Cultures of Fetishism (36 page)

1. Waseda has designed a “converbot” named Robita, which is capable of carrying on a conversation at a cocktail party.
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   Robita, who is nearly human- looking, not only speaks, but can listen, understand what is said to it, and respond appropriately—in these respects behaving more intelligently than some humans do at cocktail parties.
   

   At the 2005 Prototype Robot Exposition, Osaka University introduced Repliee Q1, a pretty, charming, well-dressed gynocoid with humanlike silicon skin who could flutter her eyelids, blink, speak, and even appear to breathe because of the subtle rising and falling of her breast.
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   Repliee looked exactly like a real-life human being. But people responded to this exact repli- cation of humanlike qualities with an eerie feeling of being in the presence of the uncanny—something unfriendly and inhuman.
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   The fantasy that robots can be equipped with human hearts, lungs, brains, stomachs, gall bladders, intestines, livers, and sexual organs was given expres- sion in the film
   Bicentennial Man
   , where the android, Andrew (whose metal body and face resembled a human’s right from the beginning), taught him- self how to design replicas of these organs and figure out how to transplant them into his own body. Thus Andrew, the android, with the assistance of a flesh-and-blood human scientist accomplice, breathed life into himself.
   

   No matter how close roboticists come to replicating human responses in androids, most of them admit that it will be quite some time before androids will be ready to take their place in the home. As of 2006, an insurmountable obstacle to building self-sufficient humanoid robots is their inability to pro- duce their own energy. Asimo, for example, clever and charming as it is, runs out of battery power in 10 minutes.
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   It is perfectly fine as a receptionist who sits at a desk all day long, probably because that desk or the wall behind it is outfitted with an electric outlet that Asimo can be plugged into.
   

   While they don’t exactly believe that they will be able to breathe life into robots, some Pygmalions of the robotic industry do have fantasies about
   

   endowing robots with “As-If” lifelike capacities. They predict that they might eventually be able to program androids with the capacities to under- stand and implement instructions on how to repair and build themselves. For instance, androids could be shown android-building websites and learn how to read and implement these instructions. They might be able to go online to check out android repair sites. They might even learn to check out each other’s bodily equipment and mend each other.
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   In a joking mood, one roboticist suggested that androids be programmed to obey a variant of Asimov’s three basic rules:
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   1. A robot must protect its existence at all costs.
      

   2. A robot must obtain and maintain access to a power source.
      

   3. A robot must continually search for better power sources.
      

Journalists familiar with movies such as
I, Robot
and
Bicentennial Man
, in which the android is able to recite or otherwise demonstrate its knowledge of Asimov’s three laws, often ask whether actual robots are endowed with a capacity to obey these laws. Rodney Brooks, in one of his less fantastical moods, says that “The simple answer is that they are not. And the reason is not that they are built to be malicious, but rather that we do not know how to build robots that are perceptive enough and smart enough to obey these three laws.”
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As Brooks, Breazeal, and other emergent artifical intelligence researchers interact with researchers in artificial life, so-called ALife, they are hoping to incorporate lifelike evolutionary processes into the construction of their robots. Like many robot engineers, they are interested in what ALife research might contribute to the construction of robots, who thus far remain fixed into whatever form they were originally created. Kismet will always be a head with large movable eyes and ears and mouth. Perhaps its descendants will one day acquire a movable body with movable arms and legs. Breazeal’s
anima machina
is a fantasy, but a fantasy that reaches out to the scientific world for verification and instrumentation.

A document sent to me by Breazeal’s post-Kismet research team, the Robotic Life Group, led me to conjecture that they are considering how they might bring something resembling a life process into their future construction of robots.

The document refers to this process as autopoiesis, which means literally “self-production,” from the Greek
auto
for self and
poiesis
for creation. The Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana are credited with the introduction of the term in 1973.
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According to Varela and Maturana, “An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (trans- formation and destruction) of components which (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine)

as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specify- ing the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”
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One of the factors that motivated Varela and Maturana to apply autopoiesis to self-production in machines was their understanding of the functioning of the biological cell. The eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various bio- chemical components such as nucleic acids and proteins and is organized into structures such as cell nucleus, organelles of various kinds, a cell membrane, and a cytoskeleton. These structures,
based on an external flow of molecultes and energy
, produce the components of the organized structure that gives rise to these components.
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An autopoietic system can be contrasted with an allopoietic system (such as a car factory), which uses components (raw mate- rials) to produce an organized structure (a car) which is something other than itself.

The key phrase in this autopoietic fantasy is “based on an external flow of molecules and energy.” For without that flow of external supplies to “feed” a physical structure, that structure, no matter how well-organized, will not be able to produce the components that maintain the structure. And, vice-versa, if the structure cannot be maintained, it will be unable to produce the com- ponents. The automatic endlessly flowing circle of continuous creation can- not function without an external supply of “food,” or “energy.” Although the system is potentially internally autopoietic, insofar as it is dependent on external supplies it is still allopoietic. Perhaps one day, in the distant future, the energy sources on which robots depend might be more organically alive than the batteries, electrical switches, and computer programs that now keep them energized. But they would still be somewhat dependent on their environment for some kind of “nourishment.”

Every now and then we are told about a possibility for making robots self- sufficient. One idea is to provide a robot with muscle fibers that can double as fuel cells. The robotic muscles would behave just like real muscles and power themselves instead of relying on batteries or electrical outlets. But even though these muscles have been created in the laboratory, no one has yet fig- ured out how to introduce them into the body of a robot. Furthermore, these muscles still require fuel like ethanol or alcohol to get them going, and another unsolved problem is how to control the amount of fuel that goes into the muscles. People have a lot of interesting ideas about how to make robots self sufficient, but the practical problems of how to put these ideas into action are always put off to the future.

