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Robinson, E. & Robinson, S. (2005, Spring).

Software
Development Practices: The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly. The Journal of Advancing Technology, 2, 46-59.

Robinson, E. (2004, November 11). The Game Manager.


Do Computers Dream
Of Silicon Sheep?:
It’s Not Just Abusive. It’s Stupid. Retrieved from
http://www.thegamemanager.com/archives/2004/11/
11/6

Robinson, E. (2005, April 6). The Game Manager. Why


Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons.
http://www.thegamemanager.com

Robinson, E. (n.d.). The Game Manager. http://www.thegame-


manager.com
Anxieties of the
Biography
Evan Robinson (TheGameManager.com) started making
Spiritual Machine
games professionally in 1980 and moved to computer
games in 1983. Following many successful years as an inde-
pendent developer, he served as a Technical Director at EA by Richard Behrens
and the Director of Games Engineering at Rocket Science
Games. He also worked as an Engineering Manager and
Senior Software Engineer at Adobe Systems. A frequent
presenter at early Game Developers Conferences, he writes
and consults on game programming, project management
and development management.
Since the industrial age The Shadow of the Robot
Sara Robinson entered the games business in 1986 as a Since the industrial age fired up its first
writer for EA. She has contributed to over 100 games for machines to replace human labor, our
LucasArts, Disney, Sega and dozens of other companies. A
former contributing editor and columnist for Computer
fired up its first machines collective imagination has been haunted
Gaming World, she was among the early creators of the by the shadow of the robot, the artificial
GDC.
to replace human labor, intelligence (AI) that so disturbingly mimics
The Robinsons live in Vancouver, B.C. Evan mat be reached our own consciousness, encased within a
34 via www.TheGameManager.com. metal exoskeleton. From the clunky tin 35
our collective imagination cans of early Amazing Stories-style sci-fi to
the modern image of a sleek android that
has been haunted by the is physically, mentally and intellectually
indistinguishable from us—indeed often
shadow of the robot. superior to us—these human-shaped
thinking machines have always played
deeply into our anxieties about what it
means to be human. Yet, at the same time,
they have suggested some great liberation
for the human race, perhaps even some
form of immortality. The dichotomy
between a desired end—the need for
technology to free humanity from toil—
and the price we pay for attempting to
achieve those ends—our growing depend-
ency on the machinery, perhaps at the
expense of our essential humanity—creates
vast anxiety.

This anxiety has been an undercurrent in


our literary culture for almost two centuries,
since William Blake first poeticized
against the “dark Satanic mills” that were
turning England’s pastoral landscape into
an enslaving industrial engine. The genre
of science fiction, which evolved over the
decades along with technology itself, has
always reflected this anxiety by exploring
Do Computers Dream of Silicon Sheep?: Anxieties of the Spiritual Machine

