Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.
This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.
Both of the new films about humans betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia, finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of “consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens) seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed, the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.Both of the new films about humans betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia, finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of “consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens) seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed, the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: A24 Films