Therefore, our most serious immediate problem is not that robots will replace humans. It will be a long, long time before humans might be replaced by intelligent robots—which, at this point, even though they can do the tango, play a trombone, answer e-mails, drive a truck, and explore the deep- blue sea, still have the intellectual capacities of an infant or young child. Even those that play chess and beat human competitors must be programmed by very smart humans.

From my point of view, as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, the most difficult moral and ethical dilemmas concern the many ways in which humans

are trying to develop the technology that would enable humans to become more like machines. As Natasha Vita-More, the founder and director of the Extropy Institute, describes how this could happen, her ideas sound very much like a bizarre conglomeration of all five principles of the fetishism strat- egy, with the necrophilic principle leading the pack. She proposes that the human body could be fused with machines by incorporating the metal- and silicon-based components that have been developed in the robotic and electronic technologies.
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To justify and rationalize her quirky proposal, Vita-More, whose surname has a fetching affinity to the philosophy underlying her Entropy Institute, introduces it by reciting all the usually cited benefits to the blind, the deaf, the mute, the paraplegic, the heart attack victims, the elderly, the mentally disabled, as well as to the nondisabled who have a full mouth of false teeth at seventy, who wear eyeglasses, who boast breast implants, who have faces enhanced by surgery, and skin made wrinkle-free and luminously youthful by deep chemical peels. But Vita-More’s proposal goes far beyond these picayune, one-by-one enhancements of the human body.

What I am proposing is to design a full body prototype that functions like a human body but is not 100 percent biological. Rather it is a whole body prosthetic that acts either as a spare body or an alternative body. This body “Primo” would house the brain and whatever organs and essential parts [that] would not be replaced. The other parts would be prosthetic, synthetic models working together; forming a system that acts to transport us just like our human body does today.
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When asked about the practicalities of a whole body prosthesis Vita-More again falls back on already existing robotic prostheses that turn out to look better and function better than the natural biological part. Such artificial bodies would be composed of “robotic computerized microchips, nanoro- bots, artificial intelligence and cosmetics.”
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She believes that after people see the advantages of something that can make life easier and better for them, they will want it. Most people want to live rather than die. If most of their body is no longer functioning properly, “I think most people will opt for Primo.”
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Primo’s simulation of flesh-and-blood life is the consummate illustration of “erogenous color drawing a mask on the skin.” In Primo, inanimate parts masquerade as animate life. But the tint of erotic color masks what could turn out to be a deadly practice. When we think about the consequences of humans turning in their malfunctioning but still living, carbon-based body parts for silicon-based robotic body parts, we should remind ourselves of the necrophilic principle.

The necrophilic principle of the fetishism strategy is evoked by the fantasy that living, animate beings are potentially dangerous. Therefore, animate flesh-and-blood creatures should be controlled by extinguishing their life energies altogether or, less drastically, by transforming these creatures into something resembling life—in the instance of Primo, silicon-based life.

Even Brooks, an ardent spokesman for silicon-based robotic technology, is worried about the belief system of some technologists, known as transhu- manism, or the extropianism of Vita-More’s Extropy Institute

Humans will go to great lengths to avoid an acceptance of death, of our personal mechanism grinding to a halt. So I am careful to try to separate the beliefs of extropians into those that are driven by ethnological imperatives and those that are driven by the fear of the unknown.

We are a long way from being able to download ourselves into computers or robots.
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Silicon products can pretend to be human, but they do not share the personal, cultural, and historical processes that go into the creation of an actual human being. Introducing silicon-based life as a substitute for human experience is dangerous not only to individual human beings but to the entire human species.

The element closest to carbon and, to some extent, also showing its capac- ity to form multiple bonds, is silicon. This has led (mostly science-fiction authors) to speculate that, in other solar systems, silicon-based life forms have already developed. However, silicon, the only element situated in the same column (IV A) as carbon on the Periodic Chart of the Elements because of their extensive similarities, has one major difference. And, it is this difference that will make it impossible for silicon-based life to supplant carbon-based life. Silicon-based life cannot produce fantasies. And, it is the human fantasy life that transmits erotic vitality to the carbon-based human body. Without erotic vitality, there is only the steady march to nothingness—even with a fully functioning silicon body encased within a sensitized silicon skin, and filled up with fully functioning mechanical body parts including genital organs. Silicon-based “creatures” might be capable of sexual behaviors, per- haps even a kind of reproductive capacity achieved through a hook-up with a computer program. However, since they cannot fantasize, they are eternally deprived of erotic experience. These bodies would be consigned, for all eter- nity, to a deathlike form of aliveness.

Finally, in order to fully appreciate the crucial differences between the artificial intelligence of robots and the natural intelligence of humans, we have to examine the meaning of the word “artificial.” Aside from the fact that artificial always implies something that is consciously fabricated to seem natural, artificial can have two distinct meanings. For example, there is “arti- ficial” as in silk, paper, or plastic flowers, which have been fabricated to look like natural flowers, and perhaps even to look more lifelike than some real flowers that sometimes begin to droop and die within a day. Artificial flowers give an illusion of life, but they are not really what they look like. If we touch them we don’t sense any life in them. When, however, we think about something like “artificial” light—a substitute for the natural force of sunlight—these electric bulbs, candles, gas-lights, and hurricane lamps do not look at all like sunlight, yet they give off the same effect as natural light and in that sense are more natural than artificial flowers.
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