Robot Wars

My focus is on the play RUR. Along with everyone else I am quite surprised by the advanced content and nature of the play. Firstly through the use of the word “robot” which was coined in this play and by the moral discussions it brings up, that are very relevant to our society now. This seems to be the first time in automata that automatons or robots are actually mistaken for humans so explicitly. Usually there are signs that lead to the uncanny affect (in last weeks discussion), where it is so close to reality but just misses it, making it all the more scary (like the reference to the eyes). With the emotional technology of the robots and the fact that they are biological machines, with livers etc. – it seems the only difference between a human and a robot in this play is that they are assembled rather than born. This small fact seems to give the humans justification that they are not at all alike and that robots are merely soulless creatures.

This obsession with creation that, predominately male, humans seem to have, has brought forward a few questions. Are these creations a way of humans progressing? In the play it is obvious that progression is made because the economy gets better through the diligence of the robot work force and the world becomes more efficient. However, is this actually helping the human’s progress? They will just do less and less, maybe become more ignorant of life and in the end not progress at all, but in fact digress. This reminds me of WALL.E when all the humans are sitting in a little spaceship bubble, relying entirely on computers, and are all morbidly obese! Man’s relationship to technology and their increasing reliance upon it is something which can be seen as a potential threat to humanity in the play. It seems, however, that these are very extreme stories and that in reality that would never really happen. But I don’t think I have that much faith in humanity to see scientists stopping, when they have a technological break through even though it might be detrimental to other people’s lives.

This leads me to another point. Has this not already occurred? Capek wrote the play in 1920s very shortly, only a few years in fact, after the First World War. This is a prime example where technology was used even though it was seriously detrimental to other people’s lives. It was the first time that machines had created such desecration on such a large scale. However, it also created an unnatural environment for the soldiers too. The soldiers acted as machines, given orders, fighting for king and country, without any allowance for moral decisions or free will. In fact soldiers have become even less than that. Since the First World War warfare has becoming more technological, more “progressive” and at the same time more destructive. A soldier on a battlefield at the end of the twentieth century counts for even less than the soldier of the First World War, making even less of an impact, than the machines they work with. War has now just become a battle of the machines.

In an article by Patrick Wright (http://www.patrickwright.net/books/tank/about/) he talks of tanks in the First World War and how the tank first emerged in 1916 to meet the requirements of the immobilised western front. But they became less of an instrument of war but more of an interesting concept for humans. “They were gendered – categorised as male or female according to their weaponry”. Not only was the tank helpful, it also signified a comfort, “The symbolic impact of the tank – it was called ‘the moral effect’ in the early days – remains essential to its operation, and not just in peace-keeping operations”.

Another thing that occurred to me in the creation of these perfect robots, is that we are simply trying to create a better version of ourselves all the time. Like the flute player that was mentioned in one of our articles earlier in the term, it needed to play better and so skin was added to the fingers, so it played more like a human. However, if this was the case, then why do we set these “wonderful” creations to do all the menial tasks in our lives? Maybe even these robots, even though they can feel emotion and pain, still harp back to the first point made in automata, that they are just an extension of us.

Back to the obsession of creation by the male. As Jo pointed out, women seem to be stereotyped, as we discussed in the lecture, as just being blank pretty faces. However, when the robots are created in the play they do not have the ability to reproduce, which then becomes a major problem for them when the formula for a robot is destroyed and all the humans are dead. However, doesn’t this just highlight the major importance of women? They give birth and essentially give life. So maybe the role of women in the play is bigger in the play than we at first realise.

The search for perfection

What interested me in this week’s reading and what point I’d like to talk about in this week’s blog is the human need to strive for perfection. It seems to be evident in much of the reading we have looked at in the past weeks. These creators are seeking, it seems, to create something superior to a human. We see ourselves as imperfect and are constantly reminded of our limits. Automata, machinery, robots etc give the creator an opportunity to create something that doesn’t have these imperfections and ultimately attempt to create something that it superior to man. However it seems that this cannot be achieved. We have all discussed how even though the automata that are created are scarily life like, there is always something missing. Be it in the eyes or the movements something is not quite right.

