always missing deadlines

Since seeing the film Prometheus, I have been interested again in the robot, the machine. There’s nothing particularly interesting about that, really. Machines and artificial intelligence have been in the thoughts of people for about as long as any other question that brings doubt into the human mind. It’s fun to think about robots acting like and somehow becoming more human through tapping into that unexplainable element of humanness that has been labeled emotion. When the Terminator insists that the computer chip that is essentially his being must be destroyed, the audience is supposed to assume that the machine is, even if accidentally, becoming more like us. The most famous examples of robots or androids all play upon this theme. Unfortunately, the most popular incarnations of robots turned people only look at the one questions: What does it mean to be human?

That question is a natural one. The people asking it are human and we want to know ourselves more than anything. I think the idea is that if we can create a mechanical being that can do what human beings can do, then we may get a little closer to understanding what makes us us. The aim is a good one, but the same conclusion always gets drawn. Where the before mentioned audience projects feelings onto a machine following its programmed instructions, all of the best robots suffer the same fate. HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, murders. That crime is particularly human because the deaths are to prevent the disruption of what HAL has deemed to be the correct course of action. There’s no propagation reason for the killings and thus exits the realm of the mechanical, even the purely animal, and goes straight for human. Roy Batty, in Blade Runner, spouts off about the beauty of the things he’s seen while making war in off-world (world being Earth) colonies, coming to the conclusion that because he is ultimately mortal as a result of a predetermined life-span, he is at least incredibly close to being human.

So here’s my issue with looking at machines through the lense of the human: Why is being human the desired end goal? And are we really trying to figure out what it means to be human? From the examples I’ve given and the countless others that exist, the question has already been answered, with all of the answers being the same. If you are self-aware and you are capable of “feeling” or “emotion”, then you are human-like. Maybe that answer satisfies some, but nobody really bothers to follow up that question with the next logical question: What is “emotion”? You’d think we’d make that leap with all of our preoccupation with trying to figure out what love is, but the curiosity seems to drop off pretty quickly.

It’s untrue to say that nobody has thought about this. Thanks to the Radiolab podcast, I’ve become acquainted with Alan Turing, the mathematician credited with breaking the German Enigma code and more or less inventing computer science. I won’t go into his biography here, but if the characterization of him in “The Turing Problem” is to be believed, he had come to the conclusion that human beings are machines. I agree with this assessment, which leads to the further conclusion that it isn’t so much about humans being all that spectacular except in our design. For me, this idea plays directly into what we know about genetics and the chemical processes that allow us all the things human beings place so high in their minds.

Then I thought about David and Ridley Scott’s latest idea of the robot. In Prometheus, there are a couple of moments that one should expect. One of the crew members asks David why he wears a helmet when he doesn’t breathe. Later, David asks that crew member what the purpose was of seeking out the creator of humans. In that first moment, Scott presents the possibility that humans are uncomfortable with the thought of being artificial in the way robots are and I can only hope that the question was intentional. Unfortunately, that insight may actually have been an accident(or at the very least, terribly undeveloped) because the more the story progresses, the more human David behaves. Everything interesting about him dissipates so that by the time the film ends, you’ve forgotten that early question was ever posed.

I don’t know that a machine will ever be created that can convince a human being that it’s human. I’d much prefer that one didn’t have to. The worst part about this is that it means we also probably won’t ever to be able to answer the question of what it means to be human that will satisfy us culturally. I think the evidence that we are the end result of biological processes that have engineered us in this fashion is convincing, but that won’t stop people from talking about it. Our obsession with ourselves will keep us looking for some exception to keep us from the rest of the world, both natural and artificial. In that way, we are both of those at the same time, making us more like the robots we want so desperately to make like us.