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.

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

Andrea and Ruk -- Two Androids

Tonight's post is the fourth in my series that treats on a science fiction class I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011. Here is a link to the first post, where the class is explained in detail: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 1)

One of the first "television show texts" we looked at in this class was an episode from the original Star Trek: season 1, episode 7, titled, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" This episode was written by Robert Bloch, a famous science fiction, horror, and fantasy writer who published in--*drum roll*--Weird Tales. Bloch was close friends with H.P. Lovecraft who was, some have argued, his mentor and main source of encouragement. 

One of these days I'll treat his fiction here, but I think it's noteworthy to mention that the Star Trek episode we watched was written by a member of the H.P. Lovecraft circle.

Anyhow, what is this episode about and how did it relate to the class as a whole? 

Well, let me offer some summary. In this episode Nurse Christine Chapel is in search of her long lost fiance, Dr. Roger Korby. Korby's last known whereabouts were the planet Exo III, where he went to study an extinct race. Long story short: the race that once inhabited Exo III were destroyed by a race of androids they created. We have here the somewhat classical narrative of the robot uprising. But here's the twist. In the course of the episode it becomes clear that Korby has mastered the art of creating androids and that he is, in fact, an android himself. The original Korby died and he downloaded his consciousness into an android body.

This episode raises some very interesting questions, particularly about the relationship between robots and humans. We get both kinds of relationships represented here: love and hate. Let me explain.

Love. One of the androids introduced in this episode is a beautiful girl, Andrea. Captain Kirk, of course, seduces her and she falls in love with him. And through her love for Kirk she comes to regret being an android, i.e. being unable to love fully. Another example: Dr. Roger Korby--who is himself an android--is deeply in love with Nurse Chapel; however, she rejects him because he is an android. 

Hate. Meanwhile, there's another android--a giant, monstrous android--named "Ruk," who seems to hate all humans and wants to kill them all. Furthermore, the human characters never fully come to trust the androids and, in the end, kill them with little fanfare. They are figured as tragic transgressions of the natural order and therefore abominations.

There's another interesting theme that shows up in this episode that recurs over and over in other texts we looked at in this class. This theme is the "sexy android" character. Most of the time the android is a woman. There are all sorts of science fiction texts that turn technology into women; thus, male protagonists engage with technology as a woman. Think of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Bladerunner, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. I plan doing a specific post that treats on this theme of technology-as-woman.

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

This is the second post in a series, Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century. Here is a link to the first post where I explain the series: Post 1

On the first day of class we watched a documentary, Transcendent Man (2009), directed by Robert Barry Ptolemy, which focuses on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. The documentary is, to an extent, a film version of Ray Kurzweil's nonfiction text, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006).

If you're not familiar with Ray Kurzweil's ideas, then I recommend familiarizing yourself with them. I want to go so far as to say he comes closest to articulating the general "mythology" of our time in regards to our relationship with technology.

This was a wonderful documentary to start the class with because the ambivalent nature of our relationship to technology comes through in such an intense way. Indeed, the extremes of "technology-as-savior" and "technology-as-doom" are evident in this documentary. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that, eventually, machine intelligence and human intelligence will merge together, and that the next stage of human evolution involves our connection to technology: this connection will result in immortality. And yet, other scientists believe that machine intelligence will stay separate from us and, surpassing us in capabilities, intelligence, vision, will come to see us as a mere "insects." Thus, they'll destroy us with as much prejudice as we destroy a nest of wasps or some irritating rabbits.

We have here the vision of either technology as Utopia or technology as Dsytopia: the U.S.S. Enterprise or Skynet.

A lot of the documentary foregrounds Kurzweil's views, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it's biased towards them. A lot of time is spent allowing his detractors to speak. Particularly, Hugo De Garis becomes the representative of the "dark side" of Kurzweil's technological vision. De Garis spends a lot of time talking about the "artilect war," a scenario he has imagined. The artiloect war, according to De Garis, will take place right before machines achieve consciousness. The war will be fought between people who think that intelligent machines should be built and people who believe intelligent machines are our doom and should not be built. We basically have, in De Garis's scenario, a fight between the two visions: those who recoil from technology as the death of humanity and those who embrace technology as the full manifestation of humanity (i.e. our destiny).

There are other vexed issues in terms of our relationship to technology that come through in this documentary, namely, how we are coming to interface with it. One question is, where do the boundaries of the human end? After we have replaced our eyes, our lungs, our brains, our limbs with technological apparatuses, when do we stop being human and start being machines? This is a metaphysical question regarding the fundamental ontological nature of human being as an discrete experience.

A lot of folks are reluctant to watch this documentary because they feel like Kurzweil is "just wrong." I think that's the wrong way of going about it. It doesn't really matter if he's right or wrong. What matters is that such visions are even being expostulated. That a man has written books claiming that technology will save us; that others have written books saying that technology will destroy us: these developments are culturally significant.

They point toward our vexed relationship with technology, the degree to which we both love it. And hate it.