 It is the same with the robots created in the play Rossum’s Universal Robots. They are held up to be perfected workers who do not have the “unnecessary” traits of humans that get in the way of efficiency. However they are lacking a soul or any emotions to speak of. We also see that in the end they cannot survive without humans and do have limits too. They are not in any way perfect as their creators had hoped them to be. They are too efficient in their work, there is “no more room to store what we have made”. Another interesting point is that Radius also states that the robots: “wanted to be like human beings. We wanted to become human beings.” they are not happy with their apparently “perfect” state.

In On the Marionette theatre the way in which the marionettes are held up as perfection is interesting. They will never make any mistakes as they do not have the influence of the “soul”. I found this quite hard to grasp, I myself would find that there was something missing to a performance that was constantly the same and too perfect. There would be something missing. It is as though in our striving for perfection there is always something that is not quite right. It begs the question then can anything ever be completely perfect? Especially if it is made by imperfect beings? Do we actually know what perfection is?

Jo G

Zoe’s Post

There is currently a programme running on bbc iplayer called ‘why beauty matters’ wherein a philosopher Roger Scruton examines the importance of beauty in art and our lives.  It was a statement he made ‘all art is created in the persuit of perfection’ which really captured me in relation to our discussions in class regarding whether humans create machines as a way of trying to resolve the imperfections of the human condition.

In this light then, I wonder whether machines can be viewed as pieces of art.  In the opera version of tales of Hoffmann, Olympia could certainly be considered to be a piece a piece of artwork in this light, although her composition is ugly-and eventually exposed as springs and wooden limbs, Hoffmann is captured by her ethereal beauty: to him this automaton represents his idea of the perfect woman.  The fact that the automaton of the woman is used in an opera lends itself further to the idea of it being a work of art.  Perhaps this is why watching the doll perform in the opera aroused feelings of ‘uneasiness’ or ‘eeriness’ in certain members of the class.  Because, if we interpret this woman performing as a doll as a form of artwork, we are suddenly confronted with the notion of having to contemplate the idea of a human being imitating something which we would normally consider as being ‘inhuman’ or a mere object, thus the boundary between what is real and what is false is immediately blurred in the act of a human being acting like a (traditionally) inanimate piece of artwork.

According to Freud the reason for us feeling this way could be connected to his theory on the ‘uncanny,’ the nearest English translation to the German ‘Un-heimlich’ or ‘Un-homely.’  According to Freud-‘The uncanny is in some ways a species of the familiar.’He goes onto say ‘We have particularly favourable conditions for generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate, and whether the lifeless bear an excessive likeness to the living.’  This is particularly relevant in relation to the character Olympia, where the audience’s sense of uncanny is channelled via Hoffman’s inability to distinguish the doll from a real human.  His emotional attachment to the automata further blurs the boundary between the real and the unreal because it suggests it is possible for a human being to fall in love with an inanimate object.  This could suggest further reasons for feelings of the uncanny towards automaton due to the fact that our emotional capacity can make us vulnerable to emotional pain arising from loving something that does not have the emotional capacity to love us back: in Hoffmans case, he was loving what he thought was human; what aesthetically represented a human but was not even alive.

The idea that humans might create machines out of their own persuit of perfection could suggest that they put into the machines elements of the human being.  I believe this notion could be what lies at the crux of our uneasy feelings about seeing a machine or automaton such as a robot or a doll which resemble humans-the fact that they seem (in appearance) similar to us, but yet we share no sense of empathy with them, making them appear to be figments of a distant memory.  Freud also talks about the ‘doppelganger’ and the fact that we create ‘doubles’ as a way of repressing fears of death.  Perhaps seeing these ‘dead’ imitations of ourselves which appear to be so vacant of life subconsciously make us think of death, or extinction, thus further producing feelings of anxiety.

Ultimately, by inferring that Machines or robots could be regarded as works of art, i am trying to put forward the idea that in these creations, the human creator puts their own ideals and so therefore a part of themselves and this part of ‘humanity’ injected into the machine could be what raises feelings of the uncanny, because we see this notion of ‘familiarity in them…this notion of the living in the lifeless.

