Expert System In Fiction

Artificial intelligence is a recurrent style in science fiction, whether utopian, stressing the possible advantages, or dystopian, emphasising the risks.

The idea of makers with human-like intelligence dates back a minimum of to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon. Since then, numerous science fiction stories have provided different effects of developing such intelligence, often involving disobediences by robots. Among the finest understood of these are Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: An Area Odyssey with its homicidal 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 numerous sci-fi circumstances, but have actually mentioned fictional robotics sometimes in expert system research articles, usually in a utopian context.

Background

The concept of sophisticated robots with human-like intelligence dates back a minimum of to Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon. [1] [2] This drew on an earlier (1863) short article of his, Darwin among the Machines, where he raised the question of the development of consciousness amongst self-replicating makers that might supplant human beings as the dominant types. [3] [2] Similar ideas were likewise gone over 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 animal in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein has actually likewise been thought about a synthetic being, for circumstances by the science fiction author Brian Aldiss. [4] Beings with a minimum of some look of intelligence were envisioned, 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 humans and other animals. [8] It is a frequent theme in science fiction; scholars have actually divided it into utopian, emphasising the possible benefits, and dystopian, stressing the threats. [9] [10] [11]

Utopian

Optimistic visions of the future of expert system are possible in sci-fi. [12] Benign AI characters consist of 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 novels portrays a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoids, aliens, and advanced beings with synthetic intelligence living in socialist habitats throughout the Milky Way. [14] [15] Researchers at the University of Cambridge have actually recognized 4 major styles in utopian circumstances featuring AI: immortality, or indefinite life-spans; ease, or freedom from the requirement to work; gratification, or pleasure and home entertainment offered by makers; and dominance, the power to protect oneself or rule over others. [16]

Alexander Wiegel contrasts the function 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 system HAL was depicted as a “cold-hearted killer”, by 2009 the general public were far more acquainted with AI, and the movie’s GERTY is “the quiet hero” who makes it possible for the lead characters to be successful, and who sacrifices itself for their security. [17]

Dystopian

The researcher Duncan Lucas writes (in 2002) that humans are stressed about the innovation they are building, and that as devices began to approach intelligence and thought, that concern becomes acute. 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 method he names “heuristic hardware”, providing as circumstances 2001 an Area 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 highlight the result of the computer on sci-fi from 1980 onwards with the blurring of the border between the genuine and the virtual, in what he calls the “cyborg result”. He mentions as examples Neuromancer, The Matrix, The Diamond Age, and Terminator. [20]

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

Frankenstein complex

A typical portrayal of AI in science fiction, and among the oldest, is the Frankenstein complex, a term coined by Asimov, where a robot turns on its developer. [22] For instance, in the 2015 movie Ex Machina, the smart entity Ava turns on its developer, in addition to on its possible rescuer. [23]

AI rebellion

Among the lots of possible dystopian circumstances involving synthetic intelligence, robotics might take over control over civilization from humans, forcing them into submission, concealing, or extinction. [15] In tales of AI disobedience, the worst of all circumstances takes place, as the smart entities developed by humankind end up being self-aware, decline human authority and attempt to destroy mankind. Possibly the very first book to address this theme, The Wreck of the World (1889) by “William Grove” (pseudonym of Reginald Colebrooke Reade), takes place in 1948 and includes sentient makers that revolt against 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 robotic slaves 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 developer. [27]

Many science fiction rebellion stories followed, one of the best-known being Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: An Area Odyssey, in which the synthetically intelligent onboard computer system HAL 9000 lethally malfunctions on a space mission and eliminates the entire crew other than the spaceship’s commander, who handles 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 (called Allied Mastercomputer or “AM” in the story) will be as unhappy and dissatisfied with its boring, limitless existence as its human developers would have been. “AM” becomes infuriated enough to take it out on the few people left, whom he sees as straight responsible for his own boredom, anger and distress. [29]

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

AI-controlled societies

The motive behind the AI revolution is often more than the easy quest for power or a supremacy complex. Robots may revolt to become the “guardian” of mankind. Alternatively, mankind may deliberately relinquish some control, fearful of its own damaging nature. An early example is Jack Williamson’s 1948 unique The Humanoids, in which a race of humanoid robots, in the name of their Prime Directive – “to serve and obey and secure males from harm” – essentially presume control of every aspect of human life. No humans might participate in any habits that might threaten them, and every human action is inspected thoroughly. Humans who withstand the Prime Directive are removed and lobotomized, so they might be 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 indicated a benevolent guidance by robotics. [31]

