A good friend of mine is a professor in the humanities, and is working on a curriculum for an upcoming course in Narrative and Artificial Intelligence. She queried a number of us for ideas, and I thought that Hubski might have some good suggestions that I could point her to.
These are the specifics:
- I’m working on a class I will teach next fall (assuming enough students enroll) and I would like your ideas, comments, and suggestions (see course description below).
I’ll only have time to show about 10 movies if I’m lucky. So I’m interested in discussion about which 10 movies they should be, as well as ideas about other movies that wouldn’t necessarily make the cut, but could appear on the Final Project menu. I’m also looking for more readings and opinions about which readings should take priority.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
-B
Narrative and Artificial Intelligence (HUMANITIES/open to First-years) Course Description Why do we tell so many stories about “robots?” Why are we most likely to represent artificial intelligence in the shape of a human? Why do so many “robot” narratives speculate about the possibility of machines acquiring emotion as part of artificial intelligence? What do recent popular film narratives reveal about the relationship between humans and technology? The genre of science fiction has considered variations on these questions for a long time. But perhaps most vividly, the intersection between science fiction and popular film shows where and how mass culture engages with these questions. In this course, we will consider these questions in relation to films and related readings.
Tentative Film Schedule Metropolis 2001 Bladerunner Tron (which version?) Star Wars I Star Trek Second Gen. The Terminator I The Matrix I Battlestar Gallactica (episode or movie?) Wall-e
Possible Readings: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Mechanic vs Organic Form” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art of Mechanical Reproduction” Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Ray Kurzweil Jason Silva NPR News /Radio Lab “real” world Robot Stories Individual Final Project Options: Films not on the class schedule Video Games (non-narrative?) Other related narrative constructs such as the vampire (mechanical reproducibility) or the psychopath (the inhuman human)
Thanks!
As someone who is thinking about re-directing my graduate career in the direction of futurology, here are my suggestions: ANY contemporary scientific or humanities discussion on the future of humanity must include Kurzweil (whether you support him or not): The Singularity Is Near (2005)
Transcendent Man (documentary) (2009) If you don't want to spend too much time on Kurzweil but want a solid perspective on how the field of AI perceives Kurzweil's theories on the future, you can read this article (which I think is fair and insightful): Goertzel, B. 2007. Human-level artificial general intelligence and the possibility of a technological singularity: A reaction to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, and McDermott’s critique of Kurzweil. Artificial Intelligence, 171: 1161-1173. To dig deeper into contemporary "futurology" it is important to discuss the research produced from The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Some of their biggest thinkers, economist and anthropologist Robin Hanson, as well as mathematician and philosopher Nick Bostrom are great places to start: Hanson, R. 1998. Is a singularity just around the corner? Journal of Evolution and Technology, 2.
Hanson, R. 2000. Long-term growth as a sequence of exponential modes.
Hanson, R. 2001. Economic growth given machine intelligence. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
Hanson, R. 2008. Economics of the singularity. IEEE Spectrum, 45: 45-50.
Hanson, R. 2008. Economics of brain emulations. In Healey, P. & Rayner, S. (eds.). Unnatural Selection – The Challenges of Engineering Tomorrow’s People: 150-158. London: EarthScan. Nick Bostrom's ideas and perspectives can be found easily on YouTube and I would suggest this FANTASTIC Aeon Magazine piece on Bostrom and the Future of Humanity Institute for your course:
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/ross-andersen-human-.../ Francis Heylighen is a hidden genius in the world of futurology. I think he is mostly hidden because he is Belgian. Either way, his works are unbelievable and necessary readings for any discussion on our future: Heylighen, F. 2007. The global superorganism: An evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society. Social Evolution & History, 6: 57-117. Heylighen, F. 2008. Chapter 13 Accelerating socio-technological evolution: From ephemeralization and stigmergy to the Global Brain. In Modelski, G., Devezas, T. & Thompson, W.R. Globalization As Evolutionary Process. New York: Routledge. Of course, it is important to also dissect and discuss the work of the man who proposed the idea of the technological singularity: Vernor Vinge. Here are some of his notable works: Vinge, V. 1993. The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era. Vision 21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace. Vol. 1. Vinge, V. 2007. What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen. Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, the Long Now Foundation. Vinge, V. 2008. Signs of the singularity. IEEE Spectrum, 45: 76-82. Also H+ Magazine's Adam Ford recently did an interview with him that is great:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngUabHOea0 It seems like sci-fi is also featured prominently in this course. Therefore, I would also suggest watching the H+ series on YouTube about the merger of humans and machines:
http://www.youtube.com/user/HplusDigitalSeries I hope those suggestions are of some help. If you have any further questions or need more suggestions feel free to contact me via Hubski. EDIT: I almost forgot - given the nature of the course, the following two articles have immense historical value: Ulam, S. 1958. Tribute to John von Neuman. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 64: 1-49. Good, I.J. 1965. Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. Advances in Computers, 6: 88. EDIT 2: Also, in my opinion, the biggest question that people within the field of artificial intelligence and futurology have to understand is whether the substrate of the mind (i.e., biology versus technology; cells versus microprocessors) matters when it comes to consciousness. If the substrate matters (i.e., only biology can produce consciousness) than the future becomes very mysterious and confusing (as noted by Vinge (2007)). If the substrate does not matter (as proposed by Kurzeil in How to Create a Mind (2012)) then I would contend that we can start to discuss a) the types of AI that will exist before 2050, b) the roles they will play within our society, c) and their place within an evolutionary framework of life, intelligence, and the universe.
