The Global AI Narratives team’s recommendations for staying sane in the time of coronavirus
In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are experiencing either voluntary or government mandated lockdown. Whilst the health of the most vulnerable members of our communities is an urgent priority, it’s also true to say that spending all day every day inside the same three rooms with the people you love (honestly! Even if they do leave their socks all over the floor!) can be a trying experience. With March having lasted at least four years, and the epoch of April looking set to extend for the next five billion years or so, the boredom is setting in and sock-related tensions are rising... but don’t panic! The Global AI Narratives team have come to the rescue with a rundown of the best AI-related activities to keep you sane over the coming weeks, complete with our popular ‘Robots’ score.
🤖 - Seriously bad. It's enough to drive you to actually attempt to home-school your kids.
🤖🤖 - Finishable, but with great resentment.
🤖🤖🤖 - Entertaining, on a par with the excitement of picking a new Zoom background.
🤖🤖🤖🤖 - Solidly enjoyable. Best served with a glass of wine and no trousers.
🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖 - Incredible! This will definitely see you through to your next Ocado delivery.
Elizabeth
Jexi (2019)
🤖🤖🤖
As we all check our phones every few minutes for the latest coronavirus figures, Jexi (2019) takes a light-hearted look at our over-reliance on smartphones and AI assistants. The protagonist, Phil, is completely addicted to his phone, and, with few friends he is quite isolated (hmm, seems familiar!) - but who needs real friends when you have a virtual assistant!? When Phil is forced to upgrade his phone, the new AI-enabled personal assistant, Jexi, goes above and beyond in her duties. Jexi is designed to “make your life better” but Phil and Jexi seem to have very different ideas about what that means. The resulting adventures are comical and, at times, cringeworthy, but the film is sure to put a smile on your face (and occasionally your face in your palm).
In a genre filled with dystopian visions of the robot uprising and a ruined future for humanity, Jexi offers a lighthearted take on our relationship with AI technology. Whilst heartwarming and funny, this movie does also provide a thoughtful critique of our over reliance on technology, and the possible impact on human relationships that AI might have in the future if we forget that we really do need other people in our lives. If you are looking for an upbeat and entertaining movie to lift your lockdown spirits, you will enjoy this heartwarming film about romantic mishaps and the meaning of friendship.
Warning: Occasionally raunchy and casually foul-mouthed. Best watched whilst the kids are walking the dog, Skyping their mates, or attempting to murder each other with your very expensive collection of replica lightsabres.
Tom
AI Remedies to Writer’S Block
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If you can’t bear another Netflix marathon and decide instead to channel your inner writer in this period of self-isolation, then go you, you productive human being! However, if even with the best will in the world you find yourself staring helplessly at a blank page, there are AI tools that can help with your writer’s block. Recently, Google teamed up with professional writers to experiment with AI writing apps, and you can check out the results of these collaborations on their blog. Last year, OpenAI released its new unsupervised language model that can generate coherent paragraphs of text; if you’d like to test its simplified version, you should check out Adam King’s Talk to Transformer website. All you need is a sentence – the neural network will finish the paragraph for you.
Supplied with a line about our team mascot: “Botty McBotface looked forward to traveling to China this summer, but everything changed with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic” – the system came up with the following: “The first days of the world's worst influenza pandemic made it clear that McBotface needed to get to the most significant place in the world for respiratory diseases.
‘One thing I was particularly anxious to see was a lung transplant clinic in Guangzhou,’ he told reporters in September, which led him to the hospital. ‘It's not like I'm against the concept of lung transplants. My life goal is to live with a lung transplant, which is why I was particularly excited about visiting and going to China this summer.’”
We learned something new about Botty, so Talk to Transformer definitely deserves the full three robots!
Tonii
Star Trek: Picard (2020)
🤖🤖🤖🤖
Set twenty years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), Star Trek: Picard (2020) is the latest instalment of the Star Trek franchise. Picard focuses heavily (albeit unsurprisingly) on the life of Jean-Luc Picard after his time with Starfleet. The series plot revolves around Picard’s search for an android (or synth) with an organic body capable as passing for human in order to save her from the ever-evil Romulans. This is a treat for die hard Trekkies and new viewers alike, with appearances from fan favourites Data (Brent Spiner) and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) offering franchise continuity, and just enough flashbacks to bring new viewers along for the ride.
After an outright ban on synthetic lifeforms after a Martian disaster, Picard becomes aware of illegal synths living below the radar, closely linked with his late friend Data, and resolves to help them. This is a branching story arc that also considers ethical questions about immigration, colonialism, self-determination, racism, and state control. Whilst such such topics could easily overpower this character-centric offering, the writers have done well to ground these ideas centrally in Picard’s journey. Rather than being glaring moralistic statements, they become tipping points that shape Picard’s view of both himself and the world(s) around him.
Whilst the show raises interesting questions about free will, choice, and the role of self-awareness in shaping who we are, it also relies heavily on stereotypical robot tropes to drive the plot forward. Of course the androids are incredibly beautiful females, of course they fall for and sleep with the handsome yet evil Romulan antagonist, and of course they need rescuing by the hero. Jean-Luc Picard, is, of course, the most traditional of gentlemen and it clearly fits his well-established character to want to help the androids, but this feels like lazy writing for a series that works so very hard to break away from the most glaring of science fiction stereotypes.
Picard is a particularly interesting series to watch during this period of lockdown. Given that Patrick Stewart has reprised his role as Picard at the age of seventy-nine, the show has a naturally slower pace than either the original TV series format or the later film installations, although it does maintain enough outright action to satisfy the die-hard fans out there. When we are all losing track of time and days inside our drastically altered routines, this combination of fast-paced action fitted around a slow-burning, edging-towards-ponderous story gives Picard an almost dream-like quality. It can definitely be easy to lose track of how long you’ve spent watching it - in the best possible way!
Stephen
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
🤖🤖🤖🤖🤖
When any shiny emerging technology grabs the popular imagination we should ask how much of the hype, the hopes and the fears is really new. Today, the AI revolution is revitalising anxieties about being controlled or even superseded by our machines (see Westworld Season 3 below). But these fears have been a major theme of science fiction for at least a century, providing us with a rich imaginative resource on which to draw.
One of the best examples is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano. Published in 1952, it is a sharp satire of corporate hubris and the fetishisation of the machine. It explores that great twentieth century theme of the individual versus the system, and so rubs shoulders with Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s 1984. But it is funnier and more human than any of those. And while those classics give us a world in which human autonomy and self-actualisation are restricted by force, Player Piano offers us something subtler and more insidious: a world in which these possibilities are stripped away by progress and technological achievement, leaving humans simply obsolete.
The central question, which Vonnegut explores from a range of different perspectives, is how people can find purpose and dignity in a world of smart machines. He does this largely through the figure of Dr Paul Proteus, a privileged and successful but increasingly disillusioned engineering manager. As in a Dickens novel, other (if almost exclusively male) perspectives are provided by a wonderful cast of supporting characters. Vonnegut fans will also see in this novel the beginnings of what became his signature style: parallel stories, mixing the serious and the absurd, and meta-narratives woven with the main story. Player Piano is a passionate, funny and sophisticated rage against the machine, which prompts us to question what humans are for.
Kanta
Westworld (Season 3) (2020)
🤖🤖🤖🤖
Mysteries continue to pile up in the third season of Westworld, although after the wild tangle of timelines in the second season (2018) demanded the audience to be very attentive indeed, this more coherent web of storylines leaves the viewer, rather gratefully, doing much less of the leg-work.
In season 3, the escaped android ‘hosts’ – we still don’t know exactly who – have emerged into a rather Black Mirror-like human world: the plot suddenly revolves around access to massive datasets of personal information, hacked smart homes, virtual reality, and artificial reincarnations of dead people. So far it’s a bit disappointing for AI experts in the way the hosts are portrayed as omnipotent machines that are compatible with, and able to instantly hack into, any kind of computerised system. Here’s a tip for technologists: you know you’ve gone too far when your sex bot can hack your doorbell.
That said, remember what the original Westworld was? A 1973 film - and very seventies indeed - about an android theme park where the robot cowboys start shooting back. No philosophy, one single timeline, no ethical conundrums. Producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have lifted the premise of this extremely mediocre shooter to a level unimaginable to the 70s viewer. Try it yourself during this lockdown, by using a random entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the basis for a sequel to Snakes on a Plane.