Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 6): Technology-as-Human versus Technology-as-Anti-Human

Pre-Post Preamble

Today I'm going to continue my post series that is an attempt to log and to preserve the insights that came out of a science fiction class that I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th century." 

Here is a link to the first post: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Now that I'm on post 6 I feel compelled to offer a table of contents of previous posts. Here they are:

Post 2: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

Post 3: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

Post 4: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Loving and Hateful Androids in *Star Trek* Episode 7 

Post 5: Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

As I'm proceeding through this post series I'm starting to realize how each post is going to become less and less "self-contained" as I proceed; by which I mean, I find I am compelled to refer to previous posts in a way I haven't had to in previous post series. 

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Another text we treated in my science fiction class was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The was episode 14 of season 1, titled, "Datelore." This episode truly captures the theme of ambivalence towards technology that was at the heart of the class.

Data and Lore

Some summary (I'm taking some ST:TNG corpus knowledge for granted here): the Enterprise stops by the planet where Data was found by the Federation. There they find in a hidden chamber an exact replica of Data, except this replica is disassembled. They bring the android pieces on to the Enterprise and reassemble them. It turns out, this is Data's brother, another android by the name of Lore. Immediately there are things about Lore that begin to disturb and stir the suspicions of the crew. It turns out Lore was disassembled because of his evil tendencies. He thinks androids are better than humans and therefore they deserve to die, or at least serve androids as slaves.

What is so interesting about this episode, I think, is the two separate visions of technology that emerge out of the two different android characters. 

Lieutenant Commander Data is a kind of "Pinocchio" figure who loves humans and strives to be a human. Data is moral and helpful and very often endearing. 

Lore, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac. He is deceiving and extremely powerful; furthermore, he thinks of humans as flawed and as insects that are dispensable.

We begin to see in this episode all sorts of parallels with the previous texts we've treated in this class. 

Ray Kurzweil and Transcendent Man

In Kurzweil's documentary, Transcendent Man, a major debate is whether or not the super intelligences he predicts will be empathetic to humans or hold us in contempt as insects. Hugo De Garis obviously believes the latter is the case while Kurzweil believes that not only will the robots serve us, make us better (his argument is much stronger), but that the robots will be us. 

And so, we can perhaps see in Data--struggling to become human--as suggesting Kurzweil's vision of technology; and we can see Lore--the evil, human hater--as suggesting De Garis's vision of technology.

Star Trek (Episode 7): "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

We see this very ambivalence played out in the Star Trek episode I treated in an earlier post. In episode 7 of Star Trek you have two avatars of robots or technology: Ruk, the human hater, and Andrea, the robot who falls in fall and commits suicide when she realizes she will never be able to love.

The Twilight Zone (Episode 7): "The Lonely"

At the end of this episode the android, Alicia, is shot and killed. I'd like to suggest that the episode doesn't key us into how to read this. Is this a murder? Something horrendous? OR! Has the protagonist (who was in love this this android?) been freed from a kind of spell? Was Alicia truly in love with the protagonist? Or, was Alicia's love an illusion, the product of software?

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Robots-as-humans versus robots-against-humans: this is an ambivalent, vexed issue that recurred consistently throughout the class. The core queston these texts seem to be asking is, is technology of us? For us? Inextricably bound to us? 

OR! It technology becoming something else? Something other? And therefore, something hostile or something we should be suspicious of?

Hmm...

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 5): Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

This afternoon I want to write  a little more on the science fiction class I taught in the summer of 2011 at Case Western, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century." Here's a link to the first post, where the class is explained: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Yesterday I talked about a Star Trek Episode, "What Are Little Girls Mad Of?" In this episode, I suggested, we have two "figurations" of the android: (1) the android who loves humans and (2) the android who hates humans. 

Today I want to talk about another "television text" where the first kind of android is highlighted, the loving android. This text is an episode from Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, episode 7 of season 1 titled, "The Lonely." 

Let me give some summary: the episode concerns a man who has been wrongfully accused of a crime and who has been marooned on an asteroid as a kind of punishment. He has an entire asteroid to himself. His crisis of that of loneliness and boredom. He has a friend, a guard who comes to give him supplies. The guard feels sorry for him; and so, what does he do? He brings the prisoner an android, a robot that looks exactly like a beautiful girl. The android chooses a name: Alicia. They quickly fall in love together. However, the crisis comes to head when the prisoner receives a pardon and he has to leave the android. He's only allowed to take 15 pounds of equipment. At this point he doesn't think of Alicia as equipment but as a person. The prison guard, feeling sorry for him, shoots Alicia in the head. Afterwards, she lies on the ground, her robot innards--circuits, blinking lights, wires--are exposed, and the pardoned prisoner seems to come to his senses. How could he have ever loved a robot?

There are some very interesting things going on in this episode. Of primary interest, I think, is the android. It's an interesting evolution, how robots go from being the clunky tin-can looking "Robby the Robots" of Forbidden Planet, to the human-like robots of this Twilight Zone episode. It's as if, in the cultural imagination, there is a logic that turns robots into humans, into entities indistinguishable from ourselves. Consider the cyborg from the original, The Terminator. He looks quite human and a part of horribleness is that he is able to "pass" for human. 

Not only are we concerned with computers/robots becoming more powerful than us, we seem to be concerned with the extent to which they can become like us. Thus, the fear of robots can be allegorized as the fear of ourselves. 

This makes this episode interesting, which results in the death of a human-like robot the human protagonist has come to love. The end of the episode is vexed, I think. We're not sure what to think about the death of Alicia. Should we be sad for the main character? Did he just lose his love? Or! Or has he been saved from an illusion? Was the love the robot had for him just the product of programming and not authentic?

Here we start to get into the question raised by the Turing Test. What conditions need to be satisfied before we believe a machine is actually intelligent? Conscious like us?

Can't go there today. Not enough time.