From the description above, it seems to be pop-culture depictions of artificial intelligence, primarily focused on film. I think digging that deeply into futurology would be too much of a digression. Agreed on Vinge though, and reluctantly on Kurtzweil.
Oh come on Kurtzweil is pop-fiction. futurology is certainly not a science :)
I'd call him a charlatan, but he's still influential so it's worth paying some attention to him. Agreed. I'm not sure that makes it a bad thing; wild speculation has been useful to science and technology in the past, and making ourselves and our world better is more palatable to me than the speculating about ways to sell lots of advertising. It is a little disturbing how cultlike it can get though.Oh come on Kurtzweil is pop-fiction.
futurology is certainly not a science
Cult-like like Lesswrong or cult-like like Heaven's Gate and Scientology? I think a lot of futurology (and all of Kurtzweil) comes from a religious impulse and has more to do with new-agery and eschatology than science. I guess it is fine enough as a hobby. Since the class is about pop-culture and AI Kurtzweil is a good fit.
Yes. Also, this. I look at these things as an outsider inclined to be hostile, but this stuff looks uncomfortably close to Scientology. And I've seen Ben Goertzel give a talk at an AAAI conference!Cult-like like Lesswrong or cult-like like Heaven's Gate and Scientology?
I think a lot of futurology (and all of Kurtzweil) comes from a religious impulse and has more to do with new-agery and eschatology than science. I guess it is fine enough as a hobby.
It was on Cyc as a precursor to strong AI. It would have been a legit, if controversial, talk in 1984 when Lenat published his book, if Lenat himself had given it. I think this was 2008, and he didn't add anything to what Lenat wrote back then but updated jargon and mentioning OpenCyc. It was very strange, but not really nutty. I don't think it was well received, but I was a lowly undergraduate and didn't talk to many people for fear of making a fool of myself.
Cyc uses a really bizarre definition of Intelligence.
The folks involved seem to think Intelligence = knowing a bunch of stuff. of course there is no good definition of Intelligence and it is better than Kurtzweil's moronic "intelligence is pattern recognition". (I feel I left that looking a bit like a ad hom. It is not because the of the direction of the inference. Kurtzweil believes dumb stuff != the stuff is dumb because Kurtzweil is but may well imply that Kurzweil is dumb because he believes dumb stuff.)
When Cyc started there were a lot of successful rule-based expert systems that the AI community was really exciting about, doing things like medical diagnosis and credit card fraud detection. It's a very good way to automate making the sort of routine decisions experts in a particular domain make within that domain. As weak AI, that model is excellent for modeling what it models. Using the informal definition that an intelligent program is one that does what an intelligent person would do, I have no problem calling those programs intelligent. The techniques we use in AI are all just magic tricks though. They're really cool and really useful magic tricks, but they don't tell us anything about our own minds, or about how to write programs that are intelligent in the way we are. Maybe they will, eventually, but we're far from that point. I don't think any of these guys are dumb, they've all done clever work, they're just making assertions way beyond what they're justified in asserting as scientists. When people do that with quantum physics or Gödel we call them cranks.
I stand corrected but Ray's confusion of strong and weak AI does not point at genius.
He is quite clever at OCR it is a bit of if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail issue.
I see a future chock full of weak AI and completely devoid of artificial humans. This sort of thing comes up all the time people clever at one thing usually medical doctors become horrible cranks at another in my experience evolutionary biology, human origins etc. If I see M.D. next to an author of a paper in anthro my eyes tend to roll unless of course it is medical anthropology.
