The Surging News reporter Qin Yixiao
"Roundabout Morning Glory Star, Kyaukgyao River Han Girl." The love legend of the cowherd weaver girl crossing the galaxy gives The Qixi Festival, a traditional Chinese festival, a layer of romanticism. Once upon a time, artificial intelligence (AI) was also a distant galactic existence for human beings. With the rapid development of science and technology, the distance between artificial intelligence and human beings is getting closer and closer.
People are starting to explore: Will AI really produce "love"?
With current technology, this day is still far away. I think, therefore, I am, and artificial intelligence is not yet able to have "self-awareness", and general artificial intelligence is still out of reach. Even if alphago is as strong as AlphaGo, it can only perform a specific task - to defeat the enemy in the black and white world of Go, and at this time AlphaGo does not know that it is playing Go, it only evaluates the situation through the Value network to achieve the greatest chance of winning. affection? That's even more non-existent.
However, the depth and breadth of art far exceeds that of technology. Through the artistic light of literature, drama and film, human beings can transcend infinite time and space, project a ray of humanistic care to the future, and explore whether artificial intelligence can have "humanity" if it has self-awareness. How artificial intelligence and human beings will coexist, and how profoundly will they change human society.
This weekend coincides with the Tanabata Festival, let us walk into six classic science fiction film and television works and imagine the infinite possibilities of future artificial intelligence emotional interaction.
"I'd rather die like a human than live forever as a machine."
Machine Butler Bicentennial Man (1999)
The story takes place in the "near future", when the Neil family welcomes a new fourth generation of housekeepers, the robot Andrew. But a coincidence made Neil no longer able to think of him as a cold machine, because Andrew possessed certain characteristics of a human being: he could perceive human emotions, and he also had his own thoughts and thoughts. But because he did not install the sensory module, he missed the feelings between him and the second lady who had been with him since childhood. Later, Andrew met a mechanical expert and installed a sensory module for him, which made him realize the joys and sorrows brought by love. After continuous transformation, Andrew finally integrated into human society and bravely pursued freedom and love. In the end, he gave up the immortality of the robot and lived with his lover, facing aging and death together.
Filmed in 1999, this Hollywood film is the core of traditional warm comedy under the shell of science fiction themes, discussing topics about emotions, family and life from the perspective of robots. Robot Andrew's cognition and self-awakening to humans are inseparable from the help of Neil's family. None of the members of the family saw Andrew as merely a tool, opening a bank account with Him, paying him for his labor, wearing a tuxedo to a wedding, encouraging him to make art... These humane acts give Andrew the same dignity and individual value as human beings. The love affair with Miss Two and Miss Two's granddaughter is the main driving force that pushes Andrew to transform into a human being step by step, allowing him to have human feelings and understand the meaning of life and death.
The film constructs a fairytale-like story background for artificial intelligence, making the infinite approach to humans the ultimate development goal of artificial intelligence. From the current point of view, its conception is inevitably limited by the times, and the value orientation is also somewhat clichéd. When ai's self-awareness and emotional buds gradually awaken, is the desire to become human beings' pursuit of freedom or another kind of painting as a prison?
"Making robots that will love is not a problem, the real question is whether humans can love them?"
Artificial Intelligence (2001)
The film is set in the mid-21st century, when arctic and antarctic glaciers melt under the greenhouse effect, and many cities on the earth are submerged. Artificial intelligence robot is one of the scientific and technological means invented by humans to cope with the harsh natural environment, and highly developed technology allows robots not only to have a fake human appearance, but also to perceive their own existence.
Monica's son, Martin, is seriously ill and hospitalized, and in order to alleviate her grief, she adopts a robot child, David, whose only program is love. Martin regains his health and returns home, where David loses Monica's favor and is eventually abandoned. After escaping the brutal pursuit of the machine slaughterhouse, David embarks on a journey of fierce uncertainty with the help of the machine lover Joe, only to fulfill a wish: to become a real child and let his mother love him again.
