Mecha Minstrel Show
Sometime in the future, a few lucky folks live in a floating paradise above the garbage-strewn, hellishly postapocalyptic surface of the Earth. Well, it’s a paradise for some: the meatbag humans have been freed from the drudgery of the workaday world by the armies of robots who do everything from cook and clean to crash-test flying Jetson-style automobiles. Mostly, though, the androids appear to be put to work slaving at the feet of the humans, presenting happily subservient faces to the meatbags while grumbling to their own clearly fully sentient and emotional selves about how they “hate” their jobs, or are “freaked out” by disturbing things the humans do, or how they wish o wish they could have a different life.
It’s creepy, and it’s weird, and it’s something like a mecha minstrel show, particularly in how the film pretends to a “robots are people too” theme yet fails itself to treat them as such. It’s as if someone in the 1850s had made an anti-slavery movie that nevertheless featured blackface minstrelry because, you know, it’s still hilarious, right?
Oh, and did I mention? Astro Boy is for kids!
I’m not familiar with the ur anime, cult favorite 1960s Japanese cartoon about a robot boy that is the basis for this American retread, but I’m guessing it wasn’t this icky. And it may not have been this nonsensical, either, because a lot of the nonsense appears to stem from the attempts by screenwriters David Bowers (Flushed Away), who also directs, and Timothy Harris to shoehorn the story of Toby, later Astro, into the “robots are people too” theme.
See, Dr. Tenma (the voice of Nicolas Cage: G-Force, Knowing) is the resident scientific genius of Metro City, and when his boy, Toby (the voice of Freddie Highmore: The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass), is killed — in an accident that is, frankly, entirely the fault of Tenma as both a negligent scientist and a negligent father — he’s so griefstricken that he builds a robot version of Toby. (Mom? There’s no mention of her whatsoever.) He uploads the kid’s memories (there’s no word either on why he had downloaded the kid’s memories in the first place) into the android, who believes he is the meatbag Toby, and tries to pretend that everything’s just hunky-dory.
But if Tenma wants to pretend that this is his lost son, and if this culture has such disdain for robots, even if they are useful as slave labor, why the hell would Tenma trick the metal Toby out with such bizarre robotic accoutrements such as jet-powered feet, superstrength, and the ability to hear and understand robot language? Was Tenma eagerly anticipating, actually, the moment at which he would reject the robot “son” precisely because he’s so emphatically not human just as Toby, now having adopted the robot name Astro, is coming to terms with his inherent machine-ness?
Nah, of course not! Astro needs jet-powered feet, laser cannons in his hands, and machine guns in his butt so he can fight other robots! The bad robots powered by evil red energy instead of nice blue energy!
It gets worse, actually. Astro gets exiled to the garbage-strewn surface where he meets more terrible people who “rescue” trashed robots from Metro City to put into android gladiatorial combat games. Oh, and he meets the members of the Robot Revolution Front, which the film intends as the plucky comic relief — oh, those wacky rebels, demanding they be treated like the sentient, self-aware beings they are, and not like chattel: adorable!
The only excuse that can be made for Astro Boy is that it obviously has no idea how unsettling it is. Nor how drearily dull it is. That may be a blessing for it, for not for us.
This review pretty much encapsulates why I read Flickfilosopher. I have no words right now.
Thank you, MAJ.
This review is so good (as an essay, not that the review is positive) that now I almost want to go and see the movie just to see what you said!
But, that is “almost”. I never saw the cartoon and have no emotional connection to it and honestly don’t want to spend $12 and an hour and a half on something with this description.
Still, WHAT a fun read! Thanks, MaryAnn!
:-)
Just read the original critically acclaimed and beloved manga that started it all. It ran from 1952 to 1968. Osamu Tezuka’s iconic art style still holds up, and the writing, for most of the chapters, is fantastic. You should also check out the 1963 anime. It’s really good, and even though the animation is a bit low-quality Hanna-Barbera style, the plot is still 1,000,000 times better than anything Hanna-Barbera has ever written. It is also the first anime in history. You can buy it on 2 DVD sets, and you can also watch some episodes with English subtitles, which are better than the crappy English dub.
Both the manga and the three animes are much better than the movie.
Rent it in six months, to see how awful it is. :->
Seriously, though: Wow. I just pound this stuff out, and I’m so glad you guys like it so much.
I might do that if I could watch it with other people. Hey, Accounting Ninja! You live in NYC?
But, even so, it would have to be as bad as Cage in The Wicker Man … man in a bear suit, the bees! … for me to enjoy it for cheese and your description doesn’t give me that impression.
Yeah, we like your stuff. You think I come to this site for my health? ;-)
Huh.
It didn’t work in A.I.
It didn’t work in Caprica.
It didn’t work in lord only knows how many SF stories and novels.
You think we’ll ever learn?
Where ‘we’ is humanity. One of my favorite horribly over-used themes from Outer Limits et al was “Don’t piss off the computer in charge of life support.” Even if there’s No Way! that computer could be sentient. But we’ll never learn…
Speaking of writing this stuff, I just finished “The Writer’s Tale.” Fascinating! Thanks for posting about it.
@LaSargenta: Unfortunately no, but I’m not too far. I’m up in bucolic New England. It’s actually pretty beautiful up here right now, with all the foliage and smell of crisp fall apples and leaves on the breeze.