Allie’s Post

I found the three readings this week address one of the main issues throughout the course, the difference between a human being with a soul and artificial intelligence without soul. This argument whether machines can have souls or whether they can ever be truly equal to human beings without one has been broached on many occasions.

However whereas within past lectures we have discussed whether this lack of soul makes a machine in some way inferior, within the two articles the fact that machines do not have souls or emotion makes them superior as they are more precise. This is in contrast to the play, which stages the idea of Machines without soul not being equal, as it is deemed unfair that they cannot feel nor have the same freedom according to Helena. “Working machines must not want to play the fiddle, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A petrol motor must not have tassels or ornaments”. Although they are seen as superior in some ways, with larger brains, the ability to retain more information and better cheaper workers, without a soul they cannot think for themselves or experience emotions which makes them almost an inferior creation to human beings.

The use of new word ‘robot’ in the play also deems them slightly inferior in my mind. We associate robot to be stereotypically metallic looking and to be able to differentiate between human and robot, a good video which make me think of typical robot movement is DJ Tiesto’s new video (bear with me!) instead of what we normally discuss as machine mimicking humans, the human here imitates a robot, however the jerky stylised movement is what the word ‘robot’ conjures up in my mind, movements which obviously show elements of mechanics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-5mGwyhruo

Within the play in the first act there is confusion over what is robot and what is human, obviously stating the robots are exactly the same as human beings yet without a soul.

However again the idea of a mechanical copy of yourself that is not real is uncanny or unnerving is brought about when the robots surround the factory, “A hundred thousand faces all alike, turned in this direction. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles.” However as mentioned before in blogs, although we can find certain automata or robots as unnerving we still persevere to improve the technology we make and to try to improve artificial intelligence. The question, why, can be covered within these three articles, in what I would call two different types of automata. The first as a typically mechanical piece of machinery designed to be a worker, as we see in the play, they provide cheaper labour and less chance of error, which seems to be a common theme. The second as discussed within the articles is what I would describe as more of an automaton, a machine for entertainment of the highest value. It is discussed that without soul and emotion there is no human error, your mind can literally perform what it wants without the emotions that are triggered affecting it. “There has never been an actor who reacted such a state of mechanical perfection that his body was absolutely his state of mind”. With all these examples it seems that human error and our imperfection is simply having a soul, a state of mind, or emotion, and that machines are superior to us in the way that whatever they are programmed to do they will excel at it over human beings, by being able to just perform without mind process or emotion getting in the way.

So with this in mind, does the play somehow predict the future? Will we carry on striving to make the perfect artificial intelligence to excel over the human being? Or is this supreme artificial intelligence to us just a scary thought that could one day just be to another person today’s technology taken for granted, laptops, mobile phones, iPods, internet……….

“IT’S A PUPPET!”

Seeing as quite a few people have chosen to write about R.U.R I will write about puppets in reference to the 2nd article this week. Also I have been looking forward to discussing puppets during the course so here is my opportunity to wax lyrical about them. Now call me a hypocrite but I love puppets. They tend to lack the creepy factor that dolls and other automata process as often they are not too life like. I also think it take a lot to disregard the skill it takes to be a good puppeteer and it is sometimes this fact that can make a puppet performance.

Puppets are once again making a comeback on the British Stage and no longer are they simply punch and Judy shows. Two of the best productions around at the moment are Avenue Q and Warhorse. If you have not seen either you are missing out but especially Warhorse. The puppeteering within this production is an absolutely wonder and the detail in the horse movements, right down to it breathing, is amazing. When you watch it you completely suspend your belief and disregard the very visible puppeteers in order to believe that this horse is real on stage. Another interesting point is that the horses within the show, as well as in Avenue Q, are very obviously puppets. The shell of the horse is made from twisted metal and wood that whilst hold the shape of a horse doesn’t try and emulate its coat. The shows then that when it comes to puppetry it is often the movements which make them uncanny rather than the way in which it looks which has been the case for many of the automata we have studied. Perhaps it is because the creators of the said automata concentrated so hard on making the machines look real rather than their movements that we often find them uncanny in the Freudian sense of the word rather than a marvel. Puppets are also interesting as they very rarely talk for themselves. That is even with the advancements in technology, people still choice to voice puppets for themselves. This could be because puppets can get away with things that humans cannot even though everyone is aware that they are being manipulated by a human. For example we all probably watched Sooty as kids, and does anyone remember little cousin Scampi. He would do “naughty” things tying Matthews’s laces together and squirting water in people faces. Now those aren’t particularly risky but to small children they are a bit naughty. A more risky example of this would be Avenue Q. With songs like “If you were Gay” and “Everyone’s a little bit racist” and “you can be as loud as the hell you want when you’re making love” this show doesn’t try to pussy foot around controversy. The piece uses Sesame Street style puppets to sing such songs and to great effect. The directors said that they chose to use puppets as they can get away with saying things that normal actors could not and indeed I think the show would have been seen in a very different light had it not included the use of puppets.