our dark thoughts and fearful dreams dominating the planet because these are of speech recognition technologies and
relating to the tyranny of our own machines that can be turned off at our other AI initiatives. Kurzweil had recent-
machines. At the same time, science fic- will. The irony of that moment is that the ly published a book, The Age of Spiritual
tion has been a literary celebration of humans simply cannot shut off the life- Machines (1999), and after engaging the
technological progress, as if that very bringing machines even if they wanted to. author in an animated discussion about
progress brings us closer to some liberat- For one thing, no one alive even remem- the book’s darker implications, Bill Joy
ing event that can only be achieved bers how they work. Second, what would was deeply disturbed.
through the evolution of our machines. happen to their daily life if they did? In a
Both the drive to progress via technology moment’s pause, Neo wrestles with the The Age of Spiritual Machines is a sweep-
and the fear of that very same technology notion that the existential experience of ing vision of how computer technolo-
as some dehumanizing force have been at being human may be based on how gy is expected to evolve over the next
the heart of our science fiction literature dependent we are on the machinery that few decades, vividly showing how
almost since its inception. we have built (Silver, 2003). Moore’s Law—the tendency of data
density on a computer chip to double
In the film Matrix Reloaded, Neo takes a What would happen to a nation like the every 18 months—predicts that at
tour of the vast underground city of United States if we lost the computers some point in the near future, a single
that delivered our electricity, if we lost the computer chip will be more powerful
chips that ran the automobiles and the than a human brain. In the book,
transportation systems, or the circuits Kurzweil speaks of self-replicating
that produced the food and purified the nanobots, human minds downloaded
waters? Even if after a period of readjustment like software into android bodies, and
(no doubt one filled with unimaginable the fleshy human body itself slowly
violence and suffering) we managed to being infiltrated (Kurzweil, 1999), like
return to an industrial agrarian society, the Borg of Star Trek: The Next
similar to the one we had a hundred years Generation, with machine implants
ago, how many people would die in the fuzzing the lines between humans and
36
interim? And once such a replacement computers. spiritual machines. This is the point that 37
society was established, how would we made Bill Joy very upset and prompted
feed, house and keep warm the vast pop- The machines we humans have built to him to write his article for Wired (Joy,
ulation that we have today? extend our senses and increase our own 2000). Joy had spent his career taking
intellect’s productivity, Kurzweil says, will pleasure in being part of a new paradigm;
Is it true that the machines and computers soon be “waking up” to consciousness he’d watched computer science evolve
have permeated so deep into our lives and will begin the construction of even from the geeky hacking culture that creat-
that we are no longer independent of more advanced machinery. Robot facto- ed the first operating systems, program-
them, that we are now committed to this ries will not only build better and more ming languages and cheaper, more power-
exo-skeletal nervous system we call tech- powerful robots, but design them as well, ful computer chips into the big industry of
nology? It is no surprise that our current anxi- not always with human interests in mind. today that drives the global economy and
eties about our machines increasingly center By the year 2099, Kurzweil concludes, runs the machinery that supports our daily
on the notion that we cannot live without there will be no clear distinction between lives.
them, but that perhaps, in a science fic- humans and computers. Intelligent
What woud happen to a tion kind of way, they will one day “wake machines will by then become “spiritual “But while I was aware of the moral dilem-
up” and decide that they indeed can live machines,” meaning that they will legally
nation like the United States if without us? be recognized as a species in their own
mas surrounding technology's conse-
quences in fields like weapons research,”
right and have legitimate consciousness
we lost the computers that Science Fiction and the Revolt of the equal to, if not surpassing, our own
Joy wrote in his article, “I did not expect
that I would confront such issues in my own
Machines (Kurzweil, 1999).
delivered our electricity? In April of 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder
field, or at least not so soon” (Joy, 2000).

of Sun Microsystems, published an alarm- While this all seems like something out of Ray Kurzweil seemed calm and collected
humans that had been built as a refuge ing article in Wired magazine entitled a Hollywood movie to be enjoyed with a about the dawn of the spiritual machines
from the machines that have aggressively “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” (Joy, bucket of popcorn, Kurzweil builds a very and the surrendering of much of what we
conquered man. Gazing at the colossal 2000, p.238). He had just met Ray convincing argument that it is at least tech- consider to be our humanity, but Joy was
engines that run the city, he instinctively Kurzweil, an accomplished inventor nologically possible, and that the comput- walking about in a panic saying, “Does
wants to believe that these machines that whose musical synthesizer had changed er industry of the last 60 years was a mere anyone else here think this is dangerous
are bringing him light and heat and food the face of popular music; Kurzweil was prelude in this vast shift in consciousness and dehumanizing?” In fact, he would
are different from the killer machines- also (and remains) a pioneer in the field that will follow the emergence of these have to look no further than the literary
Do Computers Dream of Silicon Sheep?: Anxieties of the Spiritual Machine

genre of science fiction—a genre that, for For this reason, early science fiction tion, as typified by Darth Vader, the man variance with historical, political and
more than a century, has been openly showed both an enthusiasm and a dread who has lost his humanity to robotic body social conditions. The “evil empire” sci-fi
exploring the anxieties relating to the of new technologies. The classical image parts. of Flash Gordon paralleled the rise of
surrender of our humanity to our own of the mad alchemist who, to paraphrase Fascism in Europe; the adventures in the
machines—in order to find people director Ed Wood, tampers in God’s H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) deserts of Mars or the jungles of Venus
thoughtful enough to agree with him. domain (Wood, 1955) and pays the price depicted a Martian race that appears drew from the growing exploration into
for his trespasses, portrayed to per- amorphous and blob-like, hardly a threat
Such depictions often reflected fection in Mary Shelley’s to our military until they construct their Finally, almost inevitably,
Frankenstein (2003), was trans- tripods and heat rays that blow away
the largest fear of that age: the formed, by the early 1900s, into human civilization like it is a cluster of came the threat of AI, the
the materialistic scientist, who was insects. Wells’ novel heralded the vio-
revolt of the worker. so obsessed by his new invention lence of World War One, where tanks and computer that considers itself
(be it an invisibility ray, a time airplanes appeared for the first time on
Almost from its inception, science fiction machine or a way to harness nuclear the battlefields and showed the world superior to the human race.
has been relegated to the ghetto of pulp power), that he could not see its physical how the horror of the Martian Invasion
magazines and reduced by Hollywood into dangers or moral implications until it was was possible within our lifetime, and may the Congo and the Amazon where white
action-adventure space operas, always strug- too late. Many sci-fi classics such as Isaac be brought about by our own machinery. Europeans came in contact with cultures
gling to maintain its literary respectability Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) or Robert Depictions of robots in early science fic- living in Paleolithic conditions; and the
and promote understanding of its social Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress tion reflected fears of rapid industrializa- subduing of savage alien tribes by a
import. The genre found its biggest audi- (1966) have dealt with the ethical dilem- tion, showing them as clanky humanoid Caucasian Earthling in many tales by
ence in adolescent males and was quickly mas posed by the growing field of robot- hunks of metal filled with gears and wires. Edgar Rice Burroughs validated American
laughed off as “Buck Rogers stuff”1: its mar- ics and the potential for AI. But none of Such depictions often reflected the Manifest Destiny3 and the destruction of
keting niche was on the same bookshelves the technologies described in any of this largest fear of that age: the revolt of the Native American Indian culture. During
as dime store detectives, gun-toting cow- literature had actually been invented yet. worker. Industrial capitalists were witness- the 1950s, the menace of the Pod People
boys and masked super heroes. The sheer fact that we can imagine such ing the social power of communism and in The Body Snatchers (Finney, 1989) played
machines taking over our lives is enough other revolutionary movements that upon fears of the communist infiltration
38
Yet, from the beginning, the genre attract- to fire the creative juices and makes for threatened to empower the workers who of our own society, or in preference to a 39
ed many highly intelligent and visionary great drama. The best science fiction writ- were enslaved in their factories, revealing non-political interpretation, the xenopho-
writers who weren’t as interested in the ers were like canaries in the coalmine, that they were actual human beings with bic fear of the outsider invading our com-
swashbuckling adventures of planet hop- small creatures whose early death sig- needs and feelings and, perhaps worse, munities. No longer was the menace a
ping Errol Flynn-types (as in the popular naled to the workers that the air in the the resources to organize resistance. The force from another planet, or another
stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs), but in mine shafts had turned rank and deadly deepest source of this drive towards revo- alien or robotic race; now the danger was
the potential and possibilities inherent in and that it was time to evacuate or suffer lution was the manner in which capitalist inside of us, biding its time inside our own
the rapid exponential growth of technolo- annihilation. industrialism dehumanized the worker, neighbors and spouses. Then the horrors
gy and all the ethical, moral and philo- threatened to turn him into a cog in a of radiation—an invisible force more sinis-
sophical quandaries that surround such Science fiction has always been a machine (a robot, if you will) and, with- ter than any communist country,
growth. In the 1920s, when writers like Freudian journey through our collective out doubt, sci-fi literature dealt with the unleashed by the military and their
Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster, anxieties, arrayed in the trappings of consequences of that dehumanization. nuclear hardware—gave rise to giant mon-
Edmond Hamilton and E.E. “Doc” Smith2 entertainment. Contemporary political Early masterpieces like the play R.U.R. sters and mutations.
were pioneering new directions in story- situations like the Red Scare and the Cold (Rossum's Universal Robots) (Capek, 2004)
telling, the world about them was chang- War, as well as controversial technologies and the motion picture Metropolis Finally, almost inevitably, came the threat
ing at a breakneck pace. A dynamic expan- like the atom bomb and the computer, (Pommer, 1927) did overtly carry the of AI, the computer that considers itself
sion of technology made us optimistic that have all fed the story mills of the sci-fi robot-as-worker metaphor into the politi- superior to the human race. In the moun-
the human race could be improved imagination. While many sci-fi writers cal arena and showed audiences the dan- tain-sized mainframe of the Colossus
through technology; but at the same time appeared on the surface to be just “spin- gers of mechanizing life itself in the name from Dennis Feltham Jones’ 1967 novel
we suffered tremendous anxiety over the ning a good yarn,” even the Star Wars-style of progress and profit. of the same name and HAL9000 of 2001:
potential misuse of the very machines that space operas played upon our fears of evil A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), we have
were improving our lives. empires and our growing dehumaniza- Over the decades, the source of the vari- villains to rival (if not exceed) any of
1 The character of Anthony “Buck” Rogers, a US Air Corps officer who awakens from a coma in the 25th Century, was one
ous anxieties that gave formative shape to Flash Gordon’s antagonists. In both sto-
of the first heroes of the science fiction pulp. He first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories and was the cre- the sci-fi plots and dilemmas changed in ries, the computers built by man to mon-
ation of Philip Francis Nolan. Many of the subsequent sci-fi heroes were modeled after Buck, including Flash Gordon and
Luke Skywalker, but the character also stood as the stereotype of silly pulp melodrama. The iconography of sci-fi including 3 Edgar Rice Burroughs created several characters who were the epitome of the heroic individualist transferred to another
ray guns and space ships became known as “Buck Roger’s stuff” and was not always used as a compliment. planet. John Carter of Mars, Carson Napier of Venus and David Innes of Pellucidar (the world at the Earth’s core) were all
white Americans who conquer an alien race living in Paleolithic conditions, usually becoming either King, Emperor or
2 Many of these authors published prolifically in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Weird Tales Warlord, despite the fact that of their being a racial outsider. A fringe benefit to the job was usually a marriage to the most
and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and their early works can be found in many good anthologies that draw from beautiful woman on the planet. One cannot help but see a reflection of the domination of the Native Americans by white
these magazines. Some of the better science fiction pieces, such as “Triplanetary,” by E.E. “Doc” Smith and “The Legion of Europeans in the conquering of Mars by John Carter. Burroughs’ most famous creation, Tarzan of the Apes, was another
Time” by Jack Williamson have become classics of the genre. example of this formula.
Do Computers Dream of Silicon Sheep?: Anxieties of the Spiritual Machine

