by IGMS
Modern sci-fi on the big and small screen is no exception. However, we may be reaching a critical turning point in our representations of artificial intelligence. Just as there was a pronounced shift in the tone and style of space-exploration films once space flight became a burgeoning reality in the 1960s, so, too, are we seeing a change in the way we approach A.I. as it becomes closer to becoming a prevalent aspect of 21st Century life. (Or I should say, more of a prevalent aspect, since primitive forms of it are already so commonplace.)
The subject has gotten a fair amount of attention in the press in recent years, as the likes of Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates have all warned - or at least publicly speculated - about the theoretical dangers of A.I., which is developing rapidly as we speak. "Computers will overtake humans with A.I. at some point within the next 100 years," Hawking said earlier this year. "When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours."
Indeed, the fear associated with the concept - that said intelligence will quickly surpass our own (in ways it hasn't already), and, hypothetically, render our own intelligence obsolete (or at the very least, outdated) - has been one of the driving emotional and philosophical factors in artists and writers' depictions of it throughout the years. Just this summer we got yet another entry in the Terminator series, which is basically my generation's go-to reference for advanced intelligence run amok. That franchise is built on the concept of machines becoming genuinely self-aware, an idea that still sparks pretty wide-ranging debate among scientists, futurists and others. Certainly no one is arguing that Siri has designs on taking over the world. But still, the fear of our own creation advancing beyond our control remains a real one, whether it's someone like Hawking arguing for the importance of wisdom and regulation in our continuing development of the technology, or a big-budget movie with an A.I. menace bent on total control. Just a few months ago, we saw one of pop culture's most popular figures, Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark, very nearly bring about humanity's destruction, simply by creating an artificially intelligent security system that it turns out he had no means to control. Avengers: Age of Ultron is hardly the most thoughtful of sci-fi films - in many ways it's akin to last year's Johnny Depp catastrophe Transcendence (which was undone, ironically, by a crushing lack of self-awareness about its own silliness) - but I was intrigued that, in its own way, it took on more existentially urgent subject matter than its predecessor.
But I'm not sure films like that, with their apocalyptic scope and paranoia, are really the trend anymore. Once again, there's a shift in tone now that the reality is at least somewhat more clear. Self-aware, malevolent Terminators and James Spaders may still make for good spectacle, but they don't resonate the same way now that a certain 21st Century clarity regarding A.I. has emerged. At the times HAL 9000 or the T-800 were envisioned and put on screen, none of us really had direct experience with artificial intelligence, at least not in any meaningful way. Now that it's crept into daily lives, we see it differently.
Science fiction has always been about so much more than just technology, or exploration. It has always, like art in general, been a prism with which to understand human nature. One of the great misunderstandings I often hear is that the genre simply tries to imagine or anticipate the future, when in fact it's just as often (if not more often) a way to understand the present. For this reason and others, I now wonder if, as old-hat as A.I. is as a concept, it will become sci-fi cinema's preeminent idea moving forward. If not that, might it at least become the most resonant one? The underlying thing about A.I. is that it's not about technology at all - it's about us. The artificially intelligent creations we see are mere reflections of humanity - at both its worst (like Caradog James' The Machine, when it's created for the purpose of being a weapon) and its most ideal (which, existentially speaking, may come across as even scarier than the former).
Take a couple of recent examples, which are notable not just for their unusual sensitivity toward A.I., but their conspicuously modern feel, like we could be watching ourselves in the very near future. The first is Spike Jonze's Her, which - while ostensibly a film about a man who falls in love with his operating system - was actually a meditation on human connection and human relationships. Artificial intelligence was the vehicle, not the end game. The film's aesthetic was deliberately reminiscent of modern trends of computing and design, suggesting the idea that this impossible, emotional, sexual being - Scarlett Johansson's disembodied voice, named Samantha - could have been conjured up by the likes of Steve Jobs, or someone like him.
A machine that thinks and feels like a human is an old idea that, frankly, usually isn't all that interesting. But there were key distinctions in Her's case. The fact that she ultimately was just a voice put the focus squarely on Joaquin Phoenix's Theodore, so that the (subjective) emotional connections were experienced through the volatility and frailty of a human being. Their relationship, as real as it might have been for her (whatever "she" was), was still largely a projection. For the purposes of the film, turning her into a physical being - especially if Johansson herself had been that physical being - would have been cheating (a bit more on that in a second), and Jonze knew it. It would have made her almost explicitly human, even if we knew her to be artificial. It would have taken the focus away from the human character and onto the more traditional ambiguities of the human values of androids and cyborgs and all other forms of physical A.I. that we've been seeing in sci-fi for decades.
Perhaps more importantly, and as if underscoring the importance of the human side over the technological one, in the end (obligatory spoiler warning), the A.I. itself, "Samantha," evolved so rapidly that it disappeared from Theodore's life and from human perception/communication as a whole.
