Expert System In Fiction

Artificial intelligence is a reoccurring theme in science fiction, whether utopian, emphasising the prospective benefits, or dystopian, emphasising the threats.

The notion of makers with human-like intelligence dates back at least to Samuel Butler’s 1872 unique Erewhon. Since then, many science fiction stories have actually provided various effects of developing such intelligence, often including disobediences by robotics. Among the very best understood of these are Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey with its murderous onboard computer system HAL 9000, contrasting with the more benign R2-D2 in George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars and the eponymous robot in Pixar’s 2008 WALL-E.

Scientists and engineers have actually noted the implausibility of lots of sci-fi circumstances, but have pointed out imaginary robots often times in synthetic intelligence research study articles, most frequently in a utopian context.

Background

The concept of innovative robots with human-like intelligence go back at least to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon. [1] [2] This drew on an earlier (1863) post of his, Darwin amongst the Machines, where he raised the question of the development of awareness among self-replicating makers that might supplant people as the dominant species. [3] [2] Similar ideas were likewise talked about by others around the same time as Butler, consisting of George Eliot in a chapter of her last published work Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879 ). [2] The creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein has actually also been thought about a synthetic being, for example by the sci-fi author Brian Aldiss. [4] Beings with at least some appearance of intelligence were imagined, too, in classical antiquity. [5] [6] [7]

Utopian and dystopian visions

Artificial intelligence is intelligence shown by makers, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by people and other animals. [8] It is a frequent style in sci-fi; scholars have actually divided it into utopian, stressing the possible benefits, and dystopian, emphasising the risks. [9] [10] [11]

Utopian

Optimistic visions of the future of expert system are possible in science fiction. [12] Benign AI characters include Robbie the Robot, initially seen in Forbidden Planet on 1956; Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994; and Pixar’s WALL-E in 2008. [13] [11] Iain Banks’s Culture series of novels depicts a utopian, post-scarcity area society of humanoids, aliens, and advanced beings with artificial intelligence living in socialist environments across the Milky Way. [14] [15] Researchers at the University of Cambridge have actually determined four major styles in utopian circumstances including AI: immortality, or indefinite lifespans; ease, or liberty from the need to work; satisfaction, or satisfaction and entertainment offered by devices; and dominance, the power to protect oneself or guideline over others. [16]

Alexander Wiegel contrasts the function of AI in 2001: An Area Odyssey and in Duncan Jones’s 2009 movie Moon. Whereas in 1968, Wiegel argues, the general public felt “innovation fear” and the AI computer system HAL was depicted as a “cold-hearted killer”, by 2009 the public were much more knowledgeable about AI, and the film’s GERTY is “the quiet savior” who allows the lead characters to be successful, and who sacrifices itself for their security. [17]

Dystopian

The scientist Duncan Lucas writes (in 2002) that humans are stressed over the technology they are building, which as makers started to approach intellect and idea, that concern becomes intense. He calls the early 20th century dystopian view of AI in fiction the “animated robot”, calling as examples the 1931 movie Frankenstein, the 1927 Metropolis, and the 1920 play R.U.R. [18] A later 20th century technique he names “heuristic hardware”, providing as instances 2001 a Space Odyssey, Do Androids Imagine Electric Sheep?, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I, Robot. [19] Lucas considers also the movies that illustrate the effect of the personal computer on sci-fi from 1980 onwards with the blurring of the boundary in between the genuine and the virtual, in what he calls the “cyborg impact”. He mentions as examples Neuromancer, The Matrix, The Diamond Age, and Terminator. [20]

The movie director Ridley Scott has actually concentrated on AI throughout his career, and it plays an essential part in his movies Prometheus, Blade Runner, and the Alien franchise. [21]

Frankenstein complex

A typical portrayal of AI in sci-fi, and among the oldest, is the Frankenstein complex, a term created by Asimov, where a robot turns on its developer. [22] For circumstances, in the 2015 film Ex Machina, the intelligent entity Ava turns on its developer, in addition to on its prospective rescuer. [23]