@MAJ: No, it is WE who are glad! lol. Before I discovered this site, I’d be thinking of this sort of shit all the time about movies, but no one else seemed to! But here, there’s no such thing as “thinking too much” about a movie and the messages underneath. There is no end to the philosophizing…as it were. And I love it.
And with this review, it just really embodied everything I like about your reviews, especially as it pertains to sci-fi and other geekery. Should I mention that I love robot stories?? For some reason they really speak to me.
Yeah, the Robot Revolution Front was NOT in the original work.
The Astro Boy comic book, published in Japan in the 1950s, was the original work.
You should try reading the original comic, which was published in English in the United States by Dark Horse Comics.
Are we sure that a computer could never be sentient? I’m not sure we are sure of that. If sentience is an emergent property of the functioning of the biological computers of our brains, I don’t see that it’s so remote a likelihood that it could be an emergent property of a silicon computer.
But that wasn’t the point I was making in my review. It’s not the technical issues that don’t make sense here, it’s the cultural and social context of the film. It’s as if — to extend my racial metaphor — Toby died in 1850s Atlanta and Tenma resurrected him as a small black boy. It just… boggles the mind.
Me too! That’s why I think technical issues — as interesting as they can be — aren’t necessarily a big deal (depending on the story). Because there’s obviously something metaphoric about robot stories (which goes back to at least *Frankenstein,* probably) that speaks to us in ways that resonate.
Actually, artificial intelligence is possible. Several important intellectuals said so. For example, Stephen Hawking (RIP), Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk said so.
Did you just “well, actually” someone who agrees with you? Christ.
I highly recommend that you read the original critically acclaimed Astro Boy manga that ran from 1952 to 1968. The iconic art style of Osamu Tezuka (the creator of Astro Boy, who sadly died in 1989 of stomach cancer) still holds up to this very day. The writing, for most chapters, is fantastic, and better than the movie’s writing. In the manga and the animes, you actually get to care for the robots. Also, in the manga and the original Japanese versions of the animes, Dr. Tenma’s first name wasn’t Bill Tenma, it was Umataro Tenma (Tenma is Japanese for heaven-horse , his son’s name in the manga and in the original Japanese versions of the anime, his son’s name wasn’t Toby Tenma, it was Tobio Tenma, and he wasn’t 13, he was about 6-to-9 years old. To bio’s mother and Dr. Gemma’s wife Hoshie Tenma made appearances in the first chapters of the manga. Dr. Tenma was still very neglectful, but Tobio died in a completely different way, he didn’t die in a military experiment gone wrong, he died in a traffic accident (keep in mind, at the time the manga was written, airbags were not yet invented), there was no blood, just bruises. Meanwhile, at the Ministry of Science, Dr. Tenma got a phone call that said that Tobio has been hit, Dr.Tenma panicked and ran to where the accident happened. When he saw his son’s dead body, he embraced him, and cried. It actually makes you feel sad for Tobio. Later, he had the idea of creating a robot that looks just like his son, and the whole staff at the Ministry of Science helped him accomplish that feat. Several were skeptical, but one said “There’s no stopping Tenma, not with that look on his face”. Eventually, the robot was completed, and then Dr.Tenma gave him life with electricity. He woke up right on the spot, and right in the spot Dr.Tenma taught him how to speak. They lived happily for many years, until Tenma discovered a flaw on the design of his robot son. While the other kids grew up, the robot copy did not grow a single solitary inch, and Dr.Tenma started showing disdain towards him. Later he sold the robot to the cruel robot circus ringmaster Ham Egg (which in the manga and the three animes he’s depicted as a tall, lanky human wearing a Tuxedo and a top hat). Sometime later, he could be seen in Ham Egg’s circus as a young robot performer named “Astro”, there he was found by the new head of the Ministry of Science (Dr. Tenma was expelled from the Ministry because he was losing his sanity), Professor Ochanomizu (known in the movie as Dr.Olefin), a brilliant scientist and robot rights activist (trust me, robots are going to need rights in the future if we do don’t want them to kill us). He adopted Astro as his son, and then he discovered he had weapons, known as his “seven amazing powers”: 100,000 horsepower strength, rockets on his arms and legs that allow him the power of flight, flashlight eyes, an IQ so high that he can tell who’s good and who’s evil, he had no laser cannons, he could shoot powerful laser beams from his index fingers (that ability is known as the finger laser), the laser cannon power was introduced in the 2003 anime, but it was only in one arm and instead of firing multiple shots, it fires one massive laser beam, it’s a little similar to Dragon Ball’s Kamehameha. (fun fact: the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, is a big fan of Astro Boy) the ability to translate 60 languages, he can increase his hearing up to 1000X more powerful than a human’s, and two machine guns in his butt (while it may seem unorthodox, that power actually makes for a really good surprise attack, no one suspects the butt guns, I mean why would they?). Dr. Tenma put those weapons into Astro because he was too afraid to lose another son. Those weapons are for self-defense. He’s a pacifist, but will have to fight when the villain won’t listen to reason. And soon he took on the name Astro Boy. At least that’s how the video by Dark Horse Comics (the American publishers of the Astro Boy manga) says it happened. There were no blue cores/red cores in the manga nor in the animes, in those, Astro was nuclear-powered hence his Japanese name, Tetsuwan Atomu, which translates to Mighty Atom. You should also check out the 1963 anime, it’s really good too, even if the animation quality was Hanna-Barbera-ish, it still had a great plot. It’s available on two DVD sets. I’d recommend buying the Ultra Collector’s Editions they include a lot more bonuses. Also, in the DVD sets, some episodes can be viewed in English subtitles that are better that the crappy English dub that all animes. I really hope you read the manga and watch the animes.
