Futuristic Notions of What AI could Be and Why It’s Not New
Artificial Intelligence Strategies Telling the Future and Dive Into Retrofuturism
What is the future anyway and how is it depicted? In this article I look at a few typical imaginaries pertaining to artificial intelligence. Discussing as well the different expectations and representations in two movies.
Normally I do not go into future discussions or reflections about far away topics. Indeed, it seems arcane to talk about space travelling or artificial consciousness. However, a friend of mine mentioned the possibility of sending AI away in space or the consciousness that could be created and to travel further.
It struck me. Why do discussions go so cosmic or philosophical when we talk about AI? I mean, it’s not like the discussion is not interesting. If we could indeed project consciousness across space it would be interesting, yet it would help if we could solve our issues here on earth first. AI Strategies are normally not extreme, but they still draw a foreshadowing that may be overly optimistic. That being said I have not seen any crazy promises (from most strategies that I have read), however it is interesting to think about how the future is perceived or displayed.
Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a “science” bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation.
In a way a strategy is an anticipation due to its inherent goal. It is often designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. Many times despite knowing the words or direction we may not know completely where we will end up. Thus there is a sense of anticipation or guesswork.
Such as the figure of a white humanoid robot keeping track of source code with AI in big letters, holding hands over what seemingly is a control panel. It could be like this strange picture from 2018 in the Economic Times that came towards the top when I searched for artificial intelligence, or this Forbes contributor article from 2019.
Of course it is weird. When we say AI people think human and robot.
It is almost like a throwback to iHuman, the somewhat mediocre movie from 2004 seeing Will Smith the human featured against the co-protagonist Sonny with artificial intelligence.
Sonny, is not an assembly robot. He was specially built with denser materials and a secondary neural network, giving him the ability to ignore the Three Laws. The Three Laws are: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Later, Sonny claims to have emotions and dreams.
The robot has become this notion of metal and whiteness.
Not like C3PO or R2-D2 in Star Wars with an artificial intelligence of sort. The different kind of imaginations of the future provided a much less human, and much more machine look as well as feel. It was perhaps more benign too as opposed to the idea in iRobot about a machine that had set out to kill humans. Instead this machine was there as a translator that first appeared in the Star Wars film in 1977. There are of course far more imaginations in between that time and today.
However what was interesting is to see the change towards something that is intentionally meant to be in the ‘uncanny valley’ (not robot and not human) as opposed to C3PO that clearly was a robot, yet could take human actions such as speaking, translating, walking around, reaction and having certain codes. Interestingly enough we are closer to a C3PO than we are to a Sonny as portrayed in the iRobot series. It was maybe the leap into the future towards a more intelligence with rights approach, an intelligence that dreams like us, is like us etc.
Strategies still present us with a vision of a future or a present (for a specific part of the population). Such as is the case in the Singaporean AI strategy in education. Imagining the adaptive learning with automated marking systems and chatbots as AI learning companions.
Of course it is utopian, it is used to sell a specific type of future.
Still we should perhaps think twice about certain imaginaries pertaining to the future.
Not that we should lack excitement, yet we have to realise that the imaginations of the present may not become future, or perhaps play out as a different scenario than what we imagined.
This is #500daysofAI and you are reading article 248. I am writing one new article about or related to artificial intelligence every day for 500 days. My current focus for 100 days 200–300 is national and international strategies for artificial intelligence.
