Artificial Life

At the now seemingly farcically named Ingenuity Festival the other day I was going around with my daughter and we came upon a huge statue of a robot. A big, cartoony looking thing. “Neat robot.” She says, not exactly enthusiastically. This kind of thing is growing more and more stale by the day. “ceci n’est pas un robot.” I say. It’s not a robot, it’s a statue of a ‘robot’ a specific vision of what a robot could be or look like – if it were designed by an actual madman. It’s a devolution of an interesting concept and a powerful force in the world – rendering it a sensless kind of folly – purely decorative, purely in the vein of a faded aesthetic. Because I go on pedantically (it’s only fair, as she’s a child after all) “A robot has a function and its shape suits its function, and it can move and not just stand around. It’s a statue, not a robot.”

For a while we wandered the grounds of Ingenuity which is more and more seeming to be just a flea market of some kind – wandering farther afield we end up in a back-stage type area with actual longshoremen appearing and indicating that we’d gone the wrong way, sending us on a long stroll through the parking lot between the lake and the stadium. “See the sun setting on the lake? See the horizon, like dark line drawn on the world?” “It’s pretty.” We admire it for a while. “You know what’s dumb, what I don’t like about the city?” “What dad?” “Well. Here’s the lake, it’s beautiful, it’s nice to see the sun setting into it, it’s a wonderful day and here we are looking at it and what do you see all around us?” We crack up together there – it’s a parking lot, a big empty one. Lake-front property and all. There’s a distinct feeling that the whole affair should be called the Credulity festival instead. It’s a mundane celebration of the mundane in a mundane environment – and more than that, one that oughtn’t be.

So then I start thinking, later, about Capek and the Robot. If you haven’t read R.U.R. I don’t know if I can tell you to go out and do it, but it’s interesting, if not supremely edifying. In R.U.R. the robots rebel against people after they discover love and then develop an attraction for each other and choose to become people, replacing the old. It’s kind of a straightforward discussion of the working-class becoming middle-class, developing bourgeois attitudes and breaking free of serfdom & so on. What’s interesting to me though, at this moment, is that the Robots aren’t really explicitly mechanical or what we’d call, nowadays, technological. They fall in love and breed with each other. Go back to Frankenstein or the Golem – other precursor depictions of the Robot & they’re not necessarily mechanical. I’m thinking of that ambiguity now. There was an idea of an artificial person and it was just an expressed notion – not exactly planned or described, simply understood to be a manufactured person. Which bookends a bit with the giant statue of a robot outside Ingenuity – a pure invention, a vague notional construct meant to tell a story about what it is to be a person, later turned into a kind of actuality, and finally codified into a kind of emblem. I suppose that the rendering of the robot as a giant hominid made of metal is derived from TV and Cinema robots – which were after all just guys in suits – bulky and lumbering – to accommodate the actor. So the robot goes from Metropolis to R2-D2 and it’s all still an actor, not a machine at all, not at all a manufactured person, but a person pretending to be one.

Which is all kind of interesting right? Capek talked about the Robot as a worker attaining a class and a consciousness equivalent to its creators – in the way that serfdom and chattel slavery’s, then still recent abolition was probably suggesting. So the servile depiction of a helpless underclass joining or even supplanting the overlords is a theme that ended up informing a lot of the 20^th century. Meantime, the Robot, in the west goes on to be continuously drawn as a worker – even a very capable, efficient worker, superior in every way to its masters – except, of course, that it lacks the ‘soul’ that a person has – it cannot love, it cannot feel an emotional bond – which goes hand in hand with the bourgeois attitudes of a humane middle class supported by a barbaric worker caste – devoid of the ennobling qualities that grant the upper classes their heightened superiority.

Meanwhile there are robots in life, plenty of them and they don’t look like people at all, they don’t have the slightest resemblance to a human being except that they do tasks we’d otherwise have to perform. Maybe this is why the mindless, unfeeling automaton is less pervasive a trope nowadays. There really are robots- and as there are more and more of them, there are fewer and fewer workers, there’s no need to tell a story about the emotional superiority of a professional class as compared to a working class – principally because there’s so little left of the working class and middle class. Now we have the made-up-automaton that stands in for an even lower class- the unwashed, hungry and unclean indigent – the Zombie.

Popular in fiction since the zombie tells about the superiority of the healthy, clean, and hardworking people, those who survive against death by virtue of their native virtue – and who don’t fall to unfeeling hunger because they are prepared and properly afraid and armed.

You know, not that the robot is replaced altogether in popular fiction – it’s just that its depiction is now in line with the lived reality of people who interact with robots regularly, it’s no longer a stand in for a kind of person you wouldn’t like to talk about directly.

So I end up not seeing anything ingenious about the robot statue. Capek and Shelly could come up with a robot – made of flesh and alchemy, or some obscure process, not necessarily clad in metal, not necessarily driven by mechanical means – simply an artificial person. I start to think, what is an actually novel representation of an artificial person, a person made by people? What’s a new version of that? A monster? A clone? Some biological identity, some artificial intelligence existing only in the aether of electrons? A miasma of tiny machines linked into an emergent kind of intelligence? Or what about a purely decorative, outmoded model that stands outside, seeming to represent something grand, but utterly without function or ability?