The second example shares similarities with Her, and kind of expands on one of its most memorable scenes. It's Be Right Back, a season-two episode of the BBC series Black Mirror, starring Hayley Atwell as Martha, the grieving wife of a husband (Domhnall Gleeson) recently killed in a car accident. Thanks to the (unprompted) assistance of a friend, she recreates her husband, Ash, using all manner of personal and private correspondences and records. At first, it's simply an online conversation. Then, he's given a voice - his voice, thanks to all the audio recordings she uploaded. And finally, he's given a body - one virtually identical to Ash's actual body. And she tries to recreate their life together. This touches on similar territory to the sex-surrogate scene from Her, in which Theodore hires a woman to be Samantha's "body," so they can finally be together physically. In the film, the experiment is a disaster. In Be Right Back, it works - at least up to a point. She actually has to "activate" him - taking the physical vessel, putting it into the tub and letting it gestate ("Don't forget the electrolytes," he tells her) before growing into a full-fledged Ash facsimile. She tries him out - unlike Theodore and Samantha, the sex seems to work in their case, at least for a period of time - but, naturally, this version of Ash cannot ever replicate all of the physical and emotional nuances that Martha is used to.
Here, once again, the synthetic intelligence is simply a vehicle used by the filmmakers (writer Charlie Brooker and director Owen Harris) to explore human truths and realities. The A.I. itself is a tool, not the subject.
Like anything else that plays a role in our present or future, artificial intelligence is worth being explored in all its forms - as a technology, as an existential threat, as a reflection of ourselves - but it's that last one that seems the most potent, and the most likely to dominate the cinematic conversation in years to come. It's one of the reasons I'm a bit ambivalent about AMC's otherwise well-produced sci-fi series, Humans. As well-acted and filmed as it might be, it (at least through the first four episodes) is swimming in rather basic territory - robots who think and feel like humans, the ethics of creating A.I., whether synthetics have rights, etc. It hasn't yet touched on anything particularly robust. Meanwhile, Alex Garland's Ex Machina seems to split the difference nicely. It, like many others be
fore it, expresses (with a rather bemused satisfaction) fears about the self-awareness of artificial beings, and in terms of their physical and emotional depiction, the movie delivers the goods. But the setup of its narrative is quite explicitly about the way we project our own human baggage onto the artificial things we create, rather than about whether or not machines have feelings. Ultimately the film's thoughts and attitudes are about humanity itself, expressing an emotional ambiguity about our godlike role in creating the future of civilization.
The Angelus Guns
by Max Gladstone
* * *
Three nights after Thea's brother left for the revolution in the Crystal City, she packed a bag to follow him.
She expected a fight when she confessed her plan. Instead her young mother closed her eyes, and opened them, and asked, "Can you bring him back?" They sat together at their outpost's small kitchen table, and drank tea, and curled their wings close about themselves, though the late summer night was warm.
"I have to try," she said, "before the end. It won't be long now."
Her mother rocked on her stool.
Earlier that day, wandering among the primitives they'd come to this world to watch -- scavenger lizards still struggling to master fire, a few thousand years behind schedule -- they'd seen battleships gather in the sky, and heard the rumble of the Angelus Guns returning to the Crystal City. Rainbow machines in their blood sang a war song to call the hosts of heaven home.
"You could stay," her young mother said. "Let him live with the choice he's made. Our fighting days are done. We are scientists now. Scholars."
"I could stay," she said, meaning, but I will not.
"I can't lose you both."
"You won't."
"What if he does not want to leave? Will you fight to bring him home?"
Thea did not answer that question.
She packed light. No need for food. The rainbow machines would sustain her on the Crystal City's radiance. She brought a cup, a book, and a pen.
She left before the twin sunrise. Mud stuck between the treads of her boots, and she trailed wet deep footprints across the plain. Long-necked and broad-winged lizards wheeled in the sky and sang their croaking songs. After thirty years of study Thea had almost learned to find them beautiful.
Her old mother caught her near the ravine. Thea heard no wing beats, no footsteps. She saw the lizards flee, though, and was not surprised when a great dark figure landed between her and the cliff's edge.
Thea's old mother was a statue of jet. Her pinions gleamed with blades.
"You should not go."
"I know," Thea said. "For some values of should."
Her old mother laughed at that, a sound like mountain--ized wind chimes rung by a hurricane. "The fleet has returned home. This rebellious spat will end in fire. The guns will sing, and soon."
"I'll find him first."
"I would go with you," she said. "She won't let me. She says we're both too old. She's right."
"I'm glad you came. I didn't want to leave without seeing you. You haven't wanted to talk about him, these last few days."
"This is hard," her old mother said. "And I am lazy. As your mother would be the first to say."
Thea's old mother held out her hands, and the twin suns dimmed. Across her palms lay a sword. Fire gleamed from the four-foot blade. Fire was the blade: a nova's fury, a fusion furnace confined by the magic of magnetic fields. The hilt alone did not burn. Jet, that, like her old mother's flesh, and the grip wrapped in local lizard-skin. A personal weapon, honed and kept with care since long-gone days of active duty.
"I can't take this," Thea said.
"You can," her old mother replied, "and will. I am not what I once was, but the fleet respects me nonetheless. My sword will bear you through the battle line. And it may keep you safe. Don't refuse me."
Thea folded the sword small, and placed it in her bag with the cup and book and pen. She hugged her old mother, and felt the strength of her arms as she hugged back. Neither of them was strong enough to speak.
They parted. Thea walked to the ravine's edge.
The twin suns cast shafts of light through the misty depths below.
Thea stepped off the edge. Her wings flared, and she flew.
The Crystal City shone in the space its builders made for it, in the time they'd manufactured beyond time. They built the sails first, a vast and shimmering petal-globe around the naked singularity at the city's heart. Between those sails they wove a diamond lattice, and from the lattice their palaces and chapels hung, and their dance halls and shipyards, schools and factories and museums harboring trophies from wars fought across many worlds in all the many histories.
The city shone, and also burned. Flames melted glass arches. One of the shield-sails wilted: breached, deflating. Continent-thick strands of diamond severed, arteries of transit and commerce broken. Stains spread from the wound, a tarnish, a sickness at the center of the world.
Battleships the size of moons hung by the millions outside the shield-sails. Veins in their hulls glimmered with power they harvested from the singularity sun, here at the built heart of everything. Between them, living starfields swarmed: the myriad hosts of all the many heavens. Home again. Called back from their missions to put this revolution to rest.
Any other target would have been warped and torn by the sheer weight of so much force, shivered to component atoms by the strength of their song. But the Crystal City did not shiver.
Thea's wings had borne her here, along the shifting paths between the worlds. As soon as she arrived, she was grateful for her old mother's gift. Even when the Crystal City was a thumbnail-sized sphere in the marbled distance, she felt the fleet's eyes settle on her. She drew her sword and held it before her like a torch. The soldiers knew it, as did the ships, and the immense minds that united both. Some notes of their million-chorus chord changed.
Zeke's voice entered her ear as she approached the city. She'd served with him in her new-forged days, and when she left, he stayed on. Reenlisted. Some were like that -- lifers. She had hoped he might have found a new calling. "Thea. You shouldn't be here."
"Is that you, Zeke? Or is the fleet borrowing your voice?"
"Does it matter?"
She did not answer that question. "I'm looking for my brother."
"A rebel?"
"Does it matter?" she echoed.
"Yes," he said.
"A scholar. Come to observe. Stuck in this madness. Let me through."
"You would say that even if he came to fight."
"Maybe. Will you let me pass?"
A pause. In their silence her wings bore her miles closer to the city. Targeting systems danced across her skin, faint as a lover's feathers. The sword might be able to protect her, if they fired. For a moment. "We respect your mother's blade."
We. Not I.
"Do you remember the little world with the dragonflies that sang?"
"Yes," he said. So swift, they'd been, and beautiful.
"Do you remember what we did to them?"
That had not been beautiful at all. Business: a few millennia after gaining sentience, some of those dragonflies' descendants broke free of time and reshaped their own history. They built a grand empire. Spread their wings over a supercluster. The city fought them through the ages, and broke them. But in the furthest echoes of prehistory, their ancestors sang songs, and the songs they sang were glorious.
"I remember." He sounded as if he wished he did not.
"Thank you," she said. And she flew on, and in.
A million miles was a long way to fly, even with her wings. She drank a cup of tea, and read from her book as she neared the armada. Battleships watched her pass. Sleeping guns strained against their bonds. Stored radiance seeped out through seams in their armor.
Flying beside those ships, those guns, was hard enough. Flying in front of them crisped her nerves with panic. Might as well press the point of her mother's sword to her chest and slide it home.
The guns' mouths gaped black, but she knew the holocaust stored within. She remembered what those weapons did to diamond and to flesh. She remembered what she'd done with them. What the many choirs would do, when the order came to fire.
The guns did not speak yet.
She flew into the city to find her brother.
Within its shield-sails, the city was giant, old, and wise. Light raced down diamond channels. Walls sang the glory of the world transformed. Tapestries fluttered from towering arches. But the streets were empty, and few builders moved through the skies where Thea flew. Cafes and music halls stood vacant. Fountains gushed in deserted parks. Delicate harp trills thrilled no ears.
Those who lived here knew the fleet had come, and took shelter in their homes, or outside the shield wall, or in the deep recesses of ordinary time. They did not need to see the future to know what would happen soon.
She perched on one of the many balconies of a five-tipped diamond spire, on the edge of the spreading taint. Smoke rose from occupied intersections of the world-web. She asked her book to find her brother, and when she turned the page it told her it could not. She'd feared and expected that answer. He was beyond the web.
He stood with the rebels after all.
She returned the book to her bag, and flew along the city's vast diamond arteries until she reached a break. Shimmering fiber optics ran dark. Snapped and frayed edges of carbon nanotubes sparked rainbow in the singularity radiance. Smoke hung heavy in the air. Several miles of cable had been severed, and dead builders floated in the gap, wings limp, bodies broken, open eyes still watching for a last-minute savior who had not come. Husks, she hoped, minds stored safe somewhere. She did not know for certain.
The bodies' wings were red.
Though the virus-taint extended for light-seconds around, the rebels had only cordoned off this neighborhood, barely a few hundred miles in diameter. Severed most of the strands that bound it to the city. Hence the darkness beyond, and the smell.