There is a film recently released called The Creator (directed by Gareth Edwards).
It’s a sci-fi movie about a not-too-distant future in which the relationship between robots and part of humanity becomes strained. The general plot is as follows (I’ll try not to spoil it): at some point robots became an integral part of daily life around the world, but after a serious incident in the US, America, blaming AI (wrongly), destroyed all its robots and started a global war against the rest of them, who resided somewhere in Asia (called “New Asia” in the movie), where humans continued to develop AI. In the finale of the film robots and sympathising humans deliver the crucial blow to the American war machine and end the war against AI.
It seems that the director of the movie is an “AI optimist”: robots are portrayed as existing peacefully and harmlessly among humans. But what is more interesting is how he imagines this robot-saturated future to justify his optimism. I think that a brief analysis of these imaginaries can give us some insights into the mindset of AI optimists and how anthropomorphic robots are portrayed in the media today.
First of all, in the film AI = embodied robots. We do not see any other forms of AI. Robots exist among humans as almost-humans: they wear human clothes, they talk like humans, and some of them have human faces and bodies (with some visible robotic parts). Such a reduction of AI to humanoid and anthropomorphic robots ignores the question of how AI is actually used today, for example in police surveillance and military operations. The film’s protagonist hides from the police in an AI-saturated society by simply avoiding patrolling robots. This imaginary embodiment of AI allows the director to present robots as doing all the same jobs that humans do: farming, caring, policing, performing surgeries, teaching, and so on—nothing supernatural. And in all these contexts, robots are portrayed as valuable and peaceful members of society.
This narrative is supported by real-life analogies. For example, there are reports of robots serving as Buddhist monks at funerals in Japan. The film develops this idea into the image of a Buddhist community where robots and humans coactive in their ritual practices and religious piety.
The placement of the robots in social settings, which are not characterised by purely instrumental organisation (as factories or the army) but by emotional or even spiritual relationships, reinforces the reasons for the naturalness of robots’ presence in everyday life and creates grounds for attributing to them a very deep human-likeness: in one of the scenes, the protagonist has to reassure his coworker that the robot is just a machine, after they have recovered a damaged robot from the car with the remains of the little girl inside. The robot, which looks dead, suddenly “wakes up” and starts asking what happened to the girl it was supposed to be looking after, and the protagonist’s colleague is apparently frightened by the situation and cries out in terror that the robot is real, that is, it has emotions.
This is actually one of the film’s leitmotifs: people have to convince themselves that robots are not “alive”. The protagonist, for example, at one point begins to refer to the robots he is trying to save as “she”, but cuts himself off and corrects himself by saying “it”. And the whole film is full of scenes in which robots suffer and empathise with each other’s suffering in a very recognisable way. Such depictions are consistent with the way many of the modern developers of anthropomorphic robots present their machines to the public: they are displayed not to convince people that these machines are “alive”, but to make people constantly tell themselves that the robots in front of them are not “sentient”. The idea, popular today, that the “singularity” (the creation of an artificial general intelligence that overpowers humanity) is a real event, and that humans must prepare for it and try to avoid it, only supports this tendency to place the burden of convincing humans of the “non-humanness” of robots on humans themselves.
However, the relationship between humans and robots in the film goes beyond mere coexistence. As some of the robots in the film are anthropomorphic, it is shown that they get their similarity to humans from humans who donate their appearance to the robots. (It is interesting to note that the producers of the robots are portrayed in the film as scientists, not corporations). This also has its analogue in today’s world, where AI is trained on the data produced by humans. The difference between the film and real life is that most of this data in real life is not “donated”, but mined from the internet without the consent of its creators, and there are many hours of human labour required to make this data machine-readable. Yes, the film perhaps shows the “ideal” way of exchanging data between humans and AI, but it neglects the question of where this data goes, how it is stored, and, most importantly, how data reflects and contributes to the distribution of power and inequalities in society. Data is presented in utopian way as an individual property that humans control and voluntarily share in order to develop useful technology.
Finally, it is important to note that the whole drama of the film revolves around the opposition between Western (American) and Eastern (Asian) approaches to robotics and AI. It seems that the creators of the film were inspired by the rather idealistic image of the integration of robotic technologies in Japan. And this image is used only to make a contrast between “humane” and “inhumane” treatment of robots. Real life is, of course, much more complicated. To understand the way robots are perceived and adopted in Japanese society, it is useful to look into the existing ethnographies of Japanese attitudes towards robots, e.g., Robots Won’t Save Japan: An Ethnography of Eldercare Automation by James Adrian Wright and Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson.