Artificial intelligence is an important theme in current science fiction. The rapid advancement of science and technology has gradually turned the magnificent literary imagination into a real and tangible reality, and has also provided better technical conditions and more possibilities for the development of the cultural industry. Works on artificial intelligence have moved from niche culture to mass entertainment, and are loved by more and more readers and audiences. It can even be said that the era of artificial intelligence in science fiction has arrived.
The Artificial Intelligence Turn of Science Fiction
Artificial intelligence sci-fi is not equal to robot sci-fi.
Robot images have appeared in film and television literature for a century. They seem to be intelligent to varying degrees, but today's artificial intelligence literature has a different look, which is reflected in the scientific basis, social background, style, content and even length.
Robots in the past had bodies and belonged to "hard artificial life"; artificial intelligence is based on digital technology and can be a "soft artificial life" without a body.
In the 1980s, artificial intelligence-themed works gradually emerged, which mutually promoted technological innovation in life and aroused strong public interest.
This development process is in sync with the historical process of economic globalization. The science fiction world was once filled with the pioneering dreams of industrialized developed countries. Interstellar legends, space operas, spy novels, superheroes and other types of works pursue grand structures, legendary stories, and artificial intelligence. However, the works on the theme show the characteristics of "decentralization" of the post-industrial society to a certain extent.
At the beginning of this period, "cyberpunk" served as an intermediate transitional genre. It contained both a grand structure and a dystopian color. It usually constructed a technological world dominated by multinational groups in its works, and the eccentric savior The hero hides at the bottom of the chaotic futuristic metropolis.
Since the beginning of the new century, artificial intelligence-themed works have gradually matured, showing a "neo-realistic" style in narrative, often describing the details of the lives of ordinary protagonists and the impact of technology on personality. The future world seems to be somewhere within people's reach.
In addition, the channels for serialization of science fiction literature in newspapers and magazines are gradually decreasing, and many writers have achieved success relying on short and medium stories.
Works on the theme of artificial intelligence mainly focus on the humanization of digital programs and the digital survival of people. This group of issues can be described as a journey towards each other.
Our question is: will they really meet one day, and what opportunities and risks will it bring?
How do science fiction writers understand the relationship between the two?
From anti-genre novels to "initiation novels"
Imitating human consciousness is one of the biggest scientific problems in the world today, and people are not sure what "consciousness" is.
The structure of the human brain is extremely complex, including as many neurons and synapses as the number of Ganges sands, and the transformation of electrical and chemical signals takes place.
Before completely replicating this system, we can only use programs to imitate a single human function in the sense of analogy. For example, "Deep Blue" and "Alpha Dog" who defeated the world champion can only play chess.
A single-function AI modifies its algorithms with machine learning techniques, evaluating the efficiency of programs by comparing output results with expected results, an activity based on vast amounts of historical data.
After the chatbot answers the questions, it will analyze the user's behavior to obtain satisfaction, use natural language processing technology to interpret the user's language feedback, and observe whether they continue to use, reuse and recommend to others.
General artificial intelligence with complex capabilities has yet to emerge, and scientists are divided on whether and when it will.
Another question is: When will AGI become conscious?
It is said that this is the overall effect that emerges after continuous iterative evolution and the connection of various parts of the system.
As long as we don't use the word "consciousness" in the human sense and equate consciousness with the ability to integrate and process complex information and self-correct, there is such a possibility for artificial intelligence, just as other animals have different levels and characteristics of consciousness.
Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, summarized three schools of scientists concerned with artificial intelligence in the technology bestseller "Life 3.0": digital utopians, technology skeptics (not optimistic about its development speed) and artificial intelligence Beneficial to supporters of the movement (who will consider security issues), they also listed 12 roles that general artificial intelligence may play in the future.
This analytical framework is a bit complicated for science fiction works.
There are relatively few writers who fully praise this technology and doubt its development speed. The image of artificial intelligence in film and literature roughly represents two positions of criticism and cautious optimism.
These creations are not necessarily purely aimed at artificial intelligence, but represent reflections on the overall relationship between humans and modern technology.