itor and control our national security and Videodrome (Heroux, 1983), all of which Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter disgrun- Here, again, is the essential existential
life support systems suffer acute paranoia feature a main character who, after hav- tled with his life and career, is very much problem: what is it that makes us human?
and lash back at humans like they were ing his sense of reality severely ruptured, a Phil Dickian Everyman, a wage laborer We can easily distinguish ourselves from
unwanted factors in a new world order. struggles to determine what is real and hustling to get contracts so he can raise the lower life forms and even the apes,
what is fabricated by some inhuman the money to buy a real animal to replace but what do we do when confronted with
But still, the computer was exterior to our machine with its own agenda. the mechanical sheep that he covets on a species that can work and think and cre-
selves, bland voices emerging from voice his rooftop garden. As the novel opens, ate just as well as we can, if not better?
In more than 30 novels, both sci-fi and
units, cold, calculating circuitry that could- Deckard’s liberal wife is chastising him Who is to say that we will still maintain
mainstream, and over 100 short stories,
n’t possibly feel or relate subjectively to the for being an assassin, which he denies, our status as the dominant species? When
world. Our advantage over them was their Dick explored the possible disintegration since the androids he terminates are not the androids have outmoded us and
inability to feel or think like humans. All of his own consciousness and his despera- human in the first place, and therefore proven to be superior, and everything
we had to do to release ourselves from the tion in trying to define what is human. In his work is not murder. In short, he does that we coveted as being part of our
tyranny of these machines was pull their Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he not recognize the essen-
plug and watch them go as lifeless as a tel- presents his clearest answer to the ques- tial selfhood of the Here, again, is the essential existential
evision tuned to a dead channel. tion, “What does it mean to be human?” androids and rationaliz-
(Dick, 1968). Written during a decade of es that the major differ- problem: what is it that makes us human?
But what would happen, as in the case of feverish activity and coming on the heels ence between humans
HAL9000 (Kubrick, 1968), if the comput- of many potboilers that Dick wrote to pay and androids is that the “andys” do not humanity is being done better by another
the rent, it is a stunning have the ability to empathize with the suf- species, what remains that makes us
What do we do when confronted with blend of commercial
science fiction, existen-
fering of other creatures. In fact, the only
way to legally prove that someone is an
essentially human?

a species that can work and think and tial and Gnostic philoso-
phy, and the explo-
android, short of testing their bone mar-
row, is to apply a complex psycho-physical
Philip K. Dick’s answer is Empathy.

create just as well as we can, if not better? ration of the author’s


personal demons.
examination that tests their neuromuscu-
lar reaction to tales of animal suffering.
In many of his novels, Dick professed a
fondness for the soulful presence of ani-
While there are many mals and was greatly discomfort-
40
er—that had access to our life support sys- Dick novels that are better written, this is ed by people who had no empa- 41
tems, to our food supply, to our heat and one of his most endearing and most thy for an animal’s suffering. This
air—suddenly cared about its own exis- memorable. lack of empathy was one step
tence and didn’t want to be turned off? removed from the same soulless-
The dystopic world of Do Androids Dream of ness that drove the Nazis to dehu-
Philip K. Dick and the Empathy Factor Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968) is typical of manize their enemies and kill
While the problem of how humans many Philip K. Dick novels throughout them by the millions with heart-
respond to the growing dominance of the the 1960s, one in which a global war has less efficiency. To Dick, the differ-
thinking machines is an old theme in sci- radiated the cities and killed off most ani- ence between humans and
ence fiction dating back to its origins, the mal life—“First, strangely, the owls had androids must be the ability to
ethical complexities and moral conun- died.” (Dick, p.12)—giving rise to a robot- feel empathy for the suffering of
drums relating to it grew more sophisti- ics industry that manufactures artificial others.
cated as the genre grew into its third and pets. A mad rush to colonize Mars has left
fourth generation of writers. One of the the earth underpopulated, largely by In the novel, the humans who
keystone novels of the modern period of genetically inferior people who are left to have stayed behind on Earth,
sci-fi that dealt with this issue was Do wallow in the slowly building garbage and some because they could not
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), by useless rubble that advances in the cow afford to emigrate, others
Philip K. Dick, a prolific writer who not catcher of entropy. To fulfill the daily because they have been deemed
only explored the social and political anx- needs of the Martian colonists, the robot- inferior by the government, are
ieties relating to technology, but extend- ics industry has also produced the Nexus- struggling to maintain their
ed those anxieties into consciousness 6, a brand of android that is almost indis- humanity. It is implied that those
itself. Dick, who suffered many personal tinguishable from human beings, but who have emigrated to Mars have
neuroses and phobias (among which was which can labor without complaint and given up their humanity, delegat-
the frightening feeling that he didn’t give the colonists an unprecedented ing their labor and drudgery to
exist), wrote many haunted novels which degree of leisure. The Nexus-6 are illegal the androids, and surrendered
have had a long-term influence on the on Earth, and an elite corps of bounty the remote possibility of clean air
genre. His dark footprints can be seen in hunters within the police department and healthy landscapes for artifi-
films such as The Matrix (Silver, 1999), The have been trained to detect and terminate cial machine-driven ecosystems.
Truman Show (Rudin, 1998) and any androids that have escaped to Earth. Back on Earth, the remaining
Do Computers Dream of Silicon Sheep?: Anxieties of the Spiritual Machine

humans, fighting against the onslaught of that androids cannot have that experi- makes physical love to one of the Kurzweil reveals that the programs relied
entropy and fearful of the superior race of ence since the empathy box of Wilbur androids in order to render himself inca- on being fed input from existing paint-
outlawed androids, have adapted a quasi- Mercer has no effect on them. pable of killing her. ings, poetry and fiction that had been cre-
religious practice called Mercerism to The use of the opera and the art museum ated under the more traditional inspira-
keep in touch with their gradually dimin- Deckard is at first skeptical of his wife’s in the novel is very significant, because as tion of human desire and intuition.
ishing humanity. use of the Mercer machine, and humans we like to think that we are the Without the artistic work of human
Mercerism, seen by many to be a quack only species that can produce a Mozart or beings, the computer-generated art
Mercerism is practiced by the followers of religion, is under assault by a gross and a Munch. But in The Age of Spiritual would not exist.
Wilbur Mercer, who may or may not exist. obnoxious TV comedian named Buster Machines, Kurzweil (1999) describes AI
He can only be “accessed” by an empathy Friendly (one in a series of ongoing Dick machines that will at some point become There is a pulsing light at the heart of
box, a virtual reality generator that plugs characters who resemble the 1950s so sophisticated that they will paint pic- artistic creation that these computer out-
anyone gripping its handles into a weird celebrity Jackie Gleason) who threatens tures, write poetry, solve ethical prob- puts seem to lack. The question is
Golgotha-like landscape where a robed to expose Mercer as a fake, an actor in a whether or not, at some point in the
and bearded figure, Wilbur Mercer, studio. The suspicion that Buster Friendly future when AI programs become more
ascends a steep mountain slope. From is a pawn of the androids—who have an powerful than the human brain, that
out of visual range, hostile “others” are acute self-interest in destroying pulsing light will suddenly erupt and
hurtling rocks at Mercer, and the person Mercerism—is heightened by the discov- awaken the machines to their new con-
plugged into the empathy box feels the ery that the androids have set up an elab- sciousness. Will computers then be capa-
pain as if the rock has hit him personally. orate operation on Earth, going as far as ble of writing a poem simply out of the
Mercer’s climb up the hill is experienced, to engage their own underground police sheer joy and love of the language, or to
both visually and physically, by everyone force to capture the bounty hunters. The express some inner state of being, or be
who is currently using the Mercer android’s will to survive has grown effec- capable of producing a complex harmo-
machine, as well as those who are locked tively stronger and many of them are ny of aesthetics such as is exhibited in
together in an empathic experience of exhibiting the human-like emotions of pieces like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?
shared suffering. empathy for each other.
Perhaps the spiritual outcries we hear in
42
While the Christian overtones here are In fact, as Rick Deckard goes about hunt- the Ninth will also be heard in a piece of 43
more than obvious, we can dismiss Dick’s ing down the androids so he can collect music composed by some android two
use of Mercerism as primarily Christian. his bounty money and buy a real flesh hundred years from now and come from
The meditation upon the wounds of and blood animal, he confronts the intel- a complexity of forces of consciousness
Christ is a well-known meditational tech- ligence and the apparent inner aesthetic that were not possible when created by
nique to stimulate empathic abilities and world of the androids. Nexus-6 are the the human mind alone. Perhaps the com-
to awaken one’s consciousness to the sub- latest and greatest, more human than puters, besides being stronger, more
jective suffering of others, but other reli-
human, and not even the corporation intelligent and less fragile than us, will
gions and psycho-spiritual practices, suchwho built them understands the inner also be more spiritual than us. Perhaps
as Tibetan Buddhism, place an emphasis dynamics of their own subjective world. lems, evaluate law and compose music so the new emerging spiritual machines will
Deckard confronts one of much better than us. In the light of this stand in relation to us as we do to animals
Perhaps the new emerging spiritual the aliens while she is usurpation of our essential aesthetic and look upon us as artifacts of an earlier
headlining an opera humanity, the existential dilemma of stage of evolution.
machines will stand in relation to us as event, and he is seduced what it means to be human will become
by the powerful music vastly more acute. The Egyptian Immortality Game
we do to animals and look upon us as and the android’s very All this talk of inputs and generating
human singing of We insist that, no matter how good a com- poems through analysis seems so dispirit-
artifacts of an earlier stage of evolution. Mozart’s The Magic Flute. puter gets at composing music, it was ulti- ed, like one of those episodes of Star Trek:
Later, in an art museum, mately Beethoven’s spiritual life that The Next Generation in which Data the
on compassion for all sentient life forms he contemplates why so many androids made his symphonies great, something a Android struggles to understand the con-
as well. Whether Mercer exists or not is are drawn to the works of Edvard Munch, computer can never achieve. So Kurzweil cept of finding something funny.
irrelevant: what matters it that he is a The Scream in particular, which he goes to great pains to present us with However, by meditating upon the science
nodal point for the shared experiences of assumes is a painting that reflects the examples of art created by computers— fiction conceit of a machine becoming
the remaining human beings who do not inner feelings of an android. Predictably, not some imaginary spiritual computer, human, or a human becoming machine,
want to surrender their humanity to the in a very painful turnabout, Deckard but computer programs that exist today. we are forced to confront the subjective
machines. Their isolation and alienation starts feeling contempt and indifference He includes some paintings, poems and experience of being a human conscious-
are counterbalanced by Mercerism, towards the other bounty hunters and even a short story. At first blush, it seems ness with a phenomenological interrela-
which shattered their loneliness and acquires more respect for the machines incredible that a program can produce tionship with an organic body.
makes them feel connected. It is assumed he is contracted to destroy. In fact, he works with such aesthetic impact, but
Do Computers Dream of Silicon Sheep?: Anxieties of the Spiritual Machine

Kurzweil explores the possibility that we techno-fetishism, another primal human human beings, too, fear death and strug- Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by
Day, The (2000). Faulkner, R. Trans. San Francisco:
will gradually merge with our machines attempt to discover the keys to immortali- gle to overcome it. For one single Chronicle Books.
and become some form of hybrid race, ty using the tools of the present day? moment, the dying android looks at
Finney, J. (1989). Invasion of the Body Snatchers. New York:
that our culture, our flesh, our minds will Deckard, his destroyer, and smiles. In that Touchstone Books. Originally published in 1955 as The
gradually be replaced, one circuit at a As the Egyptians developed the technolo- smile is the plentitude of shared experi- Body Snatchers.
time, by computer components, and that gy of mummification to attempt the ence. A silicon machine and a carbon
Heinlein, R.A. (1966). The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New
the very concept of a computer itself will immortality of the soul, so, too, are we machine, both fearing their own death, York: Putnam.
be redefined by incorporating our very building the computer chips and the both humbled at the threshold of that
Heroux, C. (Producer) & Cronenberg, D. (Director).
humanity and our very flesh into a new android bodies that will carry about our death. (1983). Videodrome [Motion picture].
species. According to Kurzweil, this is the consciousness? Perhaps the whole notion Canada/United States: Universal Pictures.
logical continuation of an evolutionary of computers awakening to consciousness So perhaps empathy is the key to our Jones, D.F. (1967). Colossus. New York: Putnam.
process that goes back all the way to the is as devotedly mythological and religious understanding of what it means to be
Big Bang, as if the creation of sub-atomic as any belief lifted from the Egyptian human, and perhaps, in the end, if our Joy, B. (2000). Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. Wired,
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the Universe’s first step towards the cre- such a thing is even possible—firmly root- consciousness, it will be our key to under- Kubrick, S. (Producer) & Kubrick, S. (Director). (1968).
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really cool operating systems. It can be tic than other immortality myths—can with a very ponderous dilemma, one that
left to the individual to decide just how very well be the religious faith and spiritu- has already generated vast anxiety as Kurtz, G. & Lucas, G. (Producer) & Lucas, G. (Director).
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ment over the rapid progress of comput- world fulfilling the same need to alleviate that we have already begun to merge with
er technology to an existential principle the anxieties about death and to promise our machines. We simply cannot shut off Kurzweil, R. (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines. New
York: Viking.
and evolutionary trend that ranks up immortality, where we are either floating our computers without bringing human
there with sea creatures crawling onto like angels through some heavenly land- society to a violent end. It seems that by Mozart, W.A., Schikaneder, E. (1791). The Magic Flute (Die
Zauberflote) [Opera]. Vienna, Austria.
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body, half human and half comput- turn off ourselves. Munch, E. (1893). The Scream [Painting]. Currently miss-
Kurzweil explores the possibility er, with a consciousness that can be ing from the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway.