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

Human supremacy

In other circumstances, humanity has the ability to keep control over the Earth, whether by prohibiting AI, by creating robotics to be submissive (as in Asimov’s works), or by having people combine with robotics. The sci-fi author Frank Herbert explored the concept of a time when mankind might prohibit expert system (and in some interpretations, even all kinds of calculating technology including incorporated circuits) totally. His Dune series discusses a disobedience called the Butlerian Jihad, in which mankind defeats the clever makers and enforces a capital punishment for recreating them, pricing quote from the fictional Orange Catholic Bible, “Thou shalt not make a maker 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 humanity as revenge for the Butlerian Jihad. [33]

In some stories, humankind stays in authority over robots. 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 only is the control system of the Nostromo spaceship somewhat intelligent (the team call it “Mother”), but there are also androids in the society, which are called “synthetics” or “artificial persons”, that are such ideal replicas of people that they are not discriminated against. [21] [34] TARS and CASE from Interstellar likewise demonstrate simulated human feelings and humour while continuing to acknowledge their expendability. [35]

Simulated reality

Simulated reality has actually become a typical style in science fiction, as seen in the 1999 movie The Matrix, which illustrates a world where artificially smart robots within a simulation which is embeded in the contemporary world. [36]

Reception

Implausibility

Engineers and researchers have taken an interest in the way AI exists in fiction. In movies like the 2014 Ex Machina or 2015 Chappie, a single separated genius becomes the very first to successfully construct a synthetic general intelligence; scientists in the genuine world consider this to be not likely. In Chappie, Transcendence, and Tron, human minds are capable of being submitted into artificial or virtual bodies; usually no sensible description is used as to how this difficult task can be accomplished. In the I, Robot and Bicentennial Man movies, robots that are programmed to serve people spontaneously produce new goals on their own, without a plausible description of how this occurred. [37] Analysing Ian McDonald’s 2004 River of Gods, Krzysztof Solarewicz recognizes the methods that it illustrates AIs, including “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 components in the discourse (the emotive, the mythic, or perhaps the quasi-theological) are more than merely distortions or distractions from what might otherwise be a sober and logical public dispute about the future of A.I.” Fiction can dissuade readers about future advances, causing pessimism that we see today surrounding the subject of AI. [39]

Kinds of reference

The robotics researcher Omar Mubin and coworkers have actually analysed the engineering mentions of the leading 21 fictional robotics, based upon those in the Carnegie Mellon University hall of popularity, and the IMDb list. WALL-E had 20 mentions, followed by HAL 9000 with 15, [a] Star Wars’s R2-D2 with 13, and Data with 12; the Terminator (T-800) received just 2. Of the overall of 121 engineering discusses, 60 were utopian, 40 neutral, and 21 dystopian. HAL 9000 and Skynet received both utopian and dystopian mentions; for example, HAL 9000 is viewed as dystopian in one paper “because its designers failed to prioritize its goals appropriately”, [42] but as utopian in another where a real system’s “conversational chat bot user interface [does not have] a HAL 9000 level of intelligence and there is uncertainty in how the computer system interprets what the human is trying to convey”. [43] Utopian points out, frequently of WALL-E, were associated with the goal of enhancing interaction to readers, and to a lesser level with motivation to authors. WALL-E was mentioned regularly than any other robotic for emotions (followed by HAL 9000), voice speech (followed by HAL 9000 and R2-D2), for physical gestures, and for personality. Skynet was the robotic most frequently discussed for intelligence, followed by HAL 9000 and Data. [40] Mubin and coworkers thought that scientists and engineers prevented dystopian points out of robots, potentially out of “a reluctance driven by trepidation or just an absence of awareness”. [44]

Portrayals of AI creators

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

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

Notes

^ Mubin and coworkers noted that the orthography of robotic names triggered them problems; therefore HAL 9000 was likewise composed HAL, HAL9000, and HAL-9000, and likewise for other robotics, so they believed their search was most likely insufficient. [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”. The Press, 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 (second ed.). Routledge. pp. 4-5. ISBN 978-1-56881-205-2.
^ Cave, Stephen; Dihal, Kanta (25 July 2018). “Ancient dreams of smart machines: 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 imagine 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 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.
^ Tegmark, Max (2017 ). Life 3.0: being human in the age of expert system. 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.
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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 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 City 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 masterpiece motivates us to reflect once again on where we’re originating 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 specific transcription of the laws. They also appear in the front of the book, and in both places, there is no “to” in the 2nd law.
^ Walton, Jo Lindsay (1 February 2024). “Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction”. 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 artificial intelligence 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 portrayals of AI researchers in popular movie, 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’: Expert System in Science Fiction (thesis). McMaster University (PhD thesis). hdl:11375/ 11154.
Mubin, Omar; Wadibhasme, Kewal; Jordan, Philipp; Obaid, Mohammad (2019 ). “Assessing 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 From: 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 guideline?