Another reason why I love puppets is the storytelling element of them which I am yet to see in other Automata. Wayang kulit is a form of shadow puppetry often found in Indonesia and is a large part of Javanese heritage. The puppets are often very intricately designed but owing to the fact they are always seen in shadow are 2D and traditionally do not look in anyway lifelike. They are used to tell the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, both significant stories within Hinduism. However it is not just these forms of puppets which are used in storytelling. As mentioned above one of Britain’s heritage art forms is the Punch and Judy show which has been enthralling children for years even if the puppets are the ugliest things I have ever seen. Also many children’s theatre companies adopt the use of puppets as they can only show simple emotions which are easy for children to read and understand. So to conclude the rant for this week, puppets defiantly lack the creepy factor which I feel other dolls and automata have because of the fact that they have realistic movements as appose to being visually realistic. I have just realised that I haven’t talked about the readings at all, damn me for going off on tangents!

AFTER THOUGT – I had forgotten all about this until I was thinking of a title for this blog. How many of you are true 90′s kids and remember Larry the Loafer? If not see if this jogs your memory. http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&rlz=1T4GGIH_en-GBGB276GB276&q=larry%20the%20loafer&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&rlz=1T4GGIH_en-GBGB276GB276&q=larry+the+loafer&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv&view=2&qvid=larry+the+loafer&vid=4571276575965120805

You want the first video

The Male Automaton

Our discussions in class last week regarding the creation of female automata and their position as fetish objects, inspired my blog this week. I began to compare representations of male automata and the social attitudes towards their gender. In drawing this comparison I noticed one striking difference that their creation represents: the notion of sexual fantasy.

Whereas female automata are undoubtedly honoured for their representation of the female form and its sexuality, male automata are created for far more than just their image. It seems that they are created to satisfy what appears to be another common male fantasy: power and strength.

Examples of male automata in popular culture, such as Iron Man, suggest that, unlike their female counterparts, males have no need of an aesthetically striking fascia. Their appreciation comes from their physical power and their ability to perform feats well beyond that of human strength. As mentioned earlier, I believe this stems from a male fantasy to be powerful beings of great physical strength.

This type of inhuman strength would allow a man to fight off his enemies and defend his woman. The perfect example of this representation is Arnold Schwarzenegger in the ‘Terminator’ films. Here we see a cyborg that is almost invincible to human attack and has an undefeatable will to complete his objectives. As a man creating a male automaton, would you not want it to have the physical strength that perhaps you are lacking personally? As Jane Goodall describes in her article ‘Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism” (1997), the machine’s maker serves to create the automaton in order to heighten the limits of his own agency by creating a being without agency. However, she describes how this is a dangerous move and can often have the opposite effect, but that is a separate discussion altogether…

To conclude, it seems that the representations of automata of either gender are designed to fulfil some sort of male fantasy. The females give men what they want: a perfectly formed sexual object. The males provide what men want to be: dominant and powerful alpha-males.