removed like a floppy disk. It may As Ray Kurzweil points out, even 30 years Pommer, E. (Producer) & Lang, F. (Director). (1927).
44 that we will gradually merge with very well be possible that future ago that wasn’t the case. Metropolis [Motion picture]. Germany: Universum
45
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generations will look back at our
our machines and become some junked computers, abandoned Now it is. Raymond, A. (1934) Flash Gordon [Comic strip]. United
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(Producers) & Weir, P. (Director). (1998). The Truman
same despair that we experience when we Show [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount
Nevertheless, the strange thought that our see the rotting and shriveled corpses of Pictures.
own technology may one day awaken to the Pharaohs who thought they were
Shelley, M.W. (2003). Frankenstein: or the Modern
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reality replete with emotions and survival work published 1818.

instincts (not to mention intellectual and The greatness of Philip K. Dick’s novel is References Silver, J. (Producer), & Wachowski, A. & Wachowski, L.
Amazing Stories [Periodical]. (1926-1980). United States:
artistic ambitions) is one that has gained not just that it addressed the dangers of Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.
(Directors). (1999). The Matrix [Motion picture].
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resonance over the past few decades. If the our own AI machines, but that it goes
Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press.
emergence of spiritual machines is even a even further to explore the fears and anx- Silver, J. (Producer), & Wachowski, A. & Wachowski, L.
remote possibility, it will make for fascinat- ieties at the heart of our quest to over- (Directors). (2003). Matrix Reloaded [Motion pic-
Beethoven, L.V. (1824). Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, opus
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ing more deeply the nature of machine art Nexus-6 that are threatening our human- Berman, R. (Producer). (1987-1994). Star Trek: The Next Wells, H.G. (c. 1898). The War of the Worlds. New York and
and culture, perhaps even machine psy- ity, but our own failure to feel as human Generation [Television series]. Los Angeles: London: Harper & Brothers.
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responsibilities that come with fathering a movie adapted from Do Androids Dream of Capek, K. (2004). R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
new species (Shelley, 2003)? Will we aban- Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968), added a (Novack, C., Trans.). New York: Penguin Classics.
Biography
don our machines to slavery, fail to recog- touching finale to a violent and intense Deeley, M. (Producer), & Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Richard Behrens is a freelance writer and a contributing
nize their ethical rights as living beings story: a moment in which the last remain- Bladerunner [Motion picture]. United States: Warner editor to The Modern Word, a website devoted to postmod-
Brothers. ern literature. He is also a producer and director for
and attempt to destroy them to prevent ing android spares Deckard his life after Garden Bay Films where he has just completed a documen-
them from sharing our resources? Or is feeling empathy for him, a feeling pro- Dick, P.K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? tary about the Bethlehem Steel Works. He lives in New
New York: Del Rey. Jersey with a very large book collection.
Kurzweil’s vision just a radical form of voked by the android’s recognition that

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