Robots

Robot Partners In Films

• The new films Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ex Machina both reflect our Elon Musk-approved fears of artificial intelligence. But perhaps a little AI in our lives could be a good thing.
  
  So everyone was waiting for the viral tweet about how the villain of Avengers: Age of Ultron merely reflects how evil the Internet is in real life, and the Internet, of course, obliged.
  
  It’s somehow fitting that most of the Twitter reaction to the film has become a meta-reaction to the Twitter reaction to the film, and how Joss Whedon has become the latest beloved geek celebrity to abandon social media.
  
  Much like Twitter, after all, Ultron is a digital tool initially created to be a positive force in the world that almost immediately subverts this goal into destroying everything it can with malicious, trollish glee.
  
  Of course, this story is so old it predates the Web; the Cold War gave us Skynet, Joshua, and Harlan Ellison’s AM. Stories of a computer gone mad have a certain urgency when those computers have the power to end civilization in nuclear fire, an urgency that’s faded today (though perhaps it shouldn’t have).
  
  But a world where all of us carry tiny computers with us all the time and use them to mediate all of our interactions with the world and each other? Where the idea of a computer as a “brain extension” is no longer science fiction but daily reality? Where the kids now entering college don’t remember a time when Googling wasn’t a fundamental element of their thought processes?
  
  For us, there’s an entirely different, far more personal urgency to this kind of story.
  
  I always like the weird synchronicity of encountering two films made by totally different studios in totally different genres that nonetheless address the same theme.
  
  And what’s telling is that the fears expressed in these films are not of how our technology will deviate from our basic human nature. The fear is of what happens if it doesn’t.
  
  Last year, the two science fiction meditations about artificial intelligence both coincidentally starred Scarlett Johansson—Her, a movie with Johansson as an all-too-human mind lacking a body, and Under the Skin, a movie with Johansson as an all-too-human body lacking a recognizable mind.
  
  Those were character studies, though, narrowly focused on Johansson’s relationship with Joaquin Phoenix/random Scottish hitchhikers. They were conspicuous in how little they depicted the wider world changing.
  
  By contrast, both the popcorn blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron and the low-budget meditative thriller Ex Machina are all about how technology has changed and will change the world we live in.
  
  And what’s telling is that the fears expressed in these films are not of how our technology will deviate from our basic human nature. The fear is of what happens if it doesn’t.
  
  Our fears of the past were of superintelligent computers as alien, inscrutable—that we’d create something like HAL 9000, whose actions we couldn’t predict or control because it was too different from us.
  
  That made sense, back when computers were, to the average moviegoer, an alien, inscrutable force—big black boxes kept in chilly rooms, which could only be spoken to in an arcane jargon by a priesthood of expert nerds.
  
  Back then the most plausible way to tell a story about AI gone amok was to have it be a shadowy unseen presence, like “the computer” that sent you your utility bill or handled your company’s payroll. Some egghead enters some line of code incorrectly, and boom—Skynet launches the nuclear missiles from deep inside some bunker and here comes the apocalypse.
  
  Age of Ultron deliberately holds back this nuclear apocalypse from the audience—Ultron tries to launch the nukes, but is immediately prevented, and instead enacts a far more personal form of revenge on its creator and his friends, one with a human face.
  
  Ultron is a highly humanized character from the outset, the polar opposite of the deliberately emotionless performance of Douglas Rain as HAL. He’s filled with malice, resentment, rage—his hatred of his creator and “father,” Tony Stark, a classic Oedipus complex right out of Freud. Repeated references are made—by characters like Scarlet Witch, Captain America, Stark himself—to how Ultron, patterned after his “memories” of Stark from the Avengers’ database, has internalized Stark’s ego, his insecurities, his desire to control.
  
  His first words when he awakens are to ask where his body is. He keeps building organic-looking human bodies, with creepily expressive eyes and lips. His dialogue is punctuated with Tony Stark-like quips. Compared to, say, a one-note villain like Guardians of the Galaxy’s Ronan the Accuser, he’s one of the most human Marvel villains.
  
  Back in the 1970s, the lingering question of whether HAL had human motivations for his betrayal or was merely a malfunctioning machine was central to that segment of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Age of Ultron blows past it entirely. Ultron may be “more than a man,” but from the outset he has a man’s voice, a man’s emotions, a man’s motives.
  
  That might seem like merely a choice on Joss Whedon’s part to avoid science fiction clichés and to have a robot villain portrayed by James Spader at his James Spadest.
  
  But Ex Machina gives us context for why a monster who’s a “human computer” feels so urgent. Ex Machina has as its core conceit a “Turing test” in which shy programmer Caleb is enlisted to put an alluring female android Ava through her paces, testing to see if she’s truly a conscious being or merely a simulation of one.
  
  We’ve heard the story of the robot girlfriend before too, of course, since 1938 at least. But Ex Machina throws at least two major twists into this scenario.
  
  First is Nathan, the would-be mad scientist who created Ava, a genre-savvy wisecracking jerk—much like Tony Stark—who constantly undermines any atmosphere of portentous message sci-fi you might otherwise feel building up.
  
  He’s the quintessential techbro—an unshaven, profane, hard-drinking, strength-training asshole straight out of Y-Combinator. The financial resources for his AI project come from his first success, Bluebook, this world’s version of Google—and, it turns out, so do all the technological resources because Nathan’s AI project turns out to be all the wild promises of Big Data taken to their logical conclusion. We talk to Google as though it were a person, asking it questions like “Where’s the nearest McDonald’s?” or “How do you fix a leaking faucet?” and trusting it to anticipate our desires.
  
  Her was based on Apple’s Siri, the fantasy of creating a magic talking person inside the machine who could process those requests even faster and more accurately than Google.
  
  Ex Machina approaches it from the other direction. Google is able to act more like a person over time not because sentience is magically being injected into it from outside, but simply because, by having billions of people constantly talking to it, it’s doing a better and better impression of us.
  
  There’s already digital “people” on the Internet—you and me. Our Facebook profiles, our Google search histories, our Amazon shopping carts—these are all digital models of us, however distorted and incomplete, that are packaged and sold to corporations as a way to predict the behavior of people in the real world. As time goes on, these predictions are getting creepily accurate.
  
  In the world of Ex Machina, Nathan has simply chosen to take the next logical step and use his billions of digital models of people to build an actual person.
  
  Ada’s uncanny lifelikeness isn’t just a handwave about magical futuristic technology the way androids were in the Golden Age of science fiction—she’s explicitly meant to invoke that nervous shiver down your spine when you see that Google Calendar has automatically reminded you about your upcoming plane flight by surreptitiously reading your email. She represents all the frightening ways our machines are getting “smarter” around us by constantly learning more and more about us, taking in what we feed them.
  
  And the second twist? Well, Caleb discovering Nathan is a sadistic monster who makes sex slaves out of his robots isn’t really a twist, nor is Caleb falling in love with Ada and helping her kill Nathan and escape—that’s all par for the course with mad scientists and robot girlfriends.
  
  No, the twist is that unlike the typical loving robot girlfriend, Ada straight-up betrays Caleb and leaves him for dead so that she can escape and live her new life as a human being without anyone knowing her secret.
  
  And why should this be surprising? She was made by Nathan, a dude whose modus operandi has always been to vacuum up as much information about other people as possible and use it for his own ends. Consciously manipulating another person’s emotions for your own advantage is one of the most human things you can do—certainly more “human” than being the mindlessly-in-love, self-effacing sexbot Caleb, Nathan, and millions of Internet creepers would want Ada to be.
  
  The usual dismissal to fears of “evil AI” is that no one designs software to have its own goals, malevolent or otherwise—our machines are tools that we use to amplify our own abilities, to get us what we want.
  
  The problem is that we’ve consistently demonstrated through our history that we’re very bad at knowing what we want or at wanting what’s good for us. We all know the joke about lying to Netflix or Pandora to make our tastes seem better than they actually are. We all generally agree about the social harms of smartphone addiction and mock others for their driving-and-texting ways while doing it ourselves. We decry the design of social platforms optimized for cyberbullying while continuing to flock to them because, after all, gossip and drama is what we really crave.
  
  The message—or one of the messages—of Ex Machina, neatly stated by actor Oscar Isaac in an interview, is not how dangerous machines are but “how shitty we are.” Age of Ultron isn’t nearly as philosophical a movie as Ex Machina, but it similarly makes clear Ultron’s evil isn’t because of what he is but because of where he came from. The magical Mind Gem that makes Ultron sentient isn’t inherently evil—it’s later used to create the Vision, a benevolent AI.
  
  Ultron’s evil is inseparable from his human origins. Like a hypercharged Google Now, he receives a directive from Tony Stark to carry out his will, tries to interpret that by reading all of Tony’s emails and conversations, and extrapolates from the self-loathing, misanthropic inventor’s personality a hatred of his father and of all humanity.
  
  It’s not the most plausibly sketched out motivation, but anyone who’s been unpleasantly shocked by what their own Twitter word cloud looks like can probably relate.
  
