human spirit.
As well as drawing on the Greek foundational myths, there is also the influence of deep cultural mythologies arising from Judeo-Christian theology . Having been expelled from the garden of Eden, humanity has now rejected nature; but having eaten from the tree of knowledge, we can now use the knowledge gained in an attempt to build the New Jerusalem, the perfect city, through techne. These stories of robot rebellion and enslavement and murder by ASI’s serve as a form of catharsis, revealing that we feel we get what we deserve for rejecting the natural world, privileging techne over bios, for rejecting Gods gift to us by becoming ‘modern man’. Through the viciousness of the ASI’s, a purely data-driven technological world view is shown to be sociopathic. Underlying these dystopic narratives of the destruction of human society by malevolent AI’s is a warning: our of quest for technologically enabled heavenly perfection, for daring to be god-like, results in the cosmic punishment of ‘falling on our own sword’. Like Prometheus we are chained to the rock and punished for our hubris, but not by Zeus, by the new gods’ in the form of the ASI’s in the form of Skynet or The Matrix, ASI’s that humanity originally created.
Conversely, the AI replicants in Phillip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), as presented in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), are full of anguish and emotion, contrasting with the psychopathy of their maker Tyrell and the ‘justice’ system designed to murder them. This concept is also central to the movie Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995) where an AI cop is shown to be more human than her corrupt human masters. The German philosopher Heidegger took the view that in modern society the technological culture of control corresponds to an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller, and as the technology increases, the end result is a narcissistic degeneration of humanity. Narratives such as Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Cloud Atlas, explore this by showing the humans in power, the technologist, the creators of AI’s, robots, replicants, as the narcissistic degenerate, with their AI ‘children’ as being more objective, caring about the world at large. This is beautifully expressed In Blade Runner, when towards the end of the movie, the private detective Deckard (Harrison Ford) has tracked down the final non-human replicants to an abandoned hotel. After an extended chase and fight scene with Roy Batty, the last remaining replicant of the group targeted for assassination, Deckard looks to have lost as he ends up precariously hanging onto the side of a tall building. Knowing he is dying himself, the replicant Batty (Rutger Hauer), saves Deckard’s life by pulling him up onto the roof from the edge. In his final moments of life, Batty describes the amazing sights he has witnessed “ I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die”. Wonder, compassion and poetry become the traits exhibited by the non-human replicants, brining to life the Tyrell motto “more human than human”.
In these stories, and other more dystopian books and films, technology has enabled humans to become detached from the world, from nature, from each other — but in these more nuanced stories it is the AI, the replicant, who reminds us of this detachment. In many of these AI stories, through adopting a nihilistic mode of directing technology to further capitalism humanity has become lost. The placing of emotional traits and a construction of an inner life in non-human characters, makes them ambiguous, uncontrollable, less narcissistic and degenerate than their masters. By creating a ‘better’ more moral and ethical version of humanity through an autonomous embodied ASI, a humanity 2.0, these stories both critique current trajectories of humanity, but also express the idea that it is possible to give humanity a second chance.
In these narratives the inherent telos of the universe has been halted by the nihilistic mode of capitalist production. The forces of life have been suppressed by humans in pursuit of power and money, consequently resulting in actual widespread death and destruction. Many of these AI science-fictions express the idea that an ASI with superhuman, or god-like powers, can through compassion and strength, offer another path, solve problems in the world that have been created by those humans who have ‘lost their way’. The creation of a super-intelligent ‘other’ provides an alternate space to view humanity from. In creating new life in the form of an ASI, humans are ‘passing the torch’ to another form of being. Resolution in these narratives arrives through a form of human/machine alliance (eg. The Terminator,) or an actual physical or cosmic combination of AI and human (eg. The Matrix). In these stories the future is solved not by a transhumanist ‘evolution’ of humans into the machine, the victory of techne over bios, but by what could be termed a hyper-humanism, a symbiosis, an equal partnership of bios and techne, a balance of yin and yang, that is shown to be required to create peace, harmony and a good life.