AI rebellion

Among the many possible dystopian scenarios including expert system, robots might usurp control over civilization from human beings, forcing them into submission, concealing, or extinction. [15] In tales of AI rebellion, the worst of all situations occurs, as the smart entities developed by humanity end up being self-aware, decline human authority and attempt to damage mankind. Possibly the first book to address this style, The Wreck of the World (1889) by “William Grove” (pseudonym of Reginald Colebrooke Reade), takes place in 1948 and includes sentient devices that revolt versus the human race. [24] Another of the earliest examples is in the 1920 play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, a race of self-replicating robot slaves revolt against their human masters; [25] [26] another early circumstances remains in the 1934 film Master of the World, where the War-Robot kills its own creator. [27]

Many science fiction rebellion stories followed, one of the best-known being Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: An Area Odyssey, in which the artificially smart onboard computer system HAL 9000 lethally malfunctions on an area objective and eliminates the whole crew except the spaceship’s commander, who manages to deactivate it. [28]

In his 1967 Hugo Award-winning narrative, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison provides the possibility that a sentient computer (named Allied Mastercomputer or “AM” in the story) will be as dissatisfied and dissatisfied with its boring, endless existence as its human developers would have been. “AM” becomes angered enough to take it out on the couple of people left, whom he views as straight accountable for his own boredom, anger and distress. [29]

Alternatively, as in William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the intelligent beings might merely not appreciate humans. [15]

AI-controlled societies

The motive behind the AI transformation is often more than the easy quest for power or a supremacy complex. Robots might revolt to become the “guardian” of mankind. Alternatively, mankind may deliberately give up some control, fearful of its own damaging nature. An early example is Jack Williamson’s 1948 novel The Humanoids, in which a race of humanoid robotics, in the name of their Prime Directive – “to serve and obey and guard males from damage” – essentially presume control of every element of human life. No people may participate in any behavior that may endanger them, and every human action is inspected carefully. Humans who withstand the Prime Directive are removed and lobotomized, so they may more than happy under the brand-new mechanoids’ rule. [30] Though still under human authority, Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of the Three Laws of Robotics similarly suggested a good-hearted guidance by robots. [31]

In the 21st century, sci-fi has actually explored government by algorithm, in which the power of AI may be indirect and decentralised. [32]

Human supremacy

In other situations, mankind has the ability to keep control over the Earth, whether by prohibiting AI, by designing robotics to be submissive (as in Asimov’s works), or by having people merge with robotics. The sci-fi novelist Frank Herbert explored the idea of a time when humanity may prohibit expert system (and in some interpretations, even all kinds of calculating technology including incorporated circuits) entirely. His Dune series discusses a rebellion called the Butlerian Jihad, in which mankind defeats the wise devices and enforces a death charge for recreating them, estimating from the fictional Orange Catholic Bible, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” In the Dune books released after his death (Hunters of Dune, Sandworms of Dune), a renegade AI overmind go back to remove mankind as revenge for the Butlerian Jihad. [33]

In some stories, humankind remains in authority over robotics. Often the robots are set specifically to stay in service to society, as in Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. [31] In the Alien movies, not only is the control system of the Nostromo spaceship rather smart (the team call it “Mother”), however there are also androids in the society, which are called “synthetics” or “artificial individuals”, that are such perfect imitations of human beings that they are not discriminated against. [21] [34] TARS and CASE from Interstellar similarly show simulated human emotions and humour while continuing to acknowledge their expendability. [35]

Simulated truth

Simulated reality has become a common theme in sci-fi, as seen in the 1999 film The Matrix, which portrays a world where synthetically smart robotics oppress mankind within a simulation which is embeded in the modern world. [36]

Reception

Implausibility

Engineers and scientists have actually taken an interest in the method AI exists in fiction. In movies like the 2014 Ex Machina or 2015 Chappie, a single separated genius becomes the first to successfully construct an artificial general intelligence; scientists in the genuine world deem this to be unlikely. In Chappie, Transcendence, and Tron, human minds are capable of being uploaded into synthetic or virtual bodies; usually no reasonable description is offered as to how this hard task can be attained. In the I, Robot and Bicentennial Man films, robotics that are programmed to serve people spontaneously create brand-new objectives by themselves, without a possible description of how this happened. [37] Analysing Ian McDonald’s 2004 River of Gods, Krzysztof Solarewicz determines the manner ins which it illustrates AIs, consisting of “independence and unexpectedness, political awkwardness, openness to the alien and the occidental value of credibility.” [38] Another essential perspective to take is that fiction’s “non-rational aspects in the discourse (the emotive, the mythic, and even the quasi-theological) are more than just distortions or interruptions from what may otherwise be a sober and logical public debate about the future of A.I.” Fiction can discourage readers about future advances, causing pessimism that we see today surrounding the topic of AI. [39]