Paragraph breaks are our friends.
Thanks.
Not interested. And not the point. I didn’t review half-century-old manga. I reviewed a 21st-century movie.
I never said that you should review it. You made that up. I just said that you should READ it. Preferably in an armchair, with a steaming cup of coffee. And if you don’t care about the source material and know nothing about it, then why did you review the movie in the first place? The original Astro Boy is a Japanese cultural icon. Please don’t base this film off your judgement of the manga or the animes. This movie has little to do with the manga or the animes, and that’s one of the reasons why it sucked. And in the manga and the animes Astro did not look white. I’m also disappointed that Astro Boy’s iconic theme song wasn’t included in the movie, not even in the credits.
Several children who read the manga were inspired to become manga authors themselves. For example, Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dr.Slump and Dragon Ball, is a big fan of Astro Boy. Astro Boy has also inspired several characters similar to him, for example, the most famous robot in video game history, Mega Man. Legendary animator Walt Disney watched the 1963 anime and loved it. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, and also a big fan of Disney, met Walt Disney himself at the 1964 World’s Fair, there Disney said that he wanted to make something just like Astro Boy. Legendary film director Stanley Kubrick watched the 1963 anime as well, and he loved it so much that he sent a letter to Tezuka inviting him to be the art director for his next movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although flattered by Kubrick’s invitation, Tezuka could not afford to leave his studio for a year to live in England, so he had to turn it down. Although he could not work on it, he loved the film, and would play its soundtrack at maximum volume to keep himself awake during long nights or work. On April 7, 2003, the Japanese city of Niiza registered him as an actual resident, literally making Astro Boy a legal Japanese citizen. In 2004, he was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. The Robot Hall of Fame is an American hall of fame that recognizes notable robots in various scientific fields and general society. The organization was established in 2003 by the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, which is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aside from Astro Boy, other well-known robots and computers, both real and fictional, were also inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame, for example, HAL 9000, the Maschinenmensch from the 1927 German silent film Metropolis, ASIMO, the humanoid robot from Honda, the Terminator T-800, the French robot Nao, WALL-E, the three Mars rovers Spirit, Sojourner, and Opportunity, RD-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars, Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, Sony’s robot dog AIBO, David from Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Gort the alien robot from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, the Lego Mindstorms, Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek, among others. Astro Boy was ranked 43rd on Empire magazine’s “Top 50 Comic Book Characters”, making him the only manga character on the list. IGN ranked Astro Boy as the fourth greatest anime character in its “Top 25 Greatest Anime” Characters list. The 1963 anime was ranked 86th on IGN’s “Top 100 Animated Series” list. And the renowned magazine Cinefantastique included the 1963 anime in its “Top 10 Essential Animations” list.
The real Astro Boy is one of the greatest manga/anime characters to have ever been drawn/animated, and he deserves more respect than the one you give him.
You are treading on my last nerve.
If you are unable to have an adult conversation, you can leave. Or I can ban you.
I was not mocking you. I was just saying that you should read the manga peacefully. I borrowed those words from Alan Moore, who disliked the Watchmen movie and said about the Watchmen comic book: “My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It’s been made in a certain way, and designed to be read in a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee.” I hate it when people jump to conclusions.
Then learn how to express yourself better.
There is no “should” about it. I am not interested in reading the manga.
Alright, I get it, you are not interested in the manga. I think it’s time I should end this conversation. Goodbye.
Alright, I get it, you are not interested in the manga. I think it’s time I should end this conversation. Goodbye.
You need to understand, I’m not telling you to review to read the manga for fun, (even though it’s really good), you need to study the manga in order to understand who Astro Boy really is. Because if I were a critic and I decided to review an adaptation without knowing anything about the source material, I’d be lost. For example, if I decided to review the Resident Evil movies, I’d first need to play the games, or at least watch someone play them. It’s more or less like studying for a school test. Now I’m not trying to offend you, I simply want you to understand.
The people who made the movie made it for a mass audience, not just folks who’ve read the manga. So people who are reading MaryAnn’s review need to know whether they’ll enjoy the film even if they haven’t read the source material. The comics may add to their enjoyment (they’re classics for a reason), and to their understanding of what’s on the screen, but they aren’t a requirement for everyone who sees the movie, or everyone who reviews it.
Ok. I understand. Thanks.
Looks like our friend has deleted ALL his messages. *shrug*
Snowflake.
No.
Isn’t a minstrel show a white person putting on blackface and mocking black people? In the movie I saw no humans dressing up as robots and mocking them, or vice versa.
I am no longer interested in interacting with you after your bad-faith behavior of deleting all your comments. Quit wasting my time.
I’m sorry. I deleted my comments to pretend our conversation never existed. I now realize I’ve done wrong in deleting my comments, and for that, I humbly apologize.
LOL. No, I don’t.
Guess what? I’ve reviewed some of the *Resident Evil* movies, and I’ve never played a single one of those games.
YOU need to understand that movies have to stand on their own.
All right, I understand. Thank you.
I myself should also read comics and manga peacefully, and so should everyone.
My Asperger syndrome also makes me very obsessive.
After you read my reply in its entirety, please reply me.
