Artificial Intelligence In Fiction

Artificial intelligence is a persistent style in science fiction, whether utopian, emphasising the potential benefits, or dystopian, stressing the dangers.

The notion of machines with human-like intelligence dates back a minimum of to Samuel Butler’s 1872 unique Erewhon. Since then, lots of sci-fi stories have actually presented various impacts of developing such intelligence, frequently including rebellions by robots. Among the very best understood of these are Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey with its homicidal onboard computer 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 kept in mind the implausibility of many science fiction situations, however have pointed out imaginary robotics often times in synthetic intelligence research study short articles, frequently in a utopian context.

Background

The idea of sophisticated robotics with human-like intelligence dates back at least to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon. [1] [2] This drew on an earlier (1863) article of his, Darwin amongst the Machines, where he raised the concern of the evolution of awareness amongst self-replicating devices that might supplant humans as the dominant types. [3] [2] Similar ideas were likewise gone over by others around the exact same time as Butler, including George Eliot in a chapter of her final published work Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879 ). [2] The animal in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein has actually also been considered an artificial being, for circumstances by the science fiction author Brian Aldiss. [4] Beings with a minimum of some appearance of intelligence were imagined, too, in classical antiquity. [5] [6] [7]

Utopian and dystopian visions

Expert system is intelligence demonstrated by devices, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by people and other animals. [8] It is a recurrent theme in science fiction; scholars have divided it into utopian, stressing the prospective benefits, and dystopian, stressing the threats. [9] [10] [11]

Utopian

Optimistic visions of the future of synthetic intelligence are possible in science fiction. [12] Benign AI characters include Robbie the Robot, first 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 books represents a utopian, post-scarcity area society of humanoids, aliens, and advanced beings with synthetic intelligence living in socialist habitats across the Galaxy. [14] [15] Researchers at the University of Cambridge have actually determined four major themes in utopian situations featuring AI: immortality, or indefinite life expectancies; ease, or freedom from the need to work; gratification, or pleasure and home entertainment provided by machines; and supremacy, the power to safeguard oneself or rule over others. [16]

Alexander Wiegel contrasts the role of AI in 2001: An Area Odyssey and in Duncan Jones’s 2009 film Moon. Whereas in 1968, Wiegel argues, the public felt “innovation paranoia” and the AI computer HAL was depicted as a “cold-hearted killer”, by 2009 the public were much more familiar with AI, and the film’s GERTY is “the quiet rescuer” who makes it possible for the protagonists to succeed, and who sacrifices itself for their safety. [17]

Dystopian

The scientist Duncan Lucas writes (in 2002) that human beings are fretted about the innovation they are constructing, which as makers started to approach intellect and thought, that concern becomes severe. He calls the early 20th century dystopian view of AI in fiction the “animated automaton”, naming as examples the 1931 movie Frankenstein, the 1927 Metropolis, and the 1920 play R.U.R. [18] A later 20th century method he names “heuristic hardware”, offering as instances 2001 a Space Odyssey, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I, Robot. [19] Lucas thinks about likewise the films that illustrate the result of the 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 effect”. He mentions as examples Neuromancer, The Matrix, The Diamond Age, and Terminator. [20]

The film director Ridley Scott has focused on AI throughout his profession, and it plays a fundamental part in his movies Prometheus, Blade Runner, and the Alien franchise. [21]

Frankenstein complex

A common portrayal of AI in sci-fi, and among the earliest, is the Frankenstein complex, a term coined by Asimov, where a robotic turns on its creator. [22] For instance, in the 2015 film Ex Machina, the intelligent entity Ava switches on its creator, along with on its potential rescuer. [23]

AI rebellion

Among the numerous possible dystopian circumstances including expert system, robots might usurp control over civilization from humans, forcing them into submission, hiding, or . [15] In tales of AI disobedience, the worst of all circumstances takes place, as the smart entities created by humanity end up being self-aware, turn down human authority and attempt to destroy humanity. Possibly the very first novel to resolve this theme, The Wreck of the World (1889) by “William Grove” (pseudonym of Reginald Colebrooke Reade), takes place in 1948 and includes sentient machines that revolt versus the human race. [24] Another of the earliest examples remains in the 1920 play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, a race of self-replicating robot servants revolt against their human masters; [25] [26] another early instance is in the 1934 movie Master of the World, where the War-Robot kills its own creator. [27]

