Sympathy for the Machine

scenes involving AI. Based on the manga of the same name, Pluto is a radical thesis about robot souls, consciousness, trauma, violence and many other things, but it is also... the story of a combat unit that wants to touch the piano. And at first he's not even particularly good at playing it. What he is good at is the task he was created for: destroying hundreds of his own kind during a previous global war. But he is determined to improve, because he is tired of his only legacy being that of destruction and never that of creation. He's also tired of being a weapon.

Or so it seems. One of the most interesting aspects of Pluto is the ambiguity with which he presents the inner life of each

machine

. Most robots in this world are not supposed to be advanced enough to have genuine feelings. We, the audience, are shown things that seem to contradict this idea, but it's hard to be sure that we're not simply projecting onto these robots because of their appearance. “You are giving the data human characteristics because it looks human. “If I were a box on wheels, I wouldn’t face this opposition.” On Pluto, a tragic reflection on this ambiguity occurs when an inventor finds an abused mechanical dog.

As a leading robotics expert, he certainly knows that this unit is not sentient, that its whining is just an imitation, and yet he works exhaustively to try to repair it. We discovered that the only reason this dog lived so long is because someone in his past loved the

machine

so much that they constantly maintained it. Perhaps the projected feelings are enough to make something worthy of preservation. That robotic art installation, appropriately titled "I Can't Help Myself," closed forever in 2019 after eventually running out of fluid and slowing down. In a posthumous twist, it was revealed that the arm was actually powered by electricity and never needed the substance he so desperately tried to hold on to.

Calling such a turn cruel, or the machine desperate, is, once again, an act of anthropomorphization of the inanimate. But it seems cruel, doesn't it? Although this work of art was never alive, it feels as if it has died. As a species, humans are incredibly adept at forming pair bonds with the inanimate. People around the world have been able to connect with characters like Wall-E, literally "a box on wheels." And sure, you could say that Wall-E has the advantage of being a meticulously animated fictional creation to tug at the heartstrings. Okay, so let's consider a nonfiction robot abandoned on a dusty planet.

The Mars rover Opportunity landed on January 25, 2004. Expected to last thirteen weeks, but essentially hibernating during dust storms, the small robot remained operational for fourteen years. His solitary journey across Mars came to an end when a planetary storm finally wiped out his solar panels. His final message at home was "My battery is low and getting dark." …Technically it's a reinterpretation of a less poetic broadcast, but it speaks to that broader instinct of finding humanity in a machine, even if its form isn't particularly humanoid. So why is there something so disturbing about something that's almost human, but not quite?

The real-life robot 'Ameca' is a recent creation designed to be very emotional, to the point that it's downright...amazing. And Ameca is undeniably impressive, clear evidence of the speed at which human-mimicking robots are advancing compared to earlier facsimiles of the face like the Motormouth. (Motormouth Sounds). Nowadays, robots are not going to fool anyone into thinking they are looking at a human being. But this technology will continue to advance. There will almost certainly come a time in the future when it will be impossible to tell the difference. The "Turing Test" is an experiment proposed by Alan Turing to determine if a machine is sentient...by seeing if it can fool a human into believing it is a fellow human being.

The movie Ex Machina is about a Turing test, with one crucial difference: the human in question knows from the beginning that he is talking to a robot. "The real test is to show you that it is a robot and then see if you still feel that it has consciousness." However, the experiment apparently begins to go off the rails when the tester begins to believe that the machine, Ava, is emotionally distraught over its impending disassembly. Like Pluto, Ex Machina addresses ambiguity and asks the audience to question the extent to which a robot's feelings are the result of projection.

