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Monday, January 15, 2007
If I only had a heart
While I’m on the subject of robots, I might as well ask after another thing I seek: cases of robots who want to become ... human; a real, live boy. Before A.I., before Roy Baty, there was ... the Tin Woodman. From chapter 6:
During the rest of that day there was no other adventure to mar the peace of their journey. Once, indeed, the Tin Woodman stepped upon a beetle that was crawling along the road, and killed the poor little thing. This made the Tin Woodman very unhappy, for he was always careful not to hurt any living creature; and as he walked along he wept several tears of sorrow and regret. These tears ran slowly down his face and over the hinges of his jaw, and there they rusted. When Dorothy presently asked him a question the Tin Woodman could not open his mouth, for his jaws were tightly rusted together. He became greatly frightened at this and made many motions to Dorothy to relieve him, but she could not understand. The Lion was also puzzled to know what was wrong. But the Scarecrow seized the oil-can from Dorothy’s basket and oiled the Woodman’s jaws, so that after a few moments he could talk as well as before.
“This will serve me a lesson,” said he, “to look where I step. For if I should kill another bug or beetle I should surely cry again, and crying rusts my jaws so that I cannot speak.”
Thereafter he walked very carefully, with his eyes on the road, and when he saw a tiny ant toiling by he would step over it, so as not to harm it. The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.
“You people with hearts,” he said, “have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn’t mind so much.”
Here, incidentally, is a bit from L. Frank Baum’s introduction to the original 1900 edition:
... Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
Anyway. Other examples of robots who want to have a heart - soul, humanity? What is the first literary instance? First filmic occurence?
UPDATE: Before anyone points it out - yes, I am aware that A.I. is an updating of Pinocchio, which is earlier than The Wizard of Oz. The thing that strikes me about the Tin Woodman case, which maybe I would find already in Pinocchio if I bothered to check, is, first, a typical robot thought-experiment. Gradually take away flesh and replace it with prosthetics/cybernetics and at what point do you cease to have consciousness, mind, soul (whatever you happen to be thought-experimenting on that day.) By contrast, Pinocchio has a mind because, for whatever weird reason, he was made out of talking wood. Anyway, perhaps more interestingly - per the quoted passage - the Woodman instantiates the rather standard, broadly existentialist trope that what it takes to be human is to want/will to become human. Humans, like robots who want to become human, are those creatures who want to become what they are. The other way these things get played (Blade Runner, Bicentennial Man) is that to be human is to be mortal/prepared to die. Heideggerian being-towards-death, if you like.
Comments
There’s a Star Trek The Next Generation episode called ‘Tin Man’ which is all about this ‘robot who belongs with people’ thang, if I remember correctly.
“...to be human is to be mortal/prepared to die. Heideggerian being-towards-death...”
E voila. Marvin from Hitch-Hiker’s Guide.
Again, I ask about the relevance of Japanese fiction in Singapore. And, in that context, A. I. is most interesting. The term mecha appears in that film, which is, of course, Japanese. Back when it was Kubrick’s baby, he’d asked Osamu Tezuka to art direct the film; Tezuka declined. The origin myth for Tezuka’s Astro Boy, in both the manga and the anime (1960s series and 1980s series) involves a robot circus (like that in A. I.), and that, in turn, derives from Pinocchio, but I’d guess Tezuka got his Pinocchio from Disney.
Now, in Tezuka’s Metropolis (1949) manga, the central figure is Michy, an “artificial being” (which is different from an electromechanical robot, of which there are plenty in the story) and Michy is on a quest to find her father and to figure out whether or not he/she is a human being. The Astro Boy manga and anime pretty much swim in questions about the relationship between robots and humans and what’s really human anyhow?
You might want to take a look at Frederik L. Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia, Kodansha International, 1988. It’s out of print, but you should be able to find a used copy easily enough. I gives the history of robots in Japan (including mechanical automata) and makes it quite clear that the Japanese think about robots rather differently than we do.
When talking about robots and SF, Asimov is an obvious touchstone—can’t think off the top of my head, though, that he ever addressed this issue of a robot wanting to be human in any of his ficiton.
I got it wrong. Having seen and liked Astro Boy, Kubrick had asked Tezuka to design 2001, not A.I. The original impetus for A.I. was a 1969 story by Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," which does not have any obvious Pinocchio elements beyond the artificiality of David. The story ends with the news that the parents are to be allowed to have a real child. Whatever it is that finally happens to David, that’s not in the story. So, how’d the Pinocchio material enter the story? We know that Kubrick was familiar with Astro Boy and admired Tezuka’s work; so that’s an obvious possibility. And we know that the term, mecha, is Japanese. But what actually happened, as far as I know, that’s buried in the archives. The possibility remains that A.I. is heavily indebted to a Japanese model, as is a rather different film, The Matrix.