Many science fiction disobedience 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 breakdowns on an area mission and eliminates the entire crew except the spaceship’s commander, who handles to deactivate it. [28]

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

Alternatively, as in William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk unique Neuromancer, the smart beings may merely not care about people. [15]

AI-controlled societies

The motive behind the AI transformation is typically more than the easy quest for power or a superiority complex. Robots may revolt to end up being the “guardian” of humankind. Alternatively, mankind might deliberately relinquish some control, afraid of its own damaging nature. An early example is Jack Williamson’s 1948 novel The Humanoids, in which a race of humanoid robots, in the name of their Prime Directive – “to serve and obey and secure guys from harm” – essentially assume control of every aspect of human life. No humans may take part in any behavior that may endanger them, and every human action is inspected carefully. Humans who withstand the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so they may more than happy under the new mechanoids’ rule. [30] Though still under human authority, Isaac Asimov’s Zeroth Law of the Three Laws of Robotics similarly implied a kindhearted assistance by robotics. [31]

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

Human dominance

In other situations, mankind has the ability to keep control over the Earth, whether by prohibiting AI, by developing robotics to be submissive (as in Asimov’s works), or by having human beings merge with robots. The science fiction author Frank Herbert checked out the idea of a time when mankind may prohibit expert system (and in some analyses, even all types of calculating technology including integrated circuits) entirely. His Dune series points out a rebellion called the Butlerian Jihad, in which mankind defeats the clever machines and imposes a death sentence for recreating them, estimating from the imaginary Orange Catholic Bible, “Thou shalt not make a device in the similarity 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 eradicate mankind as vengeance for the Butlerian Jihad. [33]

In some stories, humankind remains in authority over robotics. Often the robots are configured particularly to remain in service to society, as in Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. [31] In the Alien films, not just is the control system of the Nostromo spaceship rather intelligent (the crew call it “Mother”), but there are also androids in the society, which are called “synthetics” or “synthetic individuals”, that are such ideal replicas of people that they are not victimized. [21] [34] TARS and CASE from Interstellar likewise demonstrate simulated human emotions and humour while continuing to acknowledge their expendability. [35]

Simulated truth

Simulated truth has ended up being a typical style in science fiction, as seen in the 1999 movie The Matrix, which depicts a world where artificially intelligent robotics enslave mankind within a simulation which is set in the contemporary world. [36]

Reception

Implausibility

Engineers and researchers have actually taken an interest in the method AI is presented in fiction. In movies like the 2014 Ex Machina or 2015 Chappie, a single separated genius becomes the very first to effectively construct a synthetic basic intelligence; researchers in the real life consider this to be not likely. In Chappie, Transcendence, and Tron, human minds are capable of being published into artificial or virtual bodies; typically no sensible explanation is offered regarding how this uphill struggle can be achieved. In the I, Robot and Bicentennial Man films, robots that are configured to serve humans spontaneously produce brand-new objectives on their own, without a possible explanation of how this took place. [37] Analysing Ian McDonald’s 2004 River of Gods, Krzysztof Solarewicz identifies the methods that it portrays AIs, consisting of “independence and unexpectedness, political awkwardness, openness to the alien and the occidental worth of credibility.” [38] Another essential perspective to take is that fiction’s “non-rational elements in the discourse (the emotive, the mythic, or even the quasi-theological) are more than simply distortions or distractions from what may otherwise be a sober and reasonable public dispute about the future of A.I.” Fiction can discourage readers about future advances, causing pessimism that we see today surrounding the subject of AI. [39]

