A Robot Moved Me to Tears
What do feelings really really mean?
It’s afternoon as I write this but I’m playing Patrick Watson’s, Je te laisserai des mots, because it’s my idea of the perfect morning. And mine wasn’t.
Good thing yesterday’s pesky headache is gone.
The rest of today so far has been me taking my little brother to and from school, awake-daydreaming, watching The Creator (2023), reading Tim Urban, sleeping, and eating scalding hot soup after I woke up about half an hour ago.
Uneventful.
Thank God you can’t see me belch over email.
Prologue
How do you know what people think about AI?
Well, one way is to send a questionnaire to a group of people and chart their responses.
Surveys.
As a “credential-less” guy, I am not the one for data analysis.
I am taking an unscientific approach.
Pop, popcorn
Pop culture references to ideas, events and people are artistic-societal etchings of how we collectively think.
They are feedback loops. They influence people and are also influenced by people.
I figured if I look closely at how people interpret AI in culture, there’d I’d find a pool of ideas.
That’s why I started watching movies about AI seriously.
I looked up IMDb and Collider as well as other blogs that have ranked AI movies. I am ticking the list as the days go by.
On my list for a must-watch is this year’s Mission Impossible where AI stars in a brutal face-off against Tom Cruise’s 7th instalment character. That’s a lot of daring adventures if you ask me.
By February next year, I think I’d have watched and then review ~20 of these.
Would you love that?
I saw The Creator (2023) today and it is, for me, one of the best movies about AI I have seen so far. It is an emotionally gripping sci-fi action story set 30 years from now, as the western world wages a genocide against robots.
I have also watched WALL-E (2008), Pixar’s animated tale about a dumpster robot fitted with luxury “emotional-istic1” features.
And luxury has another meaning here: at $180M, WALL-E was the most expensive animation Pixar had made at the time. Good thing audiences at the box office rewarded the well-told story with their ticket fees (+ attention) and over $530M.
Aside: If you thought AI Girlfriends was my review of Her (2013), would you be quick to say I failed abysmally (and rightly so)?
Well, that was because I didn’t write a review.
I just discussed a movie you may not have seen, in a way that when you do, you’ll have fancy words and concepts in your head for the plot lines.
And that’s what I’ll repeat today. Because spoilers are not really fun.
WALL-E and The Creator give us some of the most “human” robots to grace the big screens.
And with the former’s decent popularity and latter’s freshness, they are just the right staple for a discussion along the lines of feelings and robots and whether we might be able to teach them how to love.
Photocopies
We’re getting set to build beings “in our likeness”.
Imago homini.
And by forging the beings to as close to what we are (within the limits of our abilities), we’d be in essence, granting them what makes us, well, us.
LLMs are simulating reason. Some bots are simulating emotions.
Will they get so real that it wouldn’t matter anymore?
Roll in,
WALL-E, a solar-powered refuse robot is wheeling along a desolate Earth, sorting trash. Unlike his unpolished appearance, he is shown to have quite the sauce.
He has a ‘pet’ cockroach and keeps memorabilia of interesting items in his ‘house’: a garage strewn with disco lights along the ceiling and boasting a disk-operated TV.
His makers packed so many traits, that I presume they believed would enable him to do his job with as little human interference as possible.
As we discussed in How Does ChatGPT Really Work?, just like GPT’s text prediction leaped into summarizing, analyzing and translating text, sometimes when we design AI to do Thing A, we may not know doing that well entails it’d be able to do Thing B too.
So, when behemoth space-tech corporation, B&L built WALL-E and gave it the ability to sort trash differently or autonomously learn from visual data, I bet they didn’t imagine the robot would have a careful stash of replacement parts and souvenirs, and would take a lesson from watching videos of lovers dancing and holding hands.
However, and reasonably, WALL-E isn’t built for chattiness. But what he lacks for in eloquence, he surely makes up for in ‘heart’.
Why do we feel like, aww?
If logic and reason were welded on to our brains, our emotions and feelings are the metal.
This is because while logic is handled by parts of the brain that developed as we evolved bigger brains, neurochemicals have been coursing through us prior by thousands of years.
Some emotions were jungle useful.
For example, fear helped us stay away from predators. Others developed in early human societies; love couldn’t find a prehistoric human a meal. It was an that society favoured.
We exalt logic and reason, but human emotions underpin our “humanity”.
Plotting maps and building spaceships vs. a mother’s tender kiss as she rocks her baby to sleep or lovers, admiring a sunset’s orange-hued horizon, holding hands.
Which is ‘more’ human?
In The Creator, occupying the gulf between flesh-and-blood humans and faceless robots are The Simulants, built to resemble humans as closely as possible.
As the war waged on, it was difficult for some characters to kill a Simulant.
Wasn’t a thing that acted just like a human, a human?
Displays of robot populations protecting and caring for the young, elderly and injured, robot monks leading people in spiritual reflection and education, a robot wife that was so caring and kind.
They even solved the AI alignment problem here. Simulants would never hurt a human. Still, they would not just sit and allow humans kill them.
Of what use?
In Tag Me as Human, I attempted the arduous task of answering what a human is.
WALL-E, the robot, displays so much of human emotional characteristics that we are forced to evaluate if they can be possible in the future.
He expresses curiosity, demonstrates empathy by comforting EVE, the visitor bot and shows persistence and determination.
Developing emotional robots like WALL-E will not only be useful to show off what we can be able to do. There're a few practical uses.
Emotional bots could be useful as future staff in healthcare, and in the care of the elderly.
They could also provide better understanding of emotional states and aid mental health support.
At some point, humans will prize the quality of service over who serves them.
Wrapping up questions,
We think we’re “natural” because we are our only examples of beings that sport our set of traits.
What caused the Great Leap that catapulted us from the helpless apes of the East African savannah to ruthless rulers of the planet?
If we reason that we don’t know how humans, normal great apes similar to gorillas and chimps, even got intelligent in the first place, our concept of uniqueness is eroded the more.
What we fail to contemplate is that we may actually be ‘simulations’ of some higher life form.
If we find this to be true, that we are sims, how “real” would we perceive the emotions that we have held so dear for millennia and that represent us so markedly
And if this doesn’t matter, would it be the same for the bots?
Prompt of the Day: Book Recommender
Copy and paste this into ChatGPT:
Give me a list of the best 5 books to help me with [CHALLENGE].Tool of the Day
Free users can now talk with ChatGPT. Interact with the most realistic-sounding AI on the ChatGPT app.
Did You Know?
Ousted OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman has been reinstated.
Image of the Day
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emmanuelpaulmaah.substack.comUntil tomorrow,
With love and ink,
Emmanuel
Rocket Raccoon said this word in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)