Here’s a paragraph from a review of the English translation of Astro Boy; the writer doesn’t seem to be aware of the possiblity that A.I. owes a direct debt to Astro:
On many levels, A.I. is an unintentional homage to Astro Boy. In A.I., the robot boy David eases the suffering of Monica and Harry Swinton, a couple who are distraught over their incurably ill son, Martin. In Astro Boy, Doctor Boynton constructs a robot in the likeness of his son, Toby, who was killed in a car accident. In A.I., David leaves his adoptive family after Martin recovers. In Astro Boy, Boynton sends his child robot away after he realizes that the ageless Astro can’t replace his dead son. A.I’s David gets into trouble at a “flesh fair,” a carnival where robots are destroyed for the entertainment of human audiences. In an early episode, Astro Boy battles a cruel ringmaster who runs a circus where robots are forced to fight each other. Later, Astro Boy is rescued by Doctor Elefun, a robot rights activist who teaches Astro Boy to use his powers for good.
Respectfully, Rocco, John did mention “The Bicentennial Man.”
I stand corrected, Josh—although I did say “off the top of my head.”
Following Adam, if it’s the Star Trek franchise, Commander Data’s attempts to become (more) human provided a standard story line that showed up several times in whichever TV series he was in and perhaps in one of those movies as well.
Bill: I just bought a copy of Schodt’s “Inside the Robot Kingdom” for a whopping 64 cents plus shipping on Amazon. Thanks for letting us know about it.
I think both the American conception is sort of a Theseus’s ship idea, and John mentions with the Tin Woodman case. Replace the planks and it’s the same “ideal” ship. The old saw is that to be a more “human” robot you “gotta have heart” but something probably human slips away when we become completely uploaded to some sort of hardware.
As for examples from literature, I thought about Faeirie Queene as a sort of Early Modern Science Fiction. The Faerie Queen is often interpreted to be an anthromorphized printing press, spitting out “books and papers” like a Lexmark on speed. Her brood, feeding off of her own their own mother’s blood is like a nanotech-like swarm. But Errour will survive because of her ability to kill mechanically and without mercy and it does not seem that she has the ability to change. Perhaps what is human will slip away if consciousness expands too far outward or is too narrow to grow, as in the case of simple robots or perfectly evolved organisms. The Cylons on the New Battlestar Galactica also claim to have compassion and develop religion. While the humans call the AI “toasters” they both seem to display the same range of emotions. Apparently the “meat” doesn’t matter in this case. I am not sure if this is true. We’ll just have to wait around and see.
Correction: Errour from The Faerie Queen
CH: “The old saw is that to be a more “human” robot you “gotta have heart” but something probably human slips away when we become completely uploaded to some sort of hardware.”
I’ll continue my recent habit of noting literary tropes that have become role-playing game mechanics. There was one of the cyberpunk RPGs, I forget which, in which characters could replace body parts with various highly-effective-in-combat mechanical ones. However, each replacement took away part of your basic humanity, and if you replaced too much, you’d go crazy and start attacking everyone indiscriminately. The limit on how much you could replace was set by how humane, or empathetic, or sensitive, your personality was beforehand. Therefore, as the sterotypical joke went, to become the ultimate killing machine you had to start out as Alan Alda. Much hilarity ensued as people envisioned special training courses in appreciation of lyrical poetry for the pre-op Special Forces and the like.
But of course the laugh about the game then becomes, in some form, the reality now—soldiers are sent out ostensibly to empathetically “nation build”, shoot people and get shot at, and get PTSD. There is something about the literalization of literary tropes into game mechanics that can serve as a useful mirror for how cultural tropes become literalized.
Didn’t Frankenstein’s monster want to be human?
I’m told that the movie Android has this theme.
ack! should have commented on this post rather than previous ("I won’t tell you surprise ending"). See that post for comments on Vdaer, Data, and Jeff Noon.
uh, ahem (sheepishly cutting and pasting)...brought this over from “I won’t tell you the surprise ending...”
Perhaps an interesting subtext you could introduce in your class along with the “absolute” robots (pulled that term out of thin air, hence the quotes), are those characters “in the middle"- the human/robot hybrids. An obvious example is Data from TNG, always in the “process” of becoming human- mannerisms, skin tone (is it just me, or did Data become a lesser shade of green as the series went on?), emotional development, etc. Jeff Noon’s Vurt trilogy (Vurt, Nymphomation, Pollen)offers labeled hybrids: “Robodog,” “Robovurt,” “Roboman,” where the motto “pure is poor” is a defining quality of existence (with regards to the Robos, they get a “taste” for the plastic and metal fused onto them, much like people adding on tattoo after tattoo). Finally, the ultimate example of Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies- “more machine now than man.”
Allow me to propose John Crowley’s short, “Gone” (F&SF 9/96 & fiftiversary, & Novelties & Souvenirs), as an inversion of sorts (robots who want humans to become ...) with trout mask replications (gotta have Beefheart!)