But regardless of whether Ava's outward displays of emotion are artificial or genuine, she is clearly an intelligence system that doesn't want to stop working. Thus, Ex Machina explores a fallacy we've been mulling over since the beginning of this video: that emotionality is the ultimate criterion for sensitivity. On paper, Commander Data is also an impassive machine, a fact that the opposing side uses to argue that he is nothing more than property. But just because Data or Ava may experience the world differently doesn't mean they aren't sensitive. Not all organic humans show and process feelings in the same way;

That doesn't make anyone less. Like Data, Ava is smart enough to see the injustice of how her status as a sentient being depends on the opinion of a stranger. "Do you have people who test you and might turn you off?" The lack of curiosity that Ex Machina's human characters have about Ava's true interiority reminds me of the treatment of another artificial life form trapped inside a box. In Blade Runner 2049, Joi is a holographic being whose struggle with consciousness quietly parallels that of our main Replicant characters. Even more so than for Replicators, Joi's status in society is that of a product.

Designed as a synthetic romantic companion, everything Joi says is in part dictated by an algorithm designed to tell consumers what they want to hear. Once again, it is left ambiguous to what extent his behavior is the result of a burgeoning consciousness and to what extent it is a corporate replication of human affection. Would people really seek the affections of an algorithm, despite knowing that it might not care about them? Could he simply be the spokesperson for a corporation? Yes. But when the movie Her was first released, this was more of an unanswered question. The story of a man who falls in love with an ambiguously intelligent AI after the end of a long-term relationship, Her's narrative was, once, more speculative.

A hypothetical examination of how increasing isolation in the digital age could one day lead people to outsource their need for interpersonal connections to a machine. Now… it's much less hypothetical. Loneliness is greater than ever; decoupling is becoming the norm and we have entire companies profiting from that human misery with AI companions. Looking back, Her's vision for AI seems almost prophetic. The depiction of algorithms in Ex Machina is equally prescient. Halfway through the movie, we learn that Ava's mainframe relies on voice, text, face, and search data stolen from millions of consumers, just like other programs she may have heard of.

Do you remember the Turing test? Well, current language generation models have already surpassed that. This does not mean that they are sensitive; All the evidence suggests that they are really good at returning all the data they have been trained with, but any machine that can trick someone into feeling like they are talking to a human has serious ramifications. Perhaps the only unrealistic part of Her's future is the fact that the main character can make a comfortable living writing love letters for other people. Her company's business model of outsourcing affection to a stranger works thematically, but the way the future looks, such a corporation would probably resort to a language model to spit something out rather than pay a human employee.

Anxiety over technology replacing jobs is nothing new. The same fears that produced movies like Metropolis have morphed over the decades as various automation technologies have pushed different groups out of the workplace. In retrospect, it is easy to dismiss such fears: “people still have jobs!” many economists argue. But not all jobs are equally satisfying: The unemployment rate might not change if millions of people with middle-class jobs have to start working at minimum wage, but that doesn't mean nothing is lost. Automation has already widened the wealth gap, caused rising rates of depression, and destroyed entire communities. People expected robots to free us from monotony, but historically, more often than not, people have no choice but to do monotony.

The idea of ​​creating a fully automated robotic utopia is obviously attractive, but I don't think it's conspiratorial to suggest that isn't the real reason companies are investing in this technology. But maybe I'm being too pessimistic, maybe all this technology looming on the horizon will be implemented carefully to avoid disrupting people's lives... or the entire world. …Guess we'll find out soon. But it's not the machines' fault. It's not the machines' fault if humans use them to replace other humans. It's not the machines' fault if they disrupt camaraderie, war, or the workplace. Machines are built by organics, implemented by organics, misused by organics.

We cannot lay the faults of the animate at the feet of the inanimate. “Bad ball. Think about what you have done.” Machines are reflections of humanity: our mistakes, our fears, our emotions, our ambitions. In many ways, the question of whether or not a machine could have a soul depends on whether humans are believed to have souls. “Does Commander Data have a soul? I'm not sure he did it. “I’m not sure I did.” Robots will continue to be our mirrors, reflecting the best and worst of ourselves. Does this unit have a soul? I certainly hope so.

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