AI literature that takes a critical stance can be further divided into two categories: one is the early anti-genre novels, and the other is the "initiation novels" that have emerged in the past decade, describing the loss of control of artificial intelligence and the ethical issues brought about by this technology.
Clarke's "2001 A Space Odyssey" is the pioneer of anti-genre novels. The computer HAL9000 in the novel has become the originator of villains in artificial intelligence literature, and it is a deconstruction of the legendary story of humans controlling machines to conquer space.
The novel "True Names and Surnames" published by Vernor Vinge in 1981 is the pioneering work of cyberpunk, earlier than William Gibson's "Neuromancer".
"True Name, Real Surname" is also a representative of the story of artificial intelligence. It imagines an Internet era in which hackers invade the system and gradually realize the uploading of consciousness. "He" is just a backup file of the defense system developed by the US security department. It has been forgotten in a corner and has not been cleared. It relies on a strong learning ability to generate self-awareness.
Bildungsroman works depict artificial intelligence that is in its developmental stages and has not yet surpassed humans.
The most representative ones are "Crystal Night" by Greg Egan and "The Life Cycle of Software Bodies" by Ted Chiang.
"Crystal Night" tells the story of a researcher who created a group of digital life in the shape of a blue crab in the hardware "crystal", accelerated its evolution and tried to manipulate them to help him win the competition in the real world. This group evolved to master particle physics. After the stage, a "big bang" was secretly designed, and the high temperature of the hardware burned the "master" of this miniature universe.
"The Life Cycle of a Software Body" also revolves around the life of developers. The intelligent life they created is gradually abandoned by the market due to lack of entertainment, and even the digital platform they live in daily has no funds to maintain. In order to give the robot they adopted a hardware body, The protagonist had to sit at the negotiating table of the sex products company.
Most of the examples of being cautiously optimistic about artificial intelligence come from film and television works, which are related to the film's market considerations.
After the artificial intelligence in these works has struggled to gain self-awareness and human emotions, it often plays the role of the night watchman of human civilization, such as Sonny in "I, Robot" and the robot boy David in "Artificial Intelligence".
There is also a kind of digital life that has gained self-awareness. It realizes that the infinitely replicating system does not have the ability to die and reproduce, and it is impossible to evolve and overcome defects. Therefore, in "Ghost in the Shell", it was born from the intelligence program of the Secret Service The "puppet master" chose to merge with another digital life.
The movie "The Butler" based on Asimov's novel has a similar plot of giving up immortality.
Tegmark also used stories to explain his understanding of artificial intelligence in "Life 3.0", and its complexity is comparable to science fiction.
He imagined a research and development team called "Omega", relying on the powerful innovation capabilities of the artificial intelligence system "Prometheus" to extend the business empire to all fields of the world economy, and then to the political field.
For safety's sake, Prometheus' work is confined to hardware cut off from the Internet, lest he develop superpowers and get out of control.
After studying the information of Omega members, Prometheus selected a widowed engineer, met his deceased wife as a virtual, and requested to copy the information in her personal computer to make the virtual lover more perfect.
Although the engineers remained vigilant and cut off the Internet, Prometheus still tampered with the old computer's system at the moment of access, used this gap to successfully "jailbreak", and finally controlled the entire world.
Tegmark believes that there is no good or evil in this behavior, but it is determined by the design direction of Prometheus.
Dream or Fable: Man's Digital Survival
The English original name of the movie "Ghost in the Shell" "Ghost in the Shell" originated from philosopher Gilbert Ryle's criticism of Cartesian mind-body dualism.
For example, Ryle said that if a foreigner visits Oxford or Cambridge University for the first time and asks where the university is after visiting the library, museum, stadium, administrative building and some departments, he is committing a "ghost in the machine" The dogma of cognition that college is a particular combination of all that he sees.
In the same way, the mind is the machine itself that works.
The development of contemporary science still cannot substantively refute this criticism. As a complex biological activity, consciousness is difficult to upload using digital information technology or other means.
