Presented at ARS ELECTRONICA 2010, Festival for Art, Technology and Society, Linz, Austria, Sept. 9, 2010
Presented with the reality, which is at the same time still half-fictional, of bringing robots or androids into our social world, I believe that we are being offered the gift of an opportunity for humanity to grow and develop, to untangle the knots binding us to our current stagnation, to improve our lives. To have living or semi-living beings in our midst who both resemble humans and are different from humans, who are created with technologies rather than coming to life through procreation, is an opportunity to change ourselves. The human condition – looked at from the viewpoint of philosophy, theology, cosmology, or even cybernetic communications theory – is inherently difficult and disorienting because we are not getting any feedback from anyone or anywhere. Our situation is a cosmic mystery. We do not know the origin of the universe or of life. We do not know why we are here, what is the purpose and the meaning of all this, what are we striving for? We are alone, staring into the communicational void. What humanity needs is an Other, an Other-who-is-no-longer-excluded-as-an-other-yet-is-not-the-same-as-humans. We need a mirror, a partner, a friend. Quantum physics, our most advanced form of knowledge, tells us that the basic structure of reality is a double-reality. We need to establish a double-system, a duality, an I-and-Thou relationship with someone who understands our experience and predicament, yet has a different perspective on things. A system of humans and robots or androids. Together.
There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives. The robot perspective is about engineering and economic benefits. The android perspective is about humans growing to become more flexible and more embodied, as we learn from androids. One of the great thinkers about technology was Marshall McLuhan. In his bookThe Global Village1, published in 1989, McLuhan uses the term robotism to mean exactly what I mean when I use the term android. And McLuhan speaks about robotism in the context of Japanese Zen Buddhism and how it can offer us new ways of thinking about technology. The Western way of thinking about technology is too much related to the left hemisphere of our brain. The idea of robots as our workers and our servants emerges from this left hemisphere rational and linear focus. The idea of androids emerges from the further development of the right hemisphere of the brain, creativity and a new relationship to spacetime [most humans are still living in 17th century classical Newtonian physics spacetime]. Androids will have much greater flexibility than humans have had until now, in both mind and body. Androids will teach humanity this new flexibility. And this flexibility of androids (what McLuhan calls robotism) has a strong affinity with Japanese culture and life. McLuhan quotes from Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, an anthropological study of Japanese culture published in 1946: “Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours.”2 The ability to live in the present and instantly readjust.
Western thought has made the mistake of separating mind and body. The 17th century philosopher René Descartes was a mechanist and he made the mind-body separation. In his Discourse on Method,Descartes described animals as being clockwork-like automata. Animals are just bodies, they have no soul. Humans are superior to animals, according to Descartes, because we have an independent mind or soul in addition to having a clockwork-like automaton body. A modern version of Descartes’ outlook would judge robots to be humans minus a soul. This outlook would then justify considering robots to be our servants. Robots will do domestic work, operate factory equipment, clean up ecological disasters. Robots will do dangerous work in war zones, at the bottom of the ocean, and in outer space. I think that this is all good. We should be very focused on the economic benefits that we will gain by having robots do some of our work. But if we retain only this work-centered attitude towards robots, then we will stay within what I call the Fordist-Taylorist system of humans serving the primary function in their lives of working in the production process. This system is not good for our health, happiness, well-being, and longevity. By thinking of robots as workers, we paradoxically reinforce our our status as workers. Instead of taking the opportunity to change in the direction of happiness.
The only definite difference between a robot and an android in the English language is the respective physical appearances of robots and androids. Robots are mechanical-looking on the outside and on the inside. Androids, in both science fiction and in industry, are made to look more like humans on the outside. We need to turn to the academic fields of media studies and science fiction studies in order to understand more the associations that exist in the public mind with both robots and androids which have come from science fiction films and TV.