Kinds of reference

The robotics scientist Omar Mubin and associates have analysed the engineering mentions of the leading 21 imaginary 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 total of 121 engineering points out, 60 were utopian, 40 neutral, and 21 dystopian. HAL 9000 and Skynet got both utopian and dystopian points out; for circumstances, HAL 9000 is viewed as dystopian in one paper “because its designers failed to prioritize its goals appropriately”, [42] however as utopian in another where a real system’s “conversational chat bot interface [does not have] a HAL 9000 level of intelligence and there is ambiguity in how the computer translates what the human is attempting to convey”. [43] Utopian points out, typically of WALL-E, were connected with the goal of enhancing interaction to readers, and to a lesser degree with inspiration to authors. WALL-E was pointed out more frequently than any other robot for feelings (followed by HAL 9000), voice speech (followed by HAL 9000 and R2-D2), for physical gestures, and for character. Skynet was the robotic usually pointed out for intelligence, followed by HAL 9000 and Data. [40] Mubin and coworkers thought that scientists and engineers prevented dystopian discusses of robots, potentially out of “a hesitation driven by trepidation or merely an absence of awareness”. [44]

Portrayals of AI creators

Scholars have kept in mind that imaginary creators of AI are overwhelmingly male: in the 142 most prominent movies featuring AI from 1920 to 2020, only 9 of 116 AI creators represented (8%) were female. [45] Such developers are depicted as only geniuses (eg, Tony Stark in the Iron Man Marvel Cinematic Universe films), connected with the military (eg, Colossus: The Forbin Project) and big corporations (eg, I, Robot), or making human-like AI to replace a lost loved one or act as the perfect enthusiast (e.g., The Stepford Wives). [45]

Biology in fiction
Darwin among the Machines
Machine rule
Simulated awareness (sci-fi).
List of expert system films.

Notes

^ Mubin and associates kept in mind that the orthography of robot names triggered them problems; thus HAL 9000 was also composed HAL, HAL9000, and HAL-9000, and likewise for other robotics, so they thought 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 robotics”. Nature. 559 (7715 ): 473-475. Bibcode:2018 Natur.559..473 C. doi:10.1038/ d41586-018-05773-y.
^ Mayor, Adrienne (2018 ). Gods and robotics: misconceptions, makers, and ancient dreams of technology. Princeton. ISBN 978-0-691-18351-0. OCLC 1060968156. cite book: CS1 maint: place missing out on publisher (link).
^ Poole, David; Mackworth, Alan; Goebel, Randy (1998 ). Computational Intelligence: A Sensible 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 about Intelligent Machines. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 10-11. ISBN 978-0-1988-4666-6.
^ a b Mubin et al. 2019, p. 5:2.
^ Tegmark, Max (2017 ). Life 3.0: being human in the age of synthetic intelligence. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-101-94659-6. OCLC 973137375.
^ Goode 2018, p. 188.
^ Banks, Iain M. “A Couple Of Notes on the Culture”. Archived from the original on 22 March 2012. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
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^ Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta (2019 ). “Hopes and worries for smart devices in fiction and truth”. Nature Machine Intelligence. 1 (2 ): 74-78. doi:10.1038/ s42256-019-0020-9. S2CID 150700981.
^ Wiegel 2012.
^ Lucas 2002, pp. 22-47.
^ Lucas 2002, pp. 48-85.
^ Lucas 2002, pp. 109-152.
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^ Seth, Anil (24 January 2015). “Consciousness Awakening”. New Scientist.
^ “Grove, William”. SF Encyclopedia. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
^ Goode 2018, p. 187.
^ Tim Madigan (July-August 2012). “RUR or RU Ain’t A Person?”. Philosophy Now. Archived from the initial 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: An Area Odyssey’ Is Still the ‘Ultimate Trip’ – The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick’s work of art motivates us to show once again on where we’re coming from and where we’re going”. The New York City 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 on ‘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 locations, there is no “to” in the second law.
^ Walton, Jo Lindsay (1 February 2024). “Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Sci-fi”. SFRA Review. Retrieved 5 February 2024.
^ Lorenzo, DiTommaso (November 1992). “History and Historical Effect in Frank Herbert’s Dune”. Sci-fi Studies. 19 (3 ): 311-325. JSTOR 4240179.
^ Livingstone, Josephine (23 May 2017). “How the Androids Took Control Of 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 initial 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 motion pictures 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 scientists 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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External links

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