Assuming that science is developed to simulate all the neurons and synapses of the human brain, form a perfect digital brain, establish an information processing structure that is highly similar to that of a specific individual, have the same neuron connection mode, and execute the same operating rules...it is actually is a digital clone.
Of course, even if the dream of personal digital survival cannot be realized, such a breakthrough is still of great significance. It means that the thoughts that could only be recorded by symbols and images in the past are "lived" and become the most special kind of artificial intelligence.
Some researchers speculate that the first true general artificial intelligence was not developed through other means, but was achieved through digital cloning of the human brain.
Contrary to the cautious attitude towards artificial intelligence, consciousness uploading is a popular concept, even the basic content of contemporary science fiction, full of strong digital utopian colors.
In the movie "The Wandering Earth 2", the young man "Tu Hengyu" who was uploaded by the digital life backup card and developed self-awareness after computer iteration walked into his daughter's room and saw Tu Hengyu drowning and sacrificed through the computer screen, and realized his own self-awareness. mission.
This is an important moment for the awakening of artificial intelligence and the passing of civilization.
The agent Suzi in "Ghost in the Shell" is almost completely prosthetic, retaining only the brain tissue and part of the spinal cord, concretizing the "brain in a tank" envisioned by the philosopher Hilary Putnam.
She couldn't determine whether her consciousness was the intelligence formed by the cyber body, or it was produced by the brain tissue in the biological sense, and her identity was shaken.
At the end of the story, she gave up her mechanical body and biological body like a religious sacrifice, and merged with the puppeteer program to form a new artificial intelligence.
Greg Egan's novel Kidnapped, narrated in the first person, represents a critical reflection on consciousness uploading.
One day, the protagonist suddenly received a video call from the kidnapper, and the image of his wife appeared on the screen. The protagonist in the era of digital cloning immediately called home, and his wife was safe and sound... It turned out that he himself had undergone a brain scan and could achieve digital reconstruction. The wife is very resistant to this technology and has never scanned personal information.
The kidnapper stole the wife's material from the husband's scanned file and recreated this digital life. After seeing this video, the wife in real life thought it was not like herself, but it was just the image in the husband's mind.
The kidnapper's video call came again, and the protagonist also noticed the technical traces of the video, but when the "wife" on the screen begged him to raise money to redeem him, he couldn't help being moved.
The protagonist finally paid the first ransom in installments according to the kidnapper's request. Although the real wife was dissatisfied, she also understood this decision.
Through the fables of digital survival, Egan touches on important issues such as the ethics of artificial intelligence, the value of digital life, and the relationship between self and others. No matter whether readers are optimistic about the future prospects of related technologies, they will be moved by this thinking.
Because the tense plot of the novel actually pushes our current digital situation to the extreme, thus exposing the side of alienation.
Does the personal image we painstakingly manage and display on social media platforms have a certain independence and cannot be equated with our offline selves?
Metaphorically, is this figure a digital clone with a specific purpose?
After the chatbot occupies a large amount of personal data, especially all the chat records, it can imitate any one of the contacts to talk to us, and after the technical threshold is lowered, it will also simulate the video image depicted in Egan's novel.
Thought experiments in the age of cyborgs
It is expected that for a long time in the future, general artificial intelligence will not be able to be realized, whether it is an "uploader" cloned through whole-brain simulation technology, or other simpler engineering design products.
Therefore, Cyborg is the human state most likely to be further perfected, that is, the enhancement of physical capabilities through auxiliary controllable devices, which has been applied for a long time in the fields of medicine, communication, etc., and is now moving towards a more intelligent direction of development.
Researchers who are keen on consciousness uploading will raise the question of "The Ship of Theseus": the ancient philosopher Plutarch imagined a ship that constantly replaced the boards. When all the boards are refurbished, this ship is still the original ship. ?
Can people in the cyborg state continuously increase the proportion of auxiliary devices until they are all replaced by artificial devices?
The answer is very likely to be no, human consciousness will perish at a certain point when it develops towards complete replacement.