~Louise

Expanding on from last week and the effect of the ‘doppelganger’ (double), it is not only uncanny but something that has provided science and society as well as numerous amounts of entertainment industries with plenty to talk about and research. I find I often walk in on or am present in conversations involving the subject of ‘cloning’ often including someone mentioning how ‘cool’ it would be to have a clone so that they never have to go to lectures. (!?). What is rarely ever mentioned is how this relatively new scientific discovery could benefit the lives of those suffering from acute illnesses. We could and can now use ‘cloning’ to a medical advantage, for example, organ transplants and tissue regeneration. If this took off and became the most popular way of organ transplanting we would surly see an increase in the amount of lives saved and not to mention time saved without the waiting list and donor processes. I read a statistic from the ‘Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network’, saying that over 28,356 Americans received organ transplants in 2007 and around 78 percent of those organs came from deceased people, I don’t know why but I find that more ‘un-nerving’ than that of a clone of one of my organs, can you imagine how it would feel after know that your new liver or kidney or even heart had been provided by someone who was now dead. (Actually you probably wouldn’t care as you had just under gone major live saving surgery and survived it and would feel eternally grateful the donor, dead or alive – but for the purpose of this argument, lets not concentrate on that fact). I also read that in August 2008 more that 100,000 people in the US were on the national waiting list for organs, even after this wait there in no certainly that the body will except the new organ. This ‘Organ Cloning’ would use our organs and then transplant them by creating custom, cloned organs from our own cells that our bodies would recognise, therefore avoiding the long waiting lists, the antagonising wait to know whether your body reacts against the donor organ and that of finding the correct donor match.

This leads me on to the subject of ‘Dolly – the Sheep’ and other animals that have been cloned, including a tadpole, a carp and a cat (named ‘Copy Cat’), these animals that have been successfully cloned prove there is no initial threat, and shows how advanced science and technology are. Although her death was controversial and has left a lot of questions unanswered, she has no doubt left behind a legacy. This type of cloning may become a viable tool for preserving endangered species. In January of this year an extinct mountain goat was cloned in Northern Spain, unfortunately this animal died only a short time after it’s birth yet this exciting new development was the first time an endangered species was ‘re-created’ by resurrecting them from frozen tissue…. Surely this could lead on to the reproducing of long-gone species such as dinosaurs, puffins and woolly mammoths??

There are numerous arguments against the cloning process, especially against cloning humans ranging from scientific issues, to the practicality of cloning to the religious objections. The scientific view against cloning is that a large percentage of the cloning efforts have resulting in failure (after all, it took hundreds of attempts to clone Dolly the sheep). It has also been mentioned that cloned animals tend not to live as long as those that are sexuality reproduced thought to occur because the genes taken from adults are more likely to have undergone mutations. Practically – it is far easier to sexually reproduce than creating individuals though cloning and of course it is more practical to have a child within the context of marriage and family than in a scientific experiment in a lab.

In regards to the religious argument against cloning, there is the fact that ever human life is precious in God’s eyes and whether cloned or created naturally, deserves to love as a valuable member of God’s kingdom. Just as each member of a pair of identical twins has a soul, so would a clone. I personally feel that even though identical twins look the same, most often that not they have completely different personalities, I feel that if eventually we could produce an exact replica of a human such as Einstein, even though they look the same, who knows if the clone of Einstein will be the same as the original? He couldn’t have the same personality as that would surly be impossible to reproduce as all that the original Einstein is and knows, is learned behaviour. Therefore except for image, can you actually produce a clone that is altogether the same as the original, mind, body and soul? I don’t think so.

In regards to the play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, I found it fascinating at how before it’s time the play is. Everything that is described in the play relates in some way to the mass-produced lifestyle that we lead today, from the factories run my man-made machines, to the millions and millions of gadgets people buy and then discard as soon as something better comes along. The idea of a factory producing robots for cheap labour, reminds me of illegal factories in developing countries, which hire workers (from as little a 25 pence daily) to slave away their lives building and making all sorts of equipment in order for the company and factory owners to make money. In the play, Helena, represents the social and care workers in today’s society who work to undo these wrongs created by other people, yet to no avail, in the end the robotess version of herself is left to re-create the human world (Eve – as in Adam and Eve), yet in some way, she was already trying to do this from the beginning. It seems that if the workers at Rossum’s Universal Robot factory had listened to her in the beginning, they wouldn’t have got themselves into the position of having to re-create the human race in the first place.