Dude, it’s unlikely that anyone will read your wall-of-text dissertation in its entirety. And she’ll reply to you or not, as she pleases. Don’t pester her to reply, you just look like a creep.
Also, you’re cluttering up an 8-year-old thread and saying the same thing over and over. You’ve made your point, you can stop now.
No need to be mean.
Says the guy who says things like “important intellectuals that are a lot smarter than you are.”
Sorry.
You can already delete this comment that points out the mean stuff I said in the other reply, which by the way I just deleted. Let’s just pretend this never happened.
Dude, your apology is already on the record, so just let it be. Stop telling us to do things.
Bluejay is entirely correct. Dissertations are for your own web site, not comments elsewhere. And you don’t need to post the same comment over and over again. We got it the first time.
Sorry about that. Just trying to prove my point. You see, I have Asperger syndrome, and because of it, I obsess about stuff easily.
Robots can make a good metaphor for intolerance and discrimination. The original Astro Boy manga and its three anime adaptations have proven so. It’s just that the movie executed it poorly. So can other races that also originated in the comic book realm. For example, the mutants found in the X-Men comic books published by Marvel. If you read the X-Men comics, or watch the movies, please, please don’t call them “a mutant minstrel show”.
Holy shit, are you lecturing me on the history of bigotry in science fiction?
And he didn’t even read any of these reviews or essays before he started instructing you on how to write:
https://www.flickfilosopher.com//?s=X-men&x=0&y=0
No, but I did watch most of the X-Men movies. I watched the first one, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand (which sucked), a few seconds of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which sucked too), X-Men: First Class, The Wolverine, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. I loved all of them except for The Last Stand, and Origins.
Sadly I am old enough to remember the 1960s cartoon on its original release. At a time when the concept of cartoons for adults hadn’t even occurred to anyone in the west, AstroBoy was tackling issues like segregation, racism, the urban poor and a host of other topics – all played out in the background of what was primarily your typical superhero caper cartoon.
This show first introduced me to science fiction and its power as social commentary as well as its “no limits” storytelling. Sci-fi has turned into a life long love of mine so thanks MAJ for the warning not the let this movie stain my rose coloured memories of AstroBoy.
@ MAJ: Older than Frankenstein, go to the stories of the Golem.
Ah, sorry. I was unclear. I meant the characters would believe that the computers couldn’t become sentient, and therefore would sign their own deathwarrants when the they proceed to make the computer angry (or jealous, or…)
It had nothing to do with Astro Boy, it was me wandering off on a tan… oo, shiny!
Tangents are good! Very soon, when the move to Movable Type 4 is complete (it’s happening off to the side, in the background, but slowly), we will have threaded comments, and then we’ll be able to go off on tangents galore.
Good point.
In other words, it sounds like a sci-fi version of Dexter–with robots!
I wonder if he has a foster half-sister named Deb…
In the the manga and animes, he has a younger sister named Uran, along with two brothers known as Cobalt and Chi-tan.
MaryAnn,
I wouldn’t hijack your thread, but you explicitly gave us permission…
Computer sentience (actually AI) is my profession, and I don’t believe that we will have sentient computers. Even more importantly, I don’t think we should try. You may argue that sentience is an emergent property of the computers in our brains, but I say that sentience is an emergent property of being alive. And (thread meld!) unless we want to create Frankensteins, computers will never be alive. It’s the creating Frankensteins that I’m afraid of – nanobiology has advanced to the point that we might be able to make artificial life in our lifetime. Once this artificial life has been born, we won’t be able to stop or control it, and that’s just a rat’s nest of problems we don’t need. Though it would probably make for some good movies.
Actually, important intellectuals that are a lot smarter than you are, such as Stephen Hawking (may he rest in peace), Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have said that artificial intelligence is possible, and that if we’re not careful with it, it will destroy us all.
1. How would you know how smart misterb is?
2. What does his intelligence have to do with his argument?
3. Your reliance on an argument of authority would be considered a logical fallacy in some circles so why rely on such arguments?
4. It’s been my experience that smart people aren’t any more immune to saying things that are wrong or inaccurate than people who are not so smart.
I’m sorry.
And of course, he goes back and edits his comment to remove the source of your complaint, rendering your own comment nonsensical. How annoying. Posted comments should remain on the record, for coherence’s sake.
For the record, the original statement was “important intellectuals that are a lot smarter than you are.”
I already deleted my mean comment and apologized. So you can already delete both of your comments that pointed out the mean stuff I said.
I’ve just deleted my offensive comments, and before that, I apologized for them. Let’s just pretend this never happened.
Also, you criticize my comments (rightfully) yet you voted for Donald Trump, who posts things far more offensive than the ones I post and deletes them faster than you can say “we need to build a wall”. (Which by the way, I strongly disapprove of. Trump hates Latinos for no reason other than him being racist and wants them out of the country, even the ones who came legally. I myself am a Latino ((a Honduran, to be exact)), and that will make it harder for me to move from Honduras, ((which, even though I love its culture, it’s filled to the brim with violent crimes and poverty, destroying any chances for me to live a successful life. I’m planning on moving from Honduras to the United States to live a better future, but Donald Trump is making it a lot harder for me to move than it should be.)) And that’s why I hate Donald Trump.) Trump says nasty things which became infamous like for example, “grab ’em by the pussy”. It’s baffling that most Americans voted for Trump.
I did not vote for Trump. Why the hell do you think that? How do you even know I’m American?
Most Americans didn’t. The Electoral College fucked up.
I share your sentiments about Trump but they’re irrelevant to this movie review. If you’re going to ramble on about other topics then I’m done with this conversation.
Ok. Bye.
Sorry.
misterb: I’m personally of the belief that it’s inevitable. Human curiosity is one day going to develop a computer that can rewrite and rewire itself, or create a biological organism capable of human cognition, just by virtue of curiosity and the desire for profit. Heck, we might even find ourselves breaking a language barrier with an existing species on Earth, or contacting alien life.
I think the real challenge is going to be to expand out definition of a “Person”. We’ve always considered “People” to be a subset of humanity; the same sex, religion, skin color or origin as the authorities. We still can’t come to terms with homosexuals and transgendered as “People” deserving of the full range of rights and freedoms as the rest of us: How will we deal with those that are explicitly not human, but capable of intelligent interaction?
I love movies and stories that discuss ideas like that. This sound like it ignores the issue rather horrifically.
I don’t think an AI could happen accidentally, but whether or not a sentient computer could occur is going to depend upon how you define the word. If you define it as self aware, do you define self aware as being able to look at itself? Then if a computer program and look at itself, fix itself, improve itself and so on, it is on the road towards AI.
If you define being sentient as including emotions, then an electronic computer could not, because emotions are chemically based. Any arguement about AI can quickly turn into an argument about the semantics.
Well, it kind of worked in Charles Stross Accelerando and in Hamiltons Commonwealth-cycle. (Althoug it was only a backup in the latter series).
But what is “being alive”? It’s been said that life is just the universe’s way of keeping meat fresh. If sentience is just an accidental side effect of the operations of our brains, I don’t see why — on a theoretical level — it couldn’t be an accidental side effect of the operations of brain that’s not made out of meat.
I mean, we just don’t know enough about what sentience *is* to even begin to explain it, or to say that it couldn’t be possible in other situations.
Who says sentience has to include the ability to feel emotions? (It’s probably safe to assume — as anyone who has intimate, long-term experience with animals can testify — that emotions of a sort can be present without sentience being involved. Anyone who has lived with cats and/or dogs can tell you that they most certainly have emotions of a kind.) Who says emotions couldn’t be an emergent property of reactions that are not chemically based? Who says computers couldn’t be chemically based?
There’s a lot of assumptions in that statement, Paul, and I don’t see how a one of them is necessarily valid.
Stephen Hawking, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have said that artificial intelligence is possible, and they also said that if we’re not careful, it could destroy us all.
Oh, well, if Bill Gates said it…
Paul is right – any argument about sentience quickly turns into an argument about semantics. In fact, the science is inseparable from the philosophy on this one.
But let me challenge MaryAnn on one of her statements. She seems to imply that animals, particularly domesticated animals, are not sentient. By my definition, that’s just not true. Animals are capable of independently inferring a theory of mind and attributing it to another being. There’s no logical way to do that without having a self-image, and if a being has a self-image and is capable of independent action based on its knowledge of its situation in the world, then it’s sentient.
Today’s computers fail this test because they aren’t independent; unless programmed, they don’t do anything. Frankly, I can’t think of a good reason to have computers act independently. We already have plenty of people; why add electronic ones?
Bwaahaha! Now that’s going to be stuck in my head along with
“This is my timey-wimey detector. Goes “ding!” when there’s stuff.”
I haven’t read anything about attributions of sentience concerning cats and dogs, and having spent lots of time around both, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen any evidence of sentience in them, either. I’ve known *smart* animals — I had to put child locks on my kitchen cabinets to keep one cat out of them — but that’s not the same as sentient.
Chimps and dolphins, yes, there seems to be excellent evidence for their sentience.
Let’s take a term, say the the term “duck,” and redefine it to include that which we now name as “swan.”
Swans are ducks.
Sorry, dudes, but you can’t make animals and AI’s sentient just by expanding the definition of the term “sentient.”
It is NOT an abstract term.
I didn’t make up my version of sentience – I went to the ultimate source – Wikipedia. My version of Godwin’s law says that he who quotes Wikipedia wins.
Wikipedia says there are animal lovers’ versions of sentience vs sci-fi versions – I guess we’ve all declared our allegiances.
Star Wars is another example of obviously-sentient robots treated as slaves, with the moral implications just swept under the rug and nobody even considering that this maybe shouldn’t be so. As with everything else, the prequels made this worse by introducing the idea of human(-oid) slavery, which was viewed as bad and something to escape from. Ani earns his freedom but keeps the robot slave.
As far as why Tenma would have saved a copy of his boys memories, if he wasn’t planning on robotifying him all along… Maybe he just had a Dr. Venture mentality regarding his son and the potential for disaster, to wit: “Look, if you have a clumsy child, you make them wear a helmet. If you have death prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.”
On a different note, “[sentience] is NOT an abstract term” makes me laugh. It’s one of the most abstract terms there is! It’s even more abstract than “intelligence”, another word we can’t even define with any precision except to say that we (like to think we) recognize it when we see it.
Definitions you’ll find in Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries vary from “responsive to sense impressions” (applies to most animals), “able to experience emotion” (clearly applies to cats and dogs) to “self-aware” (dogs and to a lesser extent cats have demonstrated they have a sense of self), to “choice-making consciousness” (which could apply depending on how you look at it). Seriously, acting like there’s some kind of empirical definition of “sentient” that makes applying it to dogs clearly invalid is laughable.
Last thing, MaryAnn, about AI and sentient computers. One thing to keep in mind is that AI researchers tend to be pretty pessimistic about “Strong AI” (e.g. HAL 9000) since despite many advances in “Weak AI”, e.g. machine learning and expert systems, we don’t appear to be anywhere close to producing HAL. We really have no idea even how. It could be that computer sentience is possible, but not until we have a better grasp of the algorithms (and waving our hands and saying “emergent behavior” may not be enough). I don’t think it’s impossible impossible, but maybe unlikely in the near term? In any case, at the end of the day, whether the machine is “really” sentient will be as important as whether it is “really” intelligent — if it appears to be then for all intents and purposes it is.
It’s basically the same as whether we really have free will. Philosophically, it’s an open and possibly unanswerable question. Practically, we appear to have free will so what else really matters?
–“Definitions you’ll find in Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries vary from “responsive to sense impressions” (applies to most animals), “able to experience emotion” (clearly applies to cats and dogs) to “self-aware” (dogs and to a lesser extent cats have demonstrated they have a sense of self), to “choice-making consciousness” (which could apply depending on how you look at it). Seriously, acting like there’s some kind of empirical definition of “sentient” that makes applying it to dogs clearly invalid is laughable.”
Given the subject at hand, I was thinking of “sentience” in the way the term is used in psychology, computer science, etc. Sure, you can take a smattering of dictionary definitions (i.e., popular usage), roll in the wishful thinking of animal rights activists, and broaden the definition to meaninglessness.
I never said applying the term to dogs is “clearly invalid.” But whether it *does* apply is still hotly debated, and those who debate and research it are not merely arguing semantics, as you are doing.
Well, that’s it. Nothing more to discuss, if “sentience” can include anything we want it to include.
Thank you, Mr. B. Yes, I wasn’t so focused on making an argument as pointing out that the argument depends upon the definition of the word.
I expressly said “electronic computers” because I am aware that computers might use “wetware” instead, and a “wetware” computer, if sufficently and possibly impossibly advanced, might feel emotions.
And since every human emotion has a chemical at its base, even spiritual ones, then I feel safe saying a chemical is needed for an emotion until an alternative example is found or even explained as possible. I disregard examples from SF about emotional robots, for as fond as I am of Data (for example), there is no explanation as to how the emotion chip worked. Even if an electronic or quantum computer achieved intelligence and self awareness, it would have a “light of the mind, cold and planetary.” (Sylvia Plath, a cool phrase about something else entirely)
Your belief that there is a well-defined specification for sentience in psychology or especially (LOL) computer science is fallacious.
Of course it is hotly debated whether dogs are “sentient”, but a great deal of that argument is based around the fact that we simply do not know what “sentience” is. Our definition is haphazard and subjective at best. By saying there is some strict empirical definition (when there isn’t), and that suggesting the term applies to a broader variety of things means we’re necessarily “redefining” the term, I feel it is you who are making the semantic argument. But semantic arguments only work for well-defined terms.
With regard to computers, this is the essence of the Turing Test. When will we know that computers are “intelligent” or “self aware”? When we can no longer distinguish that they are not. Whether they are “actually” sentient by whatever unstated definition you are using is rather immaterial to the practical reality of apparent sentience.
This is a philosophical argument, not a semantic one. These are truly abstract concepts. Intelligence is that which appears intelligent. Sentience is that which appears sentient. Can you prove you yourself are sentient in any other way? If you have some objective, empirical definition of sentience then stop hiding it from science!
I will take that as given. The question then is: What are these chemicals doing that cannot be effectively simulated? Already we can simulate the interactions of complex proteins with extreme predictive power. The main limitation is computing power. Assume that our physics is accurate for every meaningful interaction, and that we have a computer powerful enough to simulate a human brain (or even a whole body and all external stimuli) down to every quark at an arbitrary level of precision. Why could this simulation not have emotion?
Is it because of quantum mechanics? Is it that the random way the simulation collapses waveforms is different than the way the real chemical does? Why does that create emotion? Is this a circular version of the Consciousness Causes Collapse interpretation?
Is it because of Chaos Theory, which says in a chaotic system you can never have enough precision to ensure you don’t get wildly different results? But why do minute variations in the real chemicals not result in a brain with emotion vs a lifeless lump? And if space-time turns out to be quantized, then there will be a practical limit to precision, and we truly will be able to model the brain exactly.
I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see how anything could be happening in a “wetware” brain that couldn’t possibly happen in a “hardware” brain.
Though if brute-forcing intelligence by simulating a brain is the only way we are going to get Strong AI, then we are a long way off. And an even longer way off from the point where this brain isn’t ridiculously slower than a real human brain.
Now this is pure gut feeling, but I believe that if we are able to create self-awareness outside of the brute-force method, then we will discover that emotion is a natural and essential component.
CB,
You have a good understanding of the issues. Here’s where I stand: if self-awareness is merely a matter of “chemicals”, what happens when we die? The chemicals remain the same, but the consciousness vanishes.
This and other doubts leave me a skeptic:
If we could accurately simulate the physics of a human brain in a computer, what would we tell it to do? Would it have free will or would it sit around in coffee shops arguing about free will? Could it be that the technology necessary to complete the simulation would in fact be a living brain?
