AI Portrayals and How It’s Perceived
How AI depicted and perceived in fiction: Hope and fear. (A summary of The Royal Society “Portrayals and Preceptions of AI and Why They Matter”)
The Narrative of AI
The oldest AI-like story can be found in BCE within the story of Hephaestus, the god of smithing. Machines that he made were “attendants made of gold, which seemed like living maidens. In their hearts there is intelligence,
and they have voice and vigor”. The “AI” in the story appears as faithful servants to their crippled master. Talos, great bronze automation that patrolled the shores of Crate who throws stones at pirates and invades, is another character from old stories that involve “AI”.
The greatest density of fictional narratives exploring artificial intelligence can be found subsequent to the coinage of the term in 1955, on-page and on-screen. Such narratives provide a rich source of imaginative thinking about AI in relation to a range of issues. These include explorations of AI in relation to control, immortality, parenting, consciousness, value alignment, cyber networks, distributed intelligence, sex and gender, war and autonomous weapons, enslavement, and governance. Many of these narratives are dystopian, some are utopian, some involve elements of both. The workshop discussions on this topic focused on a number of these issues in relation to the most prevalent fictional and non-fictional AI narratives, as summarised in the following sections on embodiment and depiction.
Embodiment
From a short history of AI, there is a strong tendency in the fictional narrative to conceive of AI or intelligent machines as taking humanoid form. This humanoid form is based on the paradigm of human as the most intelligent creature. Second, those smart machines are often conceived of as doing human labor. Hephaestus’s “attendants made of gold” do the work otherwise done by human servants; C3PO from Star Wars does the work of a human translator and diplomat. Third, visual storytelling in particular -both in film and television- requires bodies, and storytelling, in general, tends to privilege human actors enacting human dramas.
The AI that portrayed in a movie also portrayed by the stereotypical secondary sexual characteristic of either men or women. They often hyper-sexualized: they have either exaggeratedly muscular male bodies and aggressive tendencies, like T-800 Terminator or conventionally beautiful female forms such as Ava in Ex Machina.
Quite different from the fictional narrative in reality since 1950s robotic itself has also been inspired by the capabilities of non-human animals. This can be seen in the tortoises Elmer and Elsie by William Grey Walter from 1948, through to whisker insured robotic sensor today.
How AI Perceived: Hope and fear
Popular portrayals of AI in the English-speaking West tend to be either exaggeratedly optimistic about what the technology might achieve, or melodramatically pessimistic. The grand hopes for AI might stem in part from the perception that it is a kind of master technology, as it amplifies the cognitive powers that humanity has deployed in all its achievements to date. For example, in 2014, the eminent scientists Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek wrote: “The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history”.
The extreme hopes, which are expressed both in fiction and non-fiction, include AI solving aging and disease so that humans might lead vastly longer lives; freeing humans from the burden of work; gratifying a wide range of desires, from entertainment to companionship; and contributing to powerful new means of defense and security. The extreme fears around AI represent the flipsides of these hopes and include AI leading to humans losing their humanity; making humans obsolete; alienating people from each other; and enslaving or destroying humans.
The portrayals and understanding of AI should not be a narrative of good and evil, rather must be a narrative of realization of the hope and minimalization of the fear. AI usage must be beneficial for humanity without decreasing it’s value nor damaging the world and the AI idea and existence. The great future of human and AI must be answered by the development of science, technology, and social policy.
Reference:
The Royal Society: Portrayals and Perceptions of AI and Why They Matter