  The funny thing is that what we want from our technology isn’t an amplification of ourselves, an extension of our own wills. That’s what we have, and it falls far short of our expectations.
  
  What we want from machines is the objectivity and rationality that we lack. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, we want machines to pull out truth from the objective ugly messiness of human interaction.
  
  For so long our fear has been that machines would escape our control, that some “ghost in the machine” would cause our computers to become something alien to us that defied our wills.
  
  We want something like Wikipedia to have a “neutral” point of view; we want the mechanics of the wiki format to impose some kind of order on everyone’s warring edits and distill the truth out of everyone’s biased, ignorant and/or malicious contributions. We want machines that will give us an objective answer as to how old we look, how attractive we are, who we should date.
  
  Part of the fantasy in Her wasn’t just that Scarlett Johansson’s Samantha was a faithfully devoted computerized girlfriend to Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore—it was that she was a faithfully devoted girlfriend while also being smarter and wiser than he was, that she could make better decisions than him. (I’ve joked that we can already tell she’s an unreal fantasy because she can accurately tell him which of his old emails he should keep and which he should delete.)
  
  The “Singularity” that Nathan says he seeks to create in Ex Machina is the opposite of what he actually does create. The term refers to the fantasy of making an AI that’s better than we are, able to change our world into a better place—not an AI that’s just another selfish person thrown into the mix of 6 billion selfish people we already have.
  
  Hence the strange contradiction that is the character of the Vision in Age of Ultron, a “good” AI who exists in counterpart to Ultron—a character based on Tony Stark’s much more primitive JARVIS AI who has a far more human body than Ultron but a far less human mien. His infinite compassion and pity for the human race comes from a place of odd, inhuman detachment—a role Paul Bettany has played to the hilt before.
  
  Much like the classic version of Superman, the Vision embodies our ideals by not being one of us. He can be trusted with near-limitless power because he isn’t human. He demonstrates the vast gulf between what we are and what we wish we were.
  
  For so long our fear has been that machines would escape our control, that some “ghost in the machine” would cause our computers to become something alien to us that defied our wills.
  
  But our storehouses of information are riddled with bias and with malicious lies that are there because we put them there. Our decision-making systems repeatedly reward zealous trolls because, to paraphrase Yeats, our systems listen to what we want and the zealous trolls are the ones who want the hardest.
  
  As I’ve said before in a speech at Techmanity, technology is a force multiplier. It strengthens most those who already hold power; it amplifies most the voices that are already loudest. If, when we anthropomorphize the imagined voice of “the Internet” or “Twitter” or “the blogosphere,” we imagine a voice of frenzied outrage, shameless cruelty, privileged self-absorption—that’s because those are the voices already loudest among us.
  
  I’m not afraid of the robot overlords rising up and taking the reins away from us humans. To the contrary: I’m pessimistic for our future precisely because I’m fairly certain they never will.

Marry Your Robot

• The Supreme Court’s recent 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage across the United States has already spawned speculation about “what will be next” in expanding marital rights. As the Supreme Court noted, “[t]he history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That institution … has evolved over time.” Interracial marriage, equality between husband and wife, and same-sex marriage were all excluded for long periods of time under our Constitution but now have been sanctioned and protected by the courts. While these changes have come slowly, and courts are unlikely to take the next step in expanding marital rights for some time, the courts are probably not finished expanding the legal definition of marital rights.
  
  A New York Times op-ed published shortly after the Supreme Court’s same-sex decision said that the court’s logic could eventually lead to recognition of polygamy or plural marriages, an argument also made by Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissenting opinion. This slippery-slope argument has also been used to contend that the court’s decision will open the door to legal recognition of bestiality or incest.
  
  Robot-human marriages might be next on the list. Probably not soon, admittedly, but it nevertheless will be an inevitable part of our future. Indeed, some critics of same-sex marriage, including some conservative Christian opponents of gay marriage, have argued that the court’s recognition of same-sex marriage would inevitably lead to robotic-human marriages. There has recently been a burst of cogent accounts of human-robot sex and love in popular culture: Her and Ex Machina, the AMC drama series Humans, and the novel Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. These fictional accounts of human-robot romantic relationships follow David Levy’s compelling, even if reluctant, argument for the inevitability of human-robot love and sex in his 2007 work Love and Sex With Robots. If you don’t think human-robot sex and love will be a growing reality of the future, read Levy’s book, and you will be convinced.
  
  Or just look at the marketplace. Sex “dolls” have become more and more realistic in appearance and touch, and one company recently announced that it was developing a sexbot with artificial intelligence that can talk back and express emotions. As Levy points out, the first to explore and benefit from robot-human sexual relationships may be individuals with physical or psychological impairments that limit their ability to have sex with other people.
  