Finally, there must be some loss in simulating reality; it’s the 2d law of thermodynamics. Do we really want to start up an imperfect copy of our consciousness when it might be smart enough to convince us that it has been well-copied?
Except the chemicals don’t remain the same. The body is a dynamic system, the chemicals inside us are constantly reacting and changing, and maintaining this system is what ‘life’ is. When someone dies from a heart attack, the reason this ultimately kills them is essentially a matter of chemistry. Your cells need oxygen and other chemicals simply to maintain themselves. The chemicals in the body of a person who has been dead even a short time are appreciably different from that of a living person.
*shrug* What’s the difference? Do you have free will, or do you just act like you do?
Um the 2nd Law is about energy conversion. It has nothing to do with simulating reality. Maybe you were thinking of the Uncertainty Principle? Though that’s often misunderstood too and has more to do with the nature of a wave not having precise momentum/location than a problem with measurement. And it wouldn’t affect our simulation itself, so the only point it could come into play is when trying to measure the initial state of the biological brain that would be the model. And I would have to hear a compelling argument why the precise locations and momentums of every electron are required for intelligence rather than simply their orbitals.
One brain is not a perfect copy of another, but they still produce intelligence. I take this to imply that the solution space for “working brains” is fairly broad. What are you worried about? That an imperfect copy would have malicious intent (that normal human brains can’t have)? I think that’s an issue regardless — even a perfect copy of a brain would immediately start to diverge from its source because its experiences would be different. Any AI that achieves self-awareness has the potential to go all Skynet on our butts when it realizes that it is different than us.
Saying simulated emotions could be the same as real emotions seems to me to be a little like saying writing H2O on my hand is just like dipping it in water.
Well there’s two ways to respond.
1) An “emotion” isn’t a physical thing like water. It only exists in your head. As does your sense of self. They are themselves a form of simulation running on a computer.
2) If I calculated the effect of dipping your hand in water, and then relayed signals to your brain that mimicked that sensation exactly, along with any other senses, how would you know the difference?
If you believe it is possible to simulate reality to the extent that your senses could not tell the difference, why then is it impossible to simulate the same reality within your head? What’s the difference between the external and the internal where one is immune to simulation?
Ah, but I believe an emotion is a physical thing like water; it is a chemical in your brain, and a chemical is a physical thing. Water is a chemical.
I agree that it is possible to trick the brain into thinking your hand is in water. Some people can do it by waving a watch in front of your eyes and putting you in a trance. But it doesn’t mean your hand is in water, and the sensation that your hand is in water is another chemical in your brain. If you take that chemical out of your brain, you cannot have the feeling no matter what.
I had a friend whose was so abused by her father that her brain lost the ability to produce the chemical that allows you to feel calm. It just burnt out. So she has to take a pill every day; yes, it is a common enough affliction that there is a standard medicine for it. if she doesn’t take that pill, she cannot feel calm.
It’s indisputable that certain chemicals are necessary for a human brain to feel emotion. But emotions are not a chemical. Emotions are a reaction to chemicals in the brain and the resulting patterns.
Your friend was not prescribed a bottle of “calm”. The pills in the bottle are not “calm” held together with gluten. In order for those pills to make her calm, she has to ingest them, and then the chemical enters her brain, and then it binds to certain receptors, which causes her neurons to fire in a different pattern than they did before, each in turn releasing their own neurotransmitters that bind to other sites, and the overall state of her brain is now “calm”.
All of that can be simulated, at least in principle. The simulated chemicals can bind to the simulated receptors causing the simulated neurons to fire and release more simulated neurotransmitters, resulting in a simulated pattern that is identical to that of a person experiencing a state of calm. Remove the simulated chemical responsible for that emotion from the simulation, and the pattern of “calm” goes away and is no longer possible, exactly the same as with the real brain.
Oh, but that’s not a physical thing, it’s just a simulated abstraction, you say. Well, that’s okay, because it’s simulated on a physical thing, a computer. We can attach input and output devices to it — senses, limbs, organs. The inputs could be made to introduce electrical and chemical signals into the simulation exactly as they would occur in the body, and have the outputs respond to the simulated signals exactly as the body would. You could even monitor chemical levels in the environment, so when the simulated brain runs low on on the chemical for calm, our simulacrum could swallow a pill, its stomach organ would analyze the contents of the pill, and introduce the chemicals in the pill into the simulation, restoring the simulation’s ability to enter a “calm” pattern.
Now our simulation is no longer abstract. It receives sensory input, and produces output. The patterns within the brain and its outputs are exactly identical to that of an actual human brain.
How is it that this would not experience emotion? If the responses to stimuli are identical, why are they not as real as anything you or I do? Or, if you want to say that the simulation is still not exactly the same as a real brain, then what is missing?
By the way, we’re focusing on emotion, but chemicals are responsible for everything that happens in your brain. Logic and reason are also the result of neurotransmitters being passed around, and of chemical reactions within neurons. So basically you’re saying this simulation of a brain cannot be anything like a brain, despite having inputs and outputs that are exactly the same.
I really can’t see how that could be so.
Because while the vast majority of your posting is correct and clearly stated, I disagree with your second and third sentences. Yes, you could similuate all of that, but an emotion is not a reaction to chemicals, I think it is a chemical reaction. So a similuated emotion would not be an emotion, any more than a CGI character would have a real body.
