We went to a matinee screening of I, Robot at the Waterfront yesterday. Figured it would be smarter than trying to surf the crowds at night time. Plus, we work at home, so our schedule is the height of flexibility.
Except for the first ten minutes, when somebody had forgotten to turn the overhead lights out in the theatre, the movie was completely awesome. I’ve been excited about this movie for months, with all these trailers and things. In case you didn’t know, I used to run a couple different websites with weird art about robots and stuff on them. So the topic is one close to my heart. Or, rather, close to my heart of about 4-5 years ago.
Plus I fucking love sci-fi movies set in the near future. Although the extreme distant future isn’t half bad either. Like when things have become so different as to be almost unrecognizable. But, the near future ones always rule. This movie reminded me a lot of two of my other favorite near-future sci-fi romps, Minority Report & Demolition Man.
Demolition Man is a rarely known gem. Besides the first couple Rocky’s, it’s Sylvester Stallone’s best movie. Certainly his best comic role. Also, it’s the only movie where I don’t want to club Sandra Bullock to death. Actually, she’s absolutely perfect in it, and is an excellent counterpoint to Stallone’s character. This is also the movie that predicted that Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to become president. Just mark my words, this is so going to happen. They are already in the process of trying to amend the Constitution to let foreign-born citizens take that office. Anyway, I felt there were plenty of scenes and dynamics lifted straight out of that movie into I, Robot, but I didn’t mind, because it was done very well.
In fact, it was one of those rare movies where I was swept away enough that didn’t sit there the entire time noticing how they made the movie. Instead I had the rare luxury to just watch and enjoy. Tons of cool shit in that movie. Without going into too much detail, I think my favorite scene is when Sonny draws the scene from his dream.
I’ve never actually read any Isaac Asimov, but now I’m semi-curious to. Back in the day, when I was much more of a sci-fi dweeb, I was into more of the quasi-magical soft-sf, rather than the more technically driven hard-sf, like Asimov and others. Apparently Asimov has a bunch of other stories and novels about robots. Maybe sometime I’ll read them, but right now, I have so many other things on my reading list (just picked up Finnegan’s Wake), that who knows when I’ll get to it.
Anyway, after the movie, my brain was just buzzing with all kinds of cool ideas about laws, and robots and consciousness. And I’d like to try to jot down an overview of some of them, so that I can maybe come back and develop these ideas more later.
This isn’t explicitly stated in the movie, but the pieces of it are all there. The idea that robots are really the next evolutionary step in human consciousness. That, possibly, at some point, our biosystem will no longer support the organic human form. And by that point, our consciousness as a race will fully shift over.
Some belief systems indicate that consciousness incarnates into our fleshy bodies. It’s not any great leap from there to believe that consciousness could become incarnate in mechanical bodies. Maybe you could die now and be reincarnated as a robot later on. If consciousness could be incarnated in created physical forms, what are the requirements to draw consciousness into something? Or is it more that you are in fact drawing consciousness out of matter? That consciousness necessarily exists in matter. That matter is, in fact, nothing more than incarnated consciousness. The question would then be not how to give consciousness to inanimate matter, but how to raise it to a level which is perceivable and communicable to ours.
What if all humans do die out, and all that’s left are robots? Robots which were built to look like humans, in order to fit in among us. Only humans no longer exist. So now, these robots basically look like humans for no reason. They are a symbol pointing to something which is no longer relevant or useful. Would they set about changing their physical shapes, or would they maintain human form as an almost religious remembrance of their long-lost human creators?
That all of religion, philosophy and law are designed to create the perfect robot. The perfect set of rules to govern all behavior. Basically the perfect program with which to run. Human beings, of course, not being robots, will never be able to fully conform themselves to any such rule system. Perhaps robots could though. Perhaps you really could design a robot which was the ideal loving peaceful Christian, or the ideal respectful Confucist, etc.
Maybe, in fact, there is some future-thinking aspect to religious systems, which is looking past the fallible human form towards this evolution of man into the perfect rule-driven machine. Just look at Christianity, and the doctrine that one day you will be resurrected in a pure form, and live in a perfect magical utopia.