That's fair. Then I will recommend Love and Sex with Robots.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a must read (even though Blade Runner is being shown; BR is awesome, but it lacks a lot of the subtlety of the orig). Also, is AI too obvious of a film? I thought it was great, as it explores android emotion a lot more than some of the other material. Also, I would have to throw in Short Circuit (c'mon, its a classic, and even though it's a comedy, it explores the desire to survive above all else). I would drop Star Wars. I love it to death as a movie, but besides C3PO, AI isn't really a theme. And even he is just a human in many ways, as they don't really consider or care about what it is to be an android. As for non-AI material that might be interesting, I would look into the writings of VS Ramachandran. He is a famous neuroscientist who does a lot of popular writing about the brain-body interface, and how one's perception of the world is altered by specific injuries (breaks in the "wiring", if you will).
Short Circuit is a great choice. It also made me think of Kit from Knight Rider, but they are painful to watch. The computer in War Games was borderline AI. For reading, I thought of a collection of essays put together by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstadter called "The Mind's I". Some of those dealt with interesting ideas and paradox of AI. Perhaps a chapter or two from Godel, Escher, Bach. I'm thinking of one that concerns the intelligence of an ant colony. edit: Star Wars has the potentially interesting issue of how droids are intelligent, but treated like property. Luke is a slave owner. I also had the thought that the Turing test would be a good topic, and it even might be worth watching Watson school Ken Jennings on Jeopardy.
The readings I would suggest are
The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem. Desire is necessary for the choice of axioms.
When we say "a machine that thinks" we mean "a machine that wants" Embedded in that is both the means to achieving GAI and the reason that doing so would be morally repugnant. Kurzweil is good at showing charts that go up as the go to the right and OCR but is an Idiot when it comes to the question of AI. and really a waste of time.Why do so many “robot” narratives speculate about the possibility of machines acquiring emotion as part of artificial intelligence?
Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, the Pygmalion bit of Ovid, or Frankenstein, for a hint that some of the stock depictions of artificial intelligence might not have all that much to do with technology at all. Richard Brautigan's All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Marvin Minsky's Will Robots Inherit the Earth?, because it really would be a shame if Kurzweil was the only technologist they heard from. Bruce Mazlish, The Man-Machine and Artificial Intelligence
Frankenstein is perfect. But only the novel, none of the films cover the theme that God sinned in creation. I can not second the Golem enough.
In similar vein to Frankenstein and the Pinocchio suggestion below, I also think the fabricants in Cloud Atlas are an interesting discussion. They are synthetic intelligence based on a biological source. They are considered throwaways even though they are designed to think and feel like humans.
I was thinking about Pinocchio in a similar vein. He is animate, and can even feel longing to be a 'real' boy, but there is something about him that isn't genuine.Gustav Meyrink's The Golem, the Pygmalion bit of Ovid, or Frankenstein, for a hint that some of the stock depictions of artificial intelligence might not have all that much to do with technology at all.
Film schedule is dumb. If we're doing AI we're remiss without: COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT
DEMON SEED
WARGAMES
STAR TREK:THE MOTION PICTURE
WEIRD SCIENCE ...but the stuff being suggested makes me worried the teacher is not familiar enough with the subject to attempt such a course.
The work of Alan Turing is the basic for understanding AI (Anything that passes the Turing test is intelligent). For reading: "The rapture of the nerds" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. For Film: Bicentennial Man, Demon Seed, Westworld, AI Good Luck!
Why do so many “robot” narratives speculate about the possibility of machines acquiring emotion as part of artificial intelligence?
The Electric Grandmother, a movie made from Ray Bradbury's short story "I Sing the Body Electric" asks whether we can replace loved ones with robots. Film version is less than an hour. Short story is short.
Small Wonder What about the Spielberg film AI Robocop? There's always Twiki from Buck Rogerstoo. When I was a kid I loved Flight of the Navigatorand the ship is essentially a future version of Kit from Knight Rider. kleinbl00 and theadvancedapes, you two seem to enjoy the #futurology topic. Any suggestions?
I think The Last Question by Asimov is a great reading amonst many to show the student just how "big" you can think on this topic, taking it far beyond machine's convergence with man. Might not be the greatest fit based on the first draft of the syllabus though, as the AI in the tale doesn't realize emotional qualities or human form, really. Depends on how much you want to focus on those themes. It's been posted on Hubski a couple times now as I recall.
A wonderful read, thanks for the reminder of it. My wife had never read it, but now she has thanks to your link. Conversation ensued.