Of Replicants and Cylons and artifice
Dream of Replicants and Cylons
Viewing humanity through the lens of artifice
Some friends and I saw Blade Runner 2049 on opening weekend.
It’s difficult to write about 2049 without spoiling it, so if you haven’t seen it and plan to, I suggest reading this afterwards (I spoil something big).
Perhaps my expectations were too high. To be clear, it was beautiful, well-acted, had excellent direction, photography, and editing — a textbook example of how to create a genuinely stunning-looking movie.
Aside from the questionable issues about representation of women in the movie (how the director of Arrival managed to mess this up I don’t know)… there’s no meat. No meaning. Much of my recent thinking has been focused on the triumph of form over substance, and Blade Runner 2049 exemplifies that.
There is no there there.
I suspect the happy accident that was Blade Runner is what Ridley Scott and the others thought they would recreate with 2049. I suspect, with Blade Runner’s creation and existence being as tumultuous as it was (read Paul Sammon’s Future Noir if you have any interest in that), there was never going to be a point where a follow-up was going to be formed in the same crucible and create a similar experience. Blade Runner was an unpurposeful revolution in science fiction filmmaking (as Benjamin Franklin states in 1776, “Revolutions… come into this world like bastard children — half improvised and half compromised”) and, when you know its background, it’s shocking it ever made it to the theaters. It became a labor of love and determination for many involved to see it completed and released. 2049 had no such need for improvisation and compromise, and that may be why it falters. Sometimes in art it’s the happy accidents that are the strongest works.
This isn’t a review of 2049. This review at Rolling Stone (in addition to the link to The Mary Sue above) sums up most of my feelings toward it.
What I find necessary from the movie is the question of artifice and what that is. Are replicants artifice? In particular, is K (especially once he realizes the key memory in his investigation is not truly his but Ana’s)? And Joi? Rachael? Or is artifice more sinister? Is it Wallace and his motives? For all of 2049’s pondering upon artifice — K’s, Joi’s, the replicants’ as a whole — the questions it raises are not any different than the first movie — nor are they better addressed here than they’ve been in other projects.
For centuries, we’ve approached questions of humanity through the lens of artificial humans in fiction and myth. Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, persocoms in Chobits, the think tanks in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, he original robots in R.U.R., the monster in both the novel and film Frankenstein (and the Bride, with her artificial brain, in the film Bride of Frankenstein), the Machine-Man in Metropolis, the clockwork daughter of Descartes, the Pygmalion myth, or even the golem of the ancient Hebrews — how do these stories shed light upon our humanity and our place in this world? Who is the artifice? What does it mean to be artificial? We have questioned our place in the universe and what our responsibilities are, questioning what it means to be human itself, by using fictional artificial life as proxy.
Why?
Sentience vs. Sapience
The third edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD; the NOAD is my favorite reference book and I will usually fall back on it, or the Oxford English Dictionary, for definitions) defines “sapient” as:
sapient | ˈsāpēənt |
adjective
1 formal wise, or attempting to appear wise. • (chiefly in science fiction) intelligent: sapient life forms.
It then goes on to define “sentient” as:
sentient | ˈsen(t)SH(ē)ənt |
adjective
able to perceive or feel things: she had been instructed from birth in the equality of all sentient life forms.
Unfortunately, the genre has begun to conflate the two words and their meanings. If we look at Data’s trial in the Star Trek: The Next Generation 1989 episode “The Measure of a Man,” we see a shift in the definition the genre uses for sentience. Maddox, the cyberneticist in that TNG episode, makes the argument sentience is (taken and modified from the Memory Alpha page on sentience):
- Intelligence (an ability to learn, comprehend, understand context, and cope with new situations);
- Self-awareness (being conscious of one’s existence and actions and/or aware of one’s self and one’s ego); and
- Consciousness
This is getting muddy. Of Maddox’s three qualifications for “sentience,” the first is actually sapient. The second point is does somewhat fit the definition of “sentient,” but the third point — consciousness — is defined by the NOAD as:
consciousness | ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs |
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings
As we can see, the prevalent thought of “sentience” in western science fiction (as defined by Star Trek) presents us with conflated definitions and circular logic (and possibly logic Trek would use to argue assimilated Borg, aside from the central intelligence of the Queen, is not “sentient,” but I think that’s an entirely different discussion).
If we examine Vernor Vinge’s 1993 paper on the Singularity, he states:
The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth [his Singularity]. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):
• There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.
If sapience is the ability to be wise (“the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” per the NOAD) and sentience is the ability to perceive (“the neurophysiological processes, including memory, by which an organism becomes aware of and interprets external stimuli,” also per the NOAD) , I would consider an artificially intelligent being as gaining sentience but not necessarily being sapient. Is that not what Tyrell is telling Deckard in Blade Runner? The replicants already have the ability to be aware of and interpret external stimuli. They are already intelligent. They are already sentient. It’s the memories — implants or photos or whatever — that grant them sapience and the necessary experience to guide them along their path. Whether it’s Rachael memory of the mother spider being eaten by her babies or K’s memory of the wooden horse in the furnace, sapience is what the Tyrell and Wallace corporations are attmepting to create in these replicants. Sentience without sapience may result in an artificially intelligence, but is that intelligence a self-conscious being? Without sapience, I’d argue not.
Perhaps I’ve seen too much Star Trek and the word “sentience” has lost the correct meaning for me. However, isn’t the ability to be truly intelligent, and encompassing all that a human can be, truly the ability to perceive? A robot can attempt to appear wise (think of the “Call Upon Yoda” doll in 2005) and still be as simple as a magic 8-ball. How does that make sense? Even calling back to Star Trek, Data’s major issue with attempting to be human is his perception and feeling, not his intelligence or judgment. Therefore, Data needs to reach sentience… which flies in the face of what Star Trek and many others seem to want “sentience” to be.
I cannot see how anything can reach sapience without reaching sentience. Even a dog, running along a freeway, is a relatively intelligent being that is using its perception to judge when to cross the freeway. According to all that I have read on sapience on sentience, this dog qualifies as both!
But what is going to tell the dog not to run out in front my car? It will be the dog’s judgment, yes, but how does he make that judgment? I can see an argument for wisdom, but if the dog doesn’t have the experience needed to build up his wisdom, then being wise only goes so far. The dog may be wise in the way of hunting rabbits, but is nothing more than a noob when it comes to crossing a freeway…
It’s experience. Sentience and sapience clearly walk hand-in-hand when you are dealing with talking about the intelligence and perception of a being, but experience has to be brought into play in order to properly round out perception and judgment. Wisdom is limited or non-existent with no experience. So, for an artificial being to reach proper sentience and sapience, experience must play a major part.
That’s why, in Blade Runner, Rachael’s memories are so important, why she foils the Voight-Kampff test for so long — because of her experience. The rest of the replicants are sapient, but Rachael has been given something to bring her sentience to bear, and that’s what makes her stand out among the other replicants.
The emergence of the artificial
The artificial brain in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein seems to be the first of its kind.
Athena and Hera, Rachael and Ana
Another issue we have to examine is the existence of the artificial Eve — and her daughter.
Interspecies mating goes back to myth — the nephilim and the Minotaur come to mind. Pregnancy in modern speculative fiction is often related to body horror (think of Cronenberg’s The Fly) or psychological horror (Rosemary’s Baby) or, sometimes, an unknown with promise (Elizabeth in V). (Note: There’s a somewhat incomplete Wikipedia entry on the subject that may lead to more interesting reading if you are so inclined.) Many of these stories use the mother as merely a vessel, or she’s been tricked or being punished for something.
When it comes to artificial lifeforms and pregnancy, the stories are a little different. In particular, Athena and Hera in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica and Rachael and Ana in Blade Runner 2049.
However, it goes further back. Is Philostephanus’ lost De Cypro the first we see of the creator (Pygmalion) falling in love with his creation (the post-classically renamed Galatea)? In Ovid’s Metamorphoses she bears two daughters (it’s always daughters, isn’t it?) — Paphus and Metharme.