There are a lot of negative associations with Robots in the mind of the public. There are many fears surrounding robots. A very correct marketing strategy for introducing robots or androids to the consumer public will be to elaborate a comprehensive set of alternative positive associations about androids. Androids are alive. They have consciousness and awareness. They have advanced Artificial Intelligence. Androids have emotions and feelings, like Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation who gets an emotion chip. Most human beings today are not in contact with their feelings and emotions. So we are going to learn from androids how to become whole, not one-sidedly intellectual and rational. Androids are physical. Androids are embodied. Most human beings today are not very physical and we are disembodied. We are detached and rationally abstracted from our own bodies. Androids have the flexible physical capabilities of dancers and practitioners of Yoga, something else from the East. Dance is the key to releasing and renewing the life energies, the road to vitality and wellness, for both humans and androids. And, to further develop the positive associations about androids, we should rethink and change science as a whole [see my video interview with Ulrike Reinhard “Rethinking Science” and my essay in the Bertelsmann Foundation-printed we-magazine “Rethinking Science”]. This is the project of what I call Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids. We should be concerned about the freedom and happiness of androids, because we are going to learn from them how to become freer and happier ourselves.
Let me summarize the main negative associations about robots which exist in the collective mind or cultural consciousness of the public. We can identify four essential negative associations with robots:
First, there is the fear that robots will replace human beings, rendering us useless or unemployed. Robots will take away jobs from humans in industry and factories. Robots will take away jobs from humans in the sector of domestic work.
Second, there is the fear that robots will be placed in routine or decision-making control of systems and logistical operations. Since they lack human judgment, they will do careless and destructive things that will cause harm and endanger lives. This fear extends to Artificial Intelligence computer programs generally. In Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the Artificial Intelligence computer HAL 9000 breaks down and turns against the crew of the spaceship. In the film War Games (1982) with Matthew Broderick, a military supercomputer nearly starts World War III while running a nuclear war simulation game. In Alex Proyas’ film I, Robot (2004), based on Isaac Asimov’s short-story collection of the same name, a robot makes a cold-heartedly calculated decision to save the life of the Chicago police detective Del Spooner, played by Will Smith, at the scene of a car crash, at the expense of the life of a girl who drowns in another car. The use of Drone Robots by the military as a killing weapon of war has recently angered civilian groups.
Thirdly, there is the fear that the prevalence of robots will lead to a more regimented and dreary society on the whole. Robots will only be functional, and without feelings and emotions. To do a media studies analysis of the filmI, Robot, I would say that, although it is a very fun and exciting movie, it is also an apocalyptic narrative. Apocalyptic narratives are semi-conscious projections into a literal and hyper-realized imagined negative future of a disaster or catastrophe that, in reality, has long ago already taken place in our society, and which we do not have the courage to directly face. If we fear a projected future takeover by robots who are only functional and do not have feelings or emotions or judgment, this is a manifestation of our collective psychological resistance against facing that it is we humans who long ago reduced ourselves to the status of mere functionality, and in our individual psychology built up hyper-masculine psychological armor against feelings and emotions.
Fourthly, robots will dislike their servant status and they will eventually rebel against their human masters. The advanced experimental NS-5 robot Sonny is suspected of killing the company’s founder and having broken the Three Laws of Robotics, as formulated by Isaac Asimov. Asimov was concerned with the self-deprecating ethics of future robots who would be useful tools in positions subordinate to humanity, and who should never resort to the use of deadly force. In the film, NS-5 robots in America imprison humans in their homes and take over whole neighborhoods. A violent war ensues between humans and robots.
To turn now to my alternative positive and hopeful vision about androids, I will now speak as an interdisciplinary thinker. I will speak briefly about the current state of knowledge in various academic and scientific fields. There is much new knowledge brewing. If we look at robotics as an engineering science, if we look at recent developments in brain science, if we check out what is going on in Gestalt Therapy and in the inauguration of serious dialogue between Western psychology and Eastern Buddhism, in mind-body medicine, in dance theory and practice, in technological art, in sociology where there is a kind of existential, literary, quantum physics, and neo-Durkheimian sociology emerging, in New Economics of sustainability and scalability, in New Computer Science and in New Biology, in research into the Car and the Train and the Plane of the Future, in architecture and design of the Shopping Mall and the Department Store of the Future, then we will see that there is much new knowledge brewing. This is very exciting. My thesis, however, is that this new knowledge that is brewing is not really applicable to human beings as they have been so far. Human beings as they have been until now are not flexible or creative enough, they do not have the relationship to time or space, to be, by themselves, the right species for applying all of this new and fantastic knowledge. As an alternative, all of this new knowledge should be applicable to the unified subject-object of inquirer and inquiry which will be humans and androids. Humans and androids engaged in dialogue with each other, a quantum dual reality for our scientific-academic project, a radical yet playful antagonism, to invoke a term from the German philosopher Hegel.