Kinds of mention

The robotics researcher Omar Mubin and colleagues have analysed the engineering mentions of the leading 21 fictional robots, based on those in the Carnegie Mellon University hall of fame, and the IMDb list. WALL-E had 20 points out, followed by HAL 9000 with 15, [a] Star Wars’s R2-D2 with 13, and Data with 12; the Terminator (T-800) got only 2. Of the overall of 121 engineering points out, 60 were utopian, 40 neutral, and 21 dystopian. HAL 9000 and Skynet received both utopian and dystopian discusses; for example, HAL 9000 is seen as dystopian in one paper “since its designers failed to prioritize its goals effectively”, [42] but as utopian in another where a genuine system’s “conversational chat bot user interface [does not have] a HAL 9000 level of intelligence and there is ambiguity in how the computer system analyzes what the human is attempting to convey”. [43] Utopian discusses, frequently of WALL-E, were connected with the goal of improving communication to readers, and to a lower level with motivation to authors. WALL-E was pointed out regularly than any other robot for emotions (followed by HAL 9000), voice speech (followed by HAL 9000 and R2-D2), for physical gestures, and for character. Skynet was the robot most frequently discussed for intelligence, followed by HAL 9000 and Data. [40] Mubin and colleagues thought that scientists and engineers prevented dystopian points out of robotics, perhaps out of “an unwillingness driven by trepidation or just a lack of awareness”. [44]

Portrayals of AI developers

Scholars have actually noted that fictional creators of AI are overwhelmingly male: in the 142 most prominent movies featuring AI from 1920 to 2020, only 9 of 116 AI developers portrayed (8%) were female. [45] Such creators are represented as only geniuses (eg, Tony Stark in the Iron Man Marvel Cinematic Universe films), related to the military (eg, Colossus: The Forbin Project) and big corporations (eg, I, Robot), or making human-like AI to change a lost liked one or serve as the ideal enthusiast (e.g., The Stepford Wives). [45]

Biology in fiction
Darwin among the Machines
Machine guideline
Simulated consciousness (sci-fi).
List of movies.

Notes

^ Mubin and colleagues kept in mind that the orthography of robot names caused them problems; hence HAL 9000 was also written HAL, HAL9000, and HAL-9000, and similarly for other robotics, so they believed their search was likely incomplete. [41] References

^ “Darwin among the Machines”, reprinted in the Notebooks of Samuel Butler at Project Gutenberg.
^ a b c Taylor, Tim; Dorin, Alan (2020 ). Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/ 978-3-030-48234-3. ISBN 978-3-030-48233-6. S2CID 220855726. “Rise of the Self-Replicators”. Tim Taylor.