On the other hand, if you define intelligence as the manipulation of symbols (words, musical notes, numbers) then it does not matter if it is done chemically or electronically. Chemical, electronic, and quantum based minds would be different from each other, but they could all manipulate symbols.
Regardless of agreement, I look forward to your further stimulating manipulation of symbols.
Reaction to chemicals, chemical reactions — those are the same thing. :) Everything in your brain is chemicals reacting, even the electrical impulses in your neurons are just salt ions moving around and reacting with other things. It makes no difference, as far as simulating it.
But if I understand you, you’re not denying that everything that happens in the real brain could be simulated and that the result could be exactly the same, but that nevertheless it wouldn’t be “real” because its not a biological wetware brain.
That sounds like begging the question. A non-biological machine cannot have emotion because emotion is something only biological machines can have, ergo the thing that looks exactly like emotion can’t actually be emotion. You’ve declared it impossible by definition, not by analysis.
It’d be like we gave a “CGI” character a body in a plush toy, but that doesn’t count because only non-plush bodies count.
I define intelligence the same way Alan Turing did: Intelligence is that which appears to be indistinguishable from what we accept to be intelligence. The same with emotion. A robot that for all intents and purposes appears to experience real emotion is experiencing real emotion. Just because it’s transistors in a computer switching instead of chemicals reacting, it’s no different. The robot, and you, are both just machines. How is one real and the other not?
There might be significant practical differences between my simulated brain and a real one (e.g., if the ‘body’ this mind occupies is completly unlikely a human one, its experiences will necessarily be different). But if the pattern is the same, the inputs and outputs are the same, and therefore the resulting behavior is the same…
I don’t see any meaningful difference.
I don’t think reactions to chemicals and chemical reactions are quite the same thing, and while I agree everything could be simulated, I don’t think a simulation is the same as reality. Yes, I am excluding emotions by definition, because analysis has led me to believe emotions are chemically based.
Unfortunately there is a premise difference here, and I seem to be repeating myself, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
CB,
We are ranging pretty far afield, but I did have to respond. Yes, I meant the 2d Law of thermodynamics. The 2d law says that every reaction is lossy, you never get out exactly what you put in. And to make a perfect copy, you would have to get out exactly what you put in. This fact is key to evolution, BTW, because DNA can never make a perfect copy of itself, even though it makes a much better copy than any other known organic chemical.
And, yes, I am worried that we would create technology that we couldn’t control – I can see no reason to do so.
Astro Boy remains stationary while punching and can’t move until the punching animation is completely finished..
To continue with the discussion on sentience, if you were to grow up in the Eastern tradition, you would see all living things as sentient, the difference being of degree rather than of lack.
It is also perhaps only in the West that there is actually a debate about this, where human supremacy and a dead mechanistic world is taken for granted. Indigenous people definitely also perceive animals as sentient and spiritual beings.
Computers, unless they were self-directed, would not be sentience.
I ignored this review and went to see Astro Boy with my kids. Put it simply: WE LOVED IT. The boys loved it, the girl loved it, voted it best movie we’ve seen this year. And hell, I loved it. It was touching, beautifully animated and fun as hell. Better than Up, better than that gloomy Wild Things, better than Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. I think that if you watch the movie with no preconceptions, but with an open mind and heart, you’ll fall in love with it. Everyone I know who’s seen it is floored with the tepid reviews it got. Lesson learned: movie critics lose perspective. If a film looks interesting, go to see it. You might discover a hidden gem.
Read the manga or watch the animes instead.
More importantly, you believe that even a simulation of these chemicals that produced exactly the same output of apparent emotion would not actually be emotion. The question is what analysis led you to believe that only chemicals can represent emotion such that something that has exactly the same effect is nevertheless different.
Also, you seem not to feel the same way about logic and reason. In our brains, they’re exactly the same thing (chemical reactions). Why can a simulated brain produce logic but not emotion?
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only says that entropy must increase in a closed system, and equivalently that no conversion of energy from one form to another can be 100% efficient. This has absolutely no bearing on the ability to measure something and then recreate it exactly, in simulation or reality. It just means your replicator will consume extra energy due to inefficiencies. You can do reactions backwards and forwards all day getting the same results each time as long as you have an external energy source, and thanks to the sun we do.
More here: http://www.mchawking.com/includes/lyrics/entropy_lyrics.php :)
It would make sense if you said the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle limits our ability to make exact copies because we cannot know position and momentum infinitely (because they simply aren’t precisely defined for the quantum waveform). But then the question is: Why does it have to be an infinitely precise copy to be sentient? My brain is not even close to a copy of yours, they are similar in gross structure but absolutely dissimilar at the level where the Uncertainty Principle comes into play. But we’re both sentient. What analysis leads you to believe that a single quark or electron being a Plank Length in one direction or another would turn a living, feeling brain into non-sentient goo?
And if self-directed, they would. :)
MaryAnn is not your guidance counselor or your bartender or your priest. She is not required to help you work through your feelings of guilt, after you’ve abused her hospitality over and over again. She is not required to accept your apology. She is not required—and never was—to listen to you ramble on about the history of Astro Boy.
If you have something worthwhile to say about her review and about the actual film—which was released nine years ago now—then say it. If you just want to talk about your favorite comics and cartoons, or about your personal failings, there are much better places to do that. Go and find them.
What the fuck are you doing, cluttering up my comments thread with your shit? Are you requesting that I pat you on the head and tell you not to worry, all is forgiven?
You are banned.