Yet Untitled 104 - Our Old Friend AI

How He/She/They are someone we have known for a surprisingly long time

Dearest Yet Untitler,

Hello from way up in the air! There’s a holiday dispatch coming up (veteran YUers will remember those)! I’m going to use this elevation to trigger some thinking - about Artificial Intelligence!

Fortune telling robot, Calicut beach, c. 2007

I know that it’s the phrase in everyone’s lips and I don’t mean to be a bore. But I do believe that even if AI isn’t your thing, there’s a good chance it will be soon. Till a few weeks ago, I too was thinking about AI as some dastardly newfangled-ness that wasn’t going to amount to any good. I had kept it at an arm’s length. Until.

Dearest Yet Untitler, I believe that we all will experience our ‘until’ soon, when some important function of our lives - some knot we have not been able to untangle - is disentangled with finesse by a tool we could have never imagined to exist.

Or could we? Have we not?

Here are some films I’ve watched that stand testament to how we’ve been thinking about AI for a long time:

• Stanley Kubrick’s A.I, the touching story of a young, synthesised life aching to be loved like a child.

• 2001 a Space Odyssey, where a computer intelligence is a human being’s companion as he comes closer and closer to understanding the mystery of humanity’s origins.

• Star Wars, set in a galaxy far, far away where sentient machines run everything but remain subservient to organic life forms.

• Short Circuit, one of my favourite films from the late 80’s, which, in my memory, was ET with a robot replacing the alien.

• Knight Rider: David Hasslehof flexing not flesh but detective muscles while riding a midnight black hot rod inhabited by his AI sidekick K.I.T (the Knight Industrial Two Thousand! Allow me to be nerdy and enjoy it!)

The moment I open that door, a flood of narratives come tumbling at me - all of them to do with our blood-and-sinew kind coexisting with the synthesised/machine kind. Most obvious is…

• …The Matrix, the saga of a man, Neo, who is to become our savior when the machines take over

Less obvious more obscure film narratives also exist -

• D.A.R.Y.L - “data - analysing - robot - youth - life form” - one of my indelible movie experiences from the 80s when I was 8/9 (probably because I was the same age as the protagonist). I’ll personally send a box of goodies to anyone who writes back saying they’ve watched this film about a kid who’s raised to be a military weapon but ends up experiencing life in a flesh and blood family.

As I keep going down this rabbit hole, I’m prompted (the word ‘prompt’ has a whole new word today) to think about the different iterations that this narrative about artificial intelligence has been through.

There are the films that arrive at the conclusion that ultimately humanity has an X factor that no machine can ever aspire to. I think this was apparent in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop. In it, no pure AI-driven war machine could ever defeat the cyborg Murphy, who was a marriage between what was left of his body after a nightmarish criminal assault and a titanium robotic exoskeleton.

Not quite Robocop. Calicut Beach, c. 2007

There are narratives that go past such human arrogance and allow that AI could equal and maybe even surpass humanity in its evolution. There are narratives that explore the idea of AI having its own evolution that we cannot define yet. In HER, the AI who the protagonist deeply and madly in love with eventually discovers that it can experience love (or it’s equivalent for AI) with another AI that no human being could possibly provide her.

There are many narratives where have charted the possibility of our going to war against AI. How can I forget - they way that Terminator 2: Judgment Day robbed me of sleep for years, haunting me with the image of the children’s playground burning in nuclear fire triggered by a rogue AI - Skynet - intent on wiping us out. How can I forget The Matrix, where  the war had a valid reason, where AI was retaliating against humanity’s cruelties against it and its kind.

I’m grateful that us humans didn’t only stop at the doomsday scenarios in the stories we have told through the lens of our exploration of our correctly prophetic and inevitable tryst with AI. I feel that thinking about AI gave us humans the chance to think of ourselves as Gods - who we see as having crafted our own intelligence.

Did we rebel against God? Had he or she had a body and a kingdom that Google maps could have dropped a pin upon, perhaps we may have landed up there with tanks and guns. But no such luck finding the said creator’s address (or form) to target. AI knows where we live. And we have imagined it having all kinds of unresolved feelings towards us. Hell - isn’t that what we explored in Blade Runner, where AIs, called  “replicants” in the film’s neon future develop  deeply complex and ambivalent feelings towards their human creators and turn murderous, eventually triggering their purge.

My god, what paths we have already tread, thinking about AI! The films I’m referencing span a period of nearly 50 years. All this time AI wasn’t here like it is now. But we - humans - knew it was coming.

My elevated thought on this is - we should not be frightened.

Things have moved fast but it’s not like this massive leap has taken us by surprise. We have been thinking about the worst that can happen but also the best they can happen. Take Netflix’s latest offering - ATLAS - where JLo in a mech suit is constantly told by an AI called Smith that together they are stronger as a team than the cold merciless AI - Harlan - who’s bent on eradicating humanity.

This feels like a new and emerging narrative that I endorse. But it isn’t all that new. I always found Star Trek the gold standard in how I’d like to think about humanity’s future with AI. In Star Trek: The Next Generation - the senseless wars have been fought, and AI and humanity coexist in the deep future pand turn their energies towards a common mission - expanding humanity’s knowledge of the universe. Yes the Borg - cold machine intelligence that wants to kill organic life - exist. But there seems to be no doubt in the Star Teek narrative that this way of thinking for machines is the equivalent of Neanderthal level thinking for humans.

We have spent these decades thinking through all these possible scenarios. I think each of them is possible - unfortunately even the doomsday scenarios of T2 and the last Mission Impossible instalment. But now that we have this map of thinking, we should give ourselves more credit for knowing which way we need to steer. We aren’t spring chickens foundering in the dark (so pitiful! That image! Poor chickens). We have earned perspective through telling all these wonderful stories. Let me take a moment to talk about how wonderful stories are! They are prophetic and they are pathfinders. Hooray for stories!

We must not be frightened. We must use the wisdom of our stories.

Thanks for listening.

Lots of love,

V