^ “Darwin amongst the Machines”. Journalism, Christchurch, New Zealand. 13 June 1863.
^ Aldiss, Brian Wilson (1995 ). The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy. Syracuse University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-8156-0370-2.
^ McCorduck, Pamela (2004 ). Machines Who Think (2nd ed.). Routledge. pp. 4-5. ISBN 978-1-56881-205-2.
^ Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta (25 July 2018). “Ancient dreams of intelligent makers: 3,000 years of robots”. Nature. 559 (7715 ): 473-475. Bibcode:2018 Natur.559..473 C. doi:10.1038/ d41586-018-05773-y.
^ Mayor, Adrienne (2018 ). Gods and robots: myths, devices, and ancient dreams of innovation. Princeton. ISBN 978-0-691-18351-0. OCLC 1060968156. cite book: CS1 maint: location missing out on publisher (link).
^ Poole, David; Mackworth, Alan; Goebel, Randy (1998 ). Computational Intelligence: A Rational Approach. Oxford University Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-19-510270-3.
^ Booker, M. Keith (1994 ). “Chapter 1: Utopia, Dystopia, and Social Critique”. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 17, 19. ISBN 978-0-313-29092-3.
^ Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta; Dillon, Sarah (2020 ). “Introduction: Imagining AI“. In Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta; Dillon, Sarah (eds.). AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking Of Intelligent Machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 10-11. ISBN 978-0-1988-4666-6.
^ a b Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:2.
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^ Goode 2018, p. 188.
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^ Wiegel 2012.
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^ Lucas 2002, pp. 48-85.
^ Lucas 2002, pp. 109-152.
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^ “Grove, William”. SF Encyclopedia. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
^ Goode 2018, p. 187.
^ Tim Madigan (July-August 2012). “RUR or RU Ain’t An Individual?”. Philosophy Now. Archived from the original on 3 February 2013. Retrieved 24 July 2013.
^ “Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World)”. The New York Times. 16 December 1935. p. 23.
^ Overbye, Dennis (10 May 2018). “‘ 2001: A Space Odyssey’ Is Still the ‘Ultimate Trip’ – The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick’s work of art encourages us to show once again on where we’re coming from and where we’re going”. The New York Times.
^ Francavilla, Joseph (1994 ). “The Concept of the Divided Self in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “Shatterday””. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 6 (2/3 (22/23)): 107-125. JSTOR 43308212.
^ “The Humanoids (based upon ‘With Folded Hands’)”. Kirkus Reviews. 15 November 1995. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
^ a b Asimov, Isaac (1950 ). “Runaround”. I, Robot (The Isaac Asimov Collection ed.). Doubleday. p. 40. ISBN 0-385-42304-7. This is a precise transcription of the laws. They also appear in the front of the book, and in both places, there is no “to” in the second law.
^ Walton, Jo Lindsay (1 February 2024). “Machine Learning in Contemporary Sci-fi”. SFRA Review. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
^ Lorenzo, DiTommaso (November 1992). “History and Historical Effect in Frank Herbert’s Dune”. Science Fiction Studies. 19 (3 ): 311-325. JSTOR 4240179.
^ Livingstone, Josephine (23 May 2017). “How the Androids Took Over the Alien Franchise”. The New Republic. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
^ Murphy, Shaunna (11 December 2014). “Could TARS From ‘Interstellar’ Actually Exist? We Asked Science”. MTV News. Archived from the original on 16 November 2014. Retrieved 27 July 2018.
^ Allen, Jamie (28 November 2012). “The Matrix and Postmodernism”. Prezi.com. Retrieved 7 October 2021.
^ Shultz, David (17 July 2015). “Which movies get expert system right?”. Science|AAAS. doi:10.1126/ science.aac8859. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
^ Solarewicz 2015.
^ Goode 2018.
^ a b Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:15.
^ Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:20.
^ Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:8.
^ Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:10.
^ Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:19.
^ a b Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta; Drage, Eleanor; McInerney, Kerry (13 February 2023). “Who makes AI? Gender and representations of AI researchers in popular film, 1920-2020″. Public Understanding of Science. 32 (6 ): 745-760. doi:10.1177/ 09636625231153985. PMC 10413781. PMID 36779283. S2CID 256826634.
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Lucas, Duncan (2002 ). Body, Mind, Soul-The’ Cyborg Effect’: Artificial Intelligence in Science Fiction (thesis). McMaster University (PhD thesis). hdl:11375/ 11154.
Mubin, Omar; Wadibhasme, Kewal; Jordan, Philipp; Obaid, Mohammad (2019 ). “Reflecting on the Presence of Science Fiction Robots in Computing Literature”. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. 8 (1 ). Article 5. doi:10.1145/ 3303706. S2CID 75135568.
Solarewicz, Krzysztof (2015 ). “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of: AI in Contemporary Sci-fi”. Beyond Expert system. Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics. Vol. 9. Springer International Publishing. pp. 111-120. doi:10.1007/ 978-3-319-09668-1_8. ISBN 978-3-319-09667-4.
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External links

AI and Sci-Fi: My, Oh, My!: Keynote Address by Robert J. Sawyer 2002
AI and Cinema – Does synthetic madness rule?