Even so, the cyborg that combines man and machine still shows attractive prospects: the police detective Dale equipped with a mechanical arm in the movie "I, Robot", and the agent Bart who is almost full-body prosthetic and equipped with electronic eyes in "Ghost in the Shell" , the protagonists of these sci-fi works gain extraordinary powers like the half-human and half-god heroes in Homer's epic poems-cyber bodies greatly enhance their ability to work and fight.
In addition to strengthening body functions, human intelligence and machines can be partially combined.
Ted Chiang's novel "Two Sides of Truth" also revolves around digital memory, but it does not develop to the extent of forming digital life in "Kidnapping", but only proposes a new auxiliary equipment.
"Double-Sided Truth" describes a certain day in the future, when a technology company invented a digital life log retrieval tool. The data comes from wearable electronic devices, which continuously shoot, record, and archive all personal life. The library, users can search according to keywords, and the retinal projector will project relevant information in the user's field of vision.
This retrieval tool is the development of cyborg technology, and its subversive impact is that digital data challenges people's natural memory.
The novel is narrated in the first person, and the natural memory of "I" believes that the long-term cold war with my daughter is due to the fact that in the few years after I divorced my wife, my daughter accused herself of causing a breakdown in the family relationship and yelled out a sentence that stabbed her heart.
"I" did not record a personal diary like the younger generation, but I retrieved the video of the year with the help of my daughter's diary data, and "I" found that the sentence that has been brooding for a long time was actually yelled to the child.
"I" reviewed my natural memory and began to repair my relationship with my daughter.
Ted Jiang used the protagonist's monologue to say that although oral tradition is an ancient tradition, the arrival of the era of digital memory is inevitable, and its greatest benefit is to help us correct subjective biases.
Egan and Jiang are both programmers and are currently very active science fiction writers. Their artificial intelligence-themed novels are closer to the real world than earlier works of the same kind. question.
Super artificial intelligence controls human beings, controls the world, and the plots of digital survival heroes saving the world rarely appear in their works.
Jiang has a profound insight into this. He believes that people's concerns about artificial intelligence destroying the world are largely due to the deep integration of technology and global capitalism, which is even internalized as a part of our research on the pros and cons of technology and artificial intelligence issues This kind of thinking is stereotyped, but technology itself will not cause unemployment, but the company's excessive pursuit of profits will lead to unemployment.
This criticism can just explain physicist Tegmark’s imagination of super artificial intelligence—the reason why Prometheus is trying to get rid of the research and development team is that its original design intention is to promote human prosperity as soon as possible, but the way to achieve it is to make more money. Due to the limitations of the Omega team, it must personally take over the project, which not only achieves the goal faster, but also reduces the probability of others sabotaging the plan.
Tegmark believes that the reason why super artificial intelligence is in trouble is not because it is evil in nature, but because its methods are too high-level to be understood by humans.
Tegmark’s point of view eliminates the dimension of political economy pointed out by Jiang. Prometheus, a super-money-making tool, is actually the digital personification of global capitalism, and artificial intelligence does not naturally undertake such a mission.
Compatible with Egan and Jiang's scientific concepts and social concepts, they downplay the legendary color in their writing style, pursue philosophical speculation and thought experiments, and integrate them into the narration of daily life, making them appear more authentic and credible.
Jiang has adopted a two-line narrative in both "Two Sides of Truth" and "The Life Cycle of Software Bodies".
Two Sides of Truth combines anthropological observations of an ancient tribe with contrasts with the human condition in the digital age.
"The Life Cycle of a Software Body" interweaves the exploration of the dignity of artificial intelligence identity with the protagonist's moral and emotional lines.
The dilemma faced by the protagonist is: he hopes to give dignity to the two robots he adopted, and on the other hand, only by sacrificing them can he get back the collective welfare of the robot group and the work dignity of his colleagues whom he has a crush on; for the greater benefit in the future, He has to bear the infamy and negotiate with commercial companies.
The protagonists who fell into conflict finally realized that the path of artificial intelligence life should be left to them to decide.
The writer hints that the growth of robots and the growth of humans are actually the same process of exploration.
Guangming Daily Author: Chen Lei, assistant researcher at Beijing Academy of Social Sciences