Religious systems, thought of as mental programs, necessarily build a certain type of consciousness around them. Someone born into a religious system based on the Bible is going to develop sets of mental connections which somebody whose culture is based around the Vedas is not going to have, and vice versa. As such, you could look at religious tracts and systems as being blue-prints for consciousness (or for robot-building).
I’ve read someplace that, before computers, education and knowledge systems were structured around basically emulating the functionality which we eventually externalized into computers. Like, you have educational models which center around and place extreme value onto things like memorizing and recalling facts. And applying rules to facts. That’s what standardized testing is all about. And look at quiz shows - that guy on Jeopardy who keeps winning. Ken, or whatever is his name is. All these people are so astounded that he won like 28 consecutive episodes, because he is so good at recalling bits of trivia. You know what? This doesn’t impress me in the slightest. If I had a super-fast internet connection, and the ability to type and retrieve information almost instantaneously, then I would be just as “intelligent” as this man. The type of knowledge he is embodying is really no longer fundamentally necessary, now that we have computers with databases and the internet.
What’s the next most important type of human knowledge then? I think we’re in the throes of figuring that out. Most of our old educational models are currently disintegrating. Because they are trying to make humans into computers, when we make very shitty computers. Computers are much better at being computers. And we are much better at being humans. We should instead be focusing on how to access and understand information, and how to analyze and synthesize. Now that we have computers as a tool, we can free up a certain amount of mental space and ability back into the things that make us more human. (Some excellent articles on this subject can be found over at Dr. Renee Fuller’s website, under the “cognitive organiztion” section)
Once we figure out, as a culture, what our next most valuable type of intelligence is, and start training people in that, will we then be able to externalize this into another tool? Into robots? Once we are able to create a machine which is able to think and be creative, how will that change what we think of ourselves? What will become the new paradigm of humanity, and what will become the next most valuable characteristic in people?
Also, I think somehow that Alzheimer’s disease relates to all this stuff, although I’m not quite sure how. What I mean by that, is that right now, what it means to be human has to do with living a full life, and basically becoming a collection of experiences. What are you left with of yourself once those experiences are taken from you, or are scrambled? Or, when virtual reality really hits the fan, what happens when we all have a basic set of experiences given to us as a matter of our education, which aren’t really ours at all?
Another whacked out idea regarding Alzheimer’s… As I understand it, your memory basically becomes a sort of swiss-cheese, full of holes and gaps, which you slip through without being aware of them. Something like that. Well, I was just thinking… what if the actual problem which occurs here is not in terms of memory, but in terms of experience. Like, what if the portion of the mind which this affects has something to do with spatial-temporal locators. So that you’re not just recalling memories, but you’re actually living distinct moments in time, throughout your life. Like, instead of a normal linear sequential experience, everything gets thrown into a sort of overlapping mess? Pretty much like how Slaughterhouse Five is written, where the sufferer feels as though they are really thrown back and forth in time somehow. I’ll have to read more about this.
Anyway, those were the main points… I’ve sort of lost my train of thought with all this. Seeing as I’m not a robot.
Oh, one other cool thing I thought of:
There was this one part of the movie where the main female character is struggling to use this entry-keypad to get access to something. It’s this big rotating cube, with all these plates on it. She had to press them in certain sequence to unlock it. That got me thinking a bit about the next step in passwords, and cryptology and things. Right now, all passwords and access codes are based more or less exclusively on sequential entry of data strings (I could be wrong, of course). But what if you took that to another level. In addition to sequence, you had to enter your data in a particular rhythm. Basically, it would be the equivalent of solving a puzzle in a video game. And what if, in addition to rhythm, you also had to be sure to enter your data sequence with a certain degree of beauty - or skill, or personality, or flair - in order to be given access. Or, going back to video games, what if, instead of entering bits of data (numerical and alphabetic digits), you had to interact virtually with characters, asking questions, fighting, jumping over things, using virtual items, things like that? And the data you’re inputting would actually be the sum total of your interactions. Cool, right? I think so.
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