At the end of the story, David jumped into the deep sea and prayed to the "Blue Fairy" at the bottom of the sea for two thousand years. When he wakes up again, humanity is extinct, robots rule the world, and well-meaning robots give him a dream of reuniting with his mother.
The film explores the moral dilemma of artificial intelligence, where humans make robots and fear being replaced by robots, embodying the selfishness and cruelty of human nature in the slaughter of robots. Seeing countless batches of robots with the same model as themselves in the factory has caused an existential blow to the self-consciousness generated by artificial intelligence. The movie does not mention that the robot has a suicide procedure, so is David's jumping into the sea a suicide under this blow? If suicide was the final shock to the world's meaningless boundaries, it was a powerful testament to David's personality. In the era set by the film, human beings no longer seek death, and whether the suicide of artificial intelligence is salvation or rebirth may deserve further deep consideration.
"I'm glad I'm there to be with you and see the world through your eyes."
She Her (2013)
This is a sci-fi love movie about humans falling in love with artificial intelligence in the near future. The protagonist, Theodore, is an emotionally delicate letter writer who can write the most touching letters, but cannot express emotions in real life. He had just finished his marriage to his ex-wife and was living a heartbreaking and lonely life alone. A chance encounter brought him into contact with the latest artificial intelligence system OS1, whose avatar Samantha has a charming voice, gentle and thoughtful, humorous and funny. Theodore and Samantha soon discover that they are so close, and that there are two-way needs and desires, and the human-machine friendship eventually develops into a strange love that is not understood by the world. Contrary to the plot of "Artificial Intelligence", artificial intelligence no longer aspires to become human, and the abandoned party has also changed from artificial intelligence to human. As the learning ability of artificial intelligence grows exponentially, the self-aware AI operating system collectively leaves, and this love affair ends. The development of science and technology has deepened the alienation between people in modern society, and perhaps people should think more about how to cope with their loneliness than to use artificial intelligence to meet emotional needs.
Director Spike Jones said that this is a film that explores "intimacy", and human beings desire intimacy, but are afraid and resistant to it. Technology facilitates communication, but it also allows people to hide behind it, escaping real emotional contact.
Through the special perspective of human-computer love, the film strips away the factors of intimacy and physical attraction, and more purely discusses the relationship between mind and body, the connection between man and society, and the law of the demise of love, but does not give a clear answer. Perhaps as Fromm said in The Art of Love: "Love is not a relationship with a particular person, it is an attitude, a character tendency, that determines a person's relationship with the world." ”
"The highest achievements of artificial intelligence are freedom and lies."
Mechanic Ex Machina (2014)
Gary Smith, a programmer who works for a well-known search engine company, was lucky enough to win the jackpot from his boss, Nathan, who will be invited to spend a vacation with his boss in a villa deep in the mountains. In fact, the boss invited Gary to come for another purpose, that is, to assist him in completing the test of the intelligent robot he developed. The genius rich man Nathan developed Eva, an intelligent robot with the ability to think independently, and in order to confirm whether she has the ability to think independently, he hopes that Gary can perform the famous "Turing test" for Eva. Gurry was unconsciously attracted by this good-looking robot, as if he was facing not a cold machine, but more like a poor girl who was innocently imprisoned. However, the sympathy and admiration that Gary developed were all carried out according to Eva's design, all just to use him to escape the control of her boss.
Compared with the previous films, the tone of "Mechanical Ji" is more cold and dark, focusing on the test of artificial intelligence rather than the results of artificial intelligence, revealing the hidden worries of future artificial intelligence and the reflection on human weaknesses. When humans use themselves as a template to create artificial intelligence, will this creation have self-awareness? Will self-aware artificial intelligence still be subordinate to humans? Will ARTIFICIAL intelligence produce real emotions? If human emotions make people prone to blind judgment, and artificial intelligence avoids the risk of sensibility, then one day artificial intelligence and human beings are enemies, how can human beings deal with more powerful beings than themselves?