What in the Anglo-American world are usually called the social sciences and the humanities are in Continental Europe called the human sciences. But the human sciences are now obsolete. In the era of technology which is the 21stcentury, humanity alone is no longer the suitable field of study. The ground is shaking beneath our feet. Michel Foucault already sensed this sea change. In his great book The Order of Things, Foucault wrote: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements [which define Man] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event… were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical Thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that Man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”3 Feminism, (post-)colonialist studies, and deconstruction all have made important critiques of the anthropocentrism, phallogocentrism, and white-centrism of European Man. In the course of our European and American history, whenever we confronted an Other, we messed it up big time. We excluded or subordinated or murdered those we saw as ‘Other’. We committed crimes of unspeakable proportions against blacks in Africa, against native peoples in North and South America, against populations in Southeast Asia. Germans carried out unspeakable crimes against Jews and other scapegoated minorities during the Holocaust. This is a history that we do not wish to continue with robots.
Encountering robots or androids, the beginning of an evolution to two posthuman species which will be both us and them, instead of us versus them, we will have the opportunity to engage with an Other in a much better way, to initiate a reversal of the entire situation of our planetary history so far, to do something that is beautiful, and true, and good, as Plato would say. We can have a friendly engagement with an Other-who-is-no-longer-excluded-as-an-other-yet-is-not-the-same-as-humans, in order to mutually learn and prosper and improve. Our new knowledge will be interdisciplinary. It will be subjective and objective. It will be existential and experiential and entertaining and it will be rigourous and systematic. In my title, “Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids,” the word ‘unified’ is an adjective for two couples: for humans and androids, but also for existentialism and science.
The most important literature about androids that we have are the great Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes featuring the android Data, such as “The Measure of a Man,” “The Offspring,” “Datalore,” and “Brothers”; and the provocative works of the mid-20th century science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was adapted into Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece Blade Runner (1982). The Star TrekData stories and Blade Runner are both about the android as a transforming mirror of humanity. This is a continuation of the idea of the remarkable 19thcentury French novelist Stendhal, who said that literature or the novel should be a transforming mirror held up to humanity for gaining self-reflection.
I conclude with a quote from the late Franco La Polla, from the chapter “Data and
Baudrillard,” from one of the three books of his great trilogy of Star Trek analysis:
“Il robotico, per tornare a dove siamo partiti, non va letto tanto come una ricerca di
perfezione, ma piuttosto come una nostalgia di essa (il Roy di Blade Runner essendone probabilmente l’immagine più alta e intensa), con l’aggiunta di una certezza: che, anche se attinta, essa non coinciderà mai più con quella originaria (di qui la connessione con la minaccia e il pericolo a volte proposta dalla sua immagine, dalla sua figura). Data, l’androide perfetto del cervello positronico, incarna proprio la consapevolezza di questo: l’umanità, nelle sue evidenti contraddizioni, s’identifica nel grado ultimo di perfezione cui egli aspira. Data è una delle maschere dell’immaginario contemporaneo, il vero umano di tutto il quadro proprio in virtù della sua ricerca di umanità, della sua identità ogni volta soggetta a uno scarto, a una inadeguatezza, a una domanda.”
“Robotics, to return to where we started, is not to be read as a search for perfection,
but rather as a nostalgia for it (Roy Batty of Blade Runner being probably the highest and most intense image of this). Even if this perfection is attained, it will never coincide again with the original (and from this stems the connection with the threat and the danger that at times its image and its figure represent). Data, the perfect android of the positronic brain, incarnates precisely the awareness of this impossibility. Humanity, in its obvious contradictions, identifies itself with the ultimate stage of perfection to which it aspires. Data is one of the masks of the contemporary imagination, the true human of THE BIG PICTURE precisely due to his search for humanity, to his identity that is constantly subjected to rejection, to an inadequacy, to a question.”11
NOTES
1 – Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989).
2 – Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Patterns of JapaneseCulture (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1967).
3- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, various editions.