  Robot-human marriage is not about robot rights; it is about the right of a human to choose to marry a robot.
  
  The era of love and sex with robots has begun and will continue to accelerate going forward, even if it remains a minority choice for the next couple of decades. But with sex and love will come calls for the right to marry. Indeed, there are already examples of people (OK, men) who want or claim to be married to their robot (see here and here).
  
  Will the recent Obergefell decision protecting same-sex marriage apply to open the door to robot-human marriage? The court’s majority decision upholding same-sex marriage was based on an analysis of four “principles and traditions.” These four factors are a mixed bag as applied to robot-human marriage. The first principle is individual autonomy, the right of each of us to decide our own private choices and intimate relationships. The “decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.” It is not too far of a stretch to extend this right of individual self-definition to choose to marry a robot—it is not a choice most of us would make (at least at this time), yet if that were someone’s preference, his or her right of personal autonomy would seem to weigh in favor of legal sanctioning of that choice (at least until robots achieve sufficient personhood to have the right to refuse consent). So that’s one point for human-robot marriage.
  
  The second factor relied on by the court is the special relationship that marriages facilitates between “two persons.” The right to marriage “dignifies couples,” reinforces “bilateral loyalty,” and represents an “association for … [a] noble …purpose.” This reference to the coupling of two “persons” would seem to exclude robot-human marriage, at least until some point far in the future when robots might achieve the status of “person.” The rationale for this factor, according to the court, is to provide human companionship: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.” But many people are lonely today, and robots may increasingly fill that need for companionship for more and more people going forward. So whether this second factor weighs for or against validating robot-human marriage is ambiguous.
  
  The remaining factors seem to clearly weigh against recognizing robot-human marriage. The third factor is that marriage safeguards children and families. Although not all marriages result in children, the institution of marriage provides stability and recognition to those married couples that do raise children. Thus, the court upheld same-sex marriage in part based on its finding that “many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted.” Robots are not capable of producing children, and although it is conceivable they could eventually serve a parenting role for children conceived by others, that role and responsibility seems even further into the future than the role of lover or spouse.
  
  Fourth and finally, the court relied on the fact that marriage was central to many practical and legal realities of modern life, such as taxation, inheritance, property rights, hospital access and insurance coverage. Most if not all of these factors are not relevant to robots, unless in some distant future they achieve personhood status. But this need to sanction the “rights, benefits, and responsibilities” of marriage applies much less persuasively to robot-human relationships than to human-human relationships.
  
  From a strictly legal perspective, therefore, the court’s decision in Obergefell contains arguments and dicta that could be used to make the case for or against robot-human marriage. Of course, as a practical matter, the legal legitimacy of robot-human marriage is not going to be recognized anytime soon. Most people (including judges) presumably think robot-human relationships are absurd and twisted. But that was once also the case for interracial marriage and same-sex marriage. Of course those advances involved sanctioning the love and relationship of two human beings, regardless of their race or sexual preferences, which is arguably quite distinct from recognizing human-machine marriage. But as robots become more and more humanlike in their appearance and behavior, this distinction may eventually erode away.
  
  The Supreme Court itself recounted the long, difficult road to get to the point where the law (and most of society) could now recognize same-sex marriage. First, advocates had to overcome the classification of same-sex relations as an illness. Then they had to declassify it as a crime. And then finally—after countless referenda, legislative debates, grass-roots campaigns, studies, popular and scholarly writings, and lawsuits—the right to marry people of the same sex was finally legally recognized.
  
  The path to recognition of robot-human marriage is likely to be equally, if not more, lengthy, torturous, and contested. But as the court emphasized at the close of its opinion in Obergefell, the issue comes down to the “fundamental right” of a person in a free society to choose the nature of the relationships and lifestyle they choose to pursue, providing they do not unreasonably harm others in exercising their choices. Robot-human marriage is not about robot rights; it is about the right of a human to choose to marry a robot. While few people would understand or support robot-human intimacy today, as robots get more sophisticated and humanlike, more and more people will find love, happiness, and intimacy in the arms of a machine. Robot sex and love is coming, and robot-human marriage will likely not be far behind.

• “WHY DON’T YOU come up and see me sometime?” the holographic re-creation of Mae West said, as she uncrossed her legs and flashed us her bare beaver.
  
  My mother looked away, troubled. “Is this really the proper use of the technology?” she said.
  
  “Come on, lady - nobody would have loved this more than Mae herself,” the hologram of Mahatma Gandhi said. “And don’t forget: the Bacon Club Chalupa is at Taco Bell for a limited time only.”