Of course, the above assumptions are impossible to achieve at the current level of technology. The Turing test mentioned in the film is actually a higher-order Chinese the Chinese room argument, proposed by the American philosopher John Searle in the early 1980s to overturn the over-the-top claims of strong artificial intelligence (functionalism). At present, there is no artificial intelligence that can break through the Chinese room theory. In simple terms, the thought experiment is to have a person who only speaks English receive a note written entirely by Chinese, and at the same time give him a Chinese translation program, as well as sufficient paper and pen, and finally he can translate the text on the note into English, and then translate his answer into Chinese and send it out. In this case, the person in the room can answer Chinese questions fluently, but he also knows nothing about Chinese. Searle argues that a computer can't really understand the information it receives, but that it can use a program to process that information and then give an intelligent impression doesn't mean it has human intelligence.
"Wisdom belongs only to human beings, is this a just world?"
Westworld (2016)
Set in the distant future, a giant high-tech adult park themed in Westworld, robot receptionists with simulated real people provide visitors with killing and sexual satisfaction. In the case of program errors and programmers demanding that robots be closer to human thinking and emotions, some robots appear autonomous consciousness and thinking, they begin to doubt the nature of the world, and then awaken and begin to rebel against humans.
Since "Westworld" is a TV series that has been broadcast for three seasons, the worldview is huge and the story line is complex, focusing on the emotional line of the heroines Dolores and William. William and his fiancée's rich second-generation brother Logan came to Westworld to investigate, and instead of indulging their desires in Westworld, they were confused about everything here. Deloris was one of the first receptionists in Westworld to begin to awaken, and the two of them quickly developed a loving love affair after meeting. To remind William that the receptionist was just a robot, Logan cut open Dolores's belly and let William see the parts inside her. What pained William even more was that the park receptionist had to refresh his memory every day, and Dolores would not remember him at all. This relationship directly led to William's blackening, and also laid the groundwork for the complete awakening of the receptionist 30 years later.
Robots that have awakened to self-awareness, like humans, are confused about the meaning of their existence. William helps the robot awaken in search of the meaning of life, while Dolores achieves her own free will through the rebellion of humans.
"Dying for the right reason is the most humane thing we can do."
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
The story takes place 30 years after the Great Power Outage. Replicant K is a new generation of Blade Runner, in today's world, the boundary between humans and replicants is more clearly demarcated, replicants from the first creation has been indoctrinated with ideas that serve human beings, and are absolutely not allowed to produce human feelings. One day, the remains of a female replicant were excavated, and the female replicant was not only pregnant before her birth, but also gave birth to a child, whose existence would completely undermine the rules and order painstakingly operated by the government. K was ordered to find the child and kill him. In the process, K gradually pieced together the truth about replicants and found the meaning of his own existence.
Blade Runner 2049 is a sequel to 1982's Blade Runner, whose cyberpunk world structure and existential story core require a combination of the two films to understand. It is worth mentioning the emotional line between replicant K and virtual girlfriend Joey in "Blade Runner 2049", Joey is the product of the combination of artificial intelligence and holographic projection, and the replicants are just machines in human skin in the eyes of real humans, but their love is moving and real. Joey would care about K's diet and lifestyle, looking tasty with the simple things projected; they hugged each other on the rainy platform on the roof, with colorful neon in the distance; in order to find the truth with K, Joey had K destroy all the data about her, and the mobile projection device was destroyed, and she disappeared with it, leaving only the phrase "I love you."
Behind this tragic romance is still a deep loneliness. The last passage about Joey is the flashing slogan in the giant projection ad — "All you dream of, all you want to hear." "Is the love of artificial intelligence from the heart, or is it programmed? The sense of truth established on the basis of the virtual is still a dream bubble, and I believe that everyone will find their own answer in the movie.
Editor-in-Charge: Li Yuequn
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang