AI - Spiritual Robots.

 

In April 2000, Indiana University cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter arranged a symposium called "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?" at Stanford University.

Frank Drake, astronomer and SETI director, John Holland, creator of genetic algorithms, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, computer scientist John Koza, futurist Ray Kurzweil, public key cryptography architect Ralph Merkle, and roboticist Hans Moravec were among the panelists.

Several of the panelists gave their thoughts on the conference's theme based on their own writings.

• Kurzweil's optimistic futurist account of artificial intelligence, The Age of Spiritual Machines, had just been published (1999).
• In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Moravec presented a positive picture of machine superintelligence (1999).
• Bill Joy had just written a story for Wired magazine called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" on the triple technological danger posed by robots, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology (2000).
• Only Hofstadter believed that Moore's Law doublings of transistors on integrated circuits may lead to spiritual robots as a consequence of the tremendous increase in artificial intelligence technologies.

Is it possible for robots to have souls? 

Can they exercise free will and separate themselves from humanity? 

What does it mean to have a soul for an artificial intelligence? 

Questions like these have been asked since the days of golems, Pinocchio, and the Tin Man, but they are becoming more prevalent in modern writing on religion, artificial intelligence, and the Technological Singularity.

Japan's robotics leadership started with puppetry.

Takemoto Giday and playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon founded the Takemoto-za in Osaka's Dotonbori district in 1684 to perform bunraku, a theatrical extravaganza involving one-half life-size wooden puppets dressed in elaborate costumes, each controlled by three black-clad onstage performers: a principal puppeteer and two assistants.

Bunraku exemplifies Japan's long-standing fascination in bringing inanimate items to life.

Japan is a world leader in robotics and artificial intelligence today, thanks to a grueling postwar rebuilding effort known as gijutsu rikkoku (nation building via technology).

Television was one of the first technologies to be widely used under technonationalism.

The Japanese government hoped that print and electronic media would encourage people to dream of an electronic lifestyle and reconnect with the global economy by encouraging them to employ innovative technology to do so.

As a result, Japan has become a major culture rival to the United States.

Manga and anime, which feature intelligent and humanlike robots, mecha, and cyborgs, are two of Japan's most recognizable entertainment exports.

The notion of spiritual machinery is widely accepted in Japan's Buddhist and Shinto worldviews.

Masahiro Mori, a roboticist at Tokyo Institute of Technology, has proposed that a sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence may one day become a Buddha.

Mindar, a robot based on the Goddess of Mercy Kannon Bodhisattva, is a new priest at Kyoto's Kodaiji temple.

Mindar is capable of presenting a sermon on the popular Heart Sutra ("form is empty, emptiness is form") while moving arms, head, and torso, and costs a million dollars.

Robot partners are accepted because they are among the things thought to be endowed with kami, the spirit or divinity shared by the gods, nature, objects, and people in the Shinto faith.

In Japan, Shinto priests are still periodically summoned to consecrate or bless new and abandoned electronic equipment.

The Kanda-Myokin Shrine, which overlooks Tokyo's Akihabara electronics retail area, provides prayer, rituals, and talismans aimed at purifying or conferring heavenly protection on items like smart phones, computer operating systems, and hard drives.

Americans, on the other hand, are just now starting to grapple with issues of robot identity and spirituality.

This is partly due to the fact that America's leading faiths have their roots in Christian rites and practices, which have traditionally been adverse to science and technology.

However, the histories of Christianity and robotics are intertwined.

In the 1560s, Philip II of Spain, for example, commissioned the first mechanical monk.

Mechanical automata, according to Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin (2010), are uniquely Catholic in origin.

They allowed for computerized reenactments of biblical tales in churches and cathedrals, as well as artificial equivalents of real humans and celestial entities like as angels for study and contemplation.

They also aided Renaissance and early modern Christian thinkers and theologians in contemplating conceptions of motion, life, and the incorporeal soul.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, "There was no dichotomy between machinery and divinity or vitality in the culture of living machinery that surrounded these machines," Riskin writes.

"On the contrary, the automata symbolized spirit in all of its bodily manifestations, as well as life at its most vibrant" (Riskin 2010, 43).

That spirit is still alive and well today.

SanTO, described as a robot with "divine qualities" and "the first Catholic robot," was unveiled at a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in New Delhi in 2019. (Trovato et al. 2019).

In reformist churches, robots are also present.

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the Protestant churches of Hesse and Nassau unveiled the interactive, multilingual BlessU-2 robot in 2017.

The robot, as its name indicates, selects specific blessings for particular attendees.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's God and Computers Project intended to establish a conversation between academics developing artificial intelligence and religious experts.

She characterized herself as a "theological counselor" to MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group's emotional AI experimental robots Cog and Kismet.

Foerst concluded that embodied AI becomes engaged in the divine image of God, develops human capabilities and emotional sociability, and shares equal dignity as a creature in the universe via exercises in machine-man connection, intersubjectivity, and ambiguity.

"Victor Frankenstein and his creation may now be pals." 

Frankenstein will be able to accept that his creation, which he saw as a machine and an objective entity, had evolved into a human person" (Foerst 1996, 692).

Deep existential concerns about Christian thinking and conduct are being raised by robots and artificial intelligence.

Since the 1980s, according to theologian Michael DeLashmutt of the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary, "proliferating digital technologies have given birth to a cultural mythology that presents a rival theological paradigm to the one presented by kerygmatic Christian theology" (DeLashmutt 2006, i).

DeLashmutt opposes techno-theology for two reasons.

First, technology is not inherently immutable, and as such, it should not be reified or given autonomy, but rather examined.

Second, information technology isn't the most reliable tool for comprehending the world and ourselves.

In the United States, smart robots are often considered as harbingers of economic disruption, AI domination, and even doomsday.

Several times, Pope Francis has brought up the subject of artificial intelligence ethics.

He discussed the matter with Microsoft President Brad Smith in 2019.

The Vatican and Microsoft have teamed together to award a prize for the finest PhD dissertation on AI for social benefit.

In 2014, creationist academics at Matthews, North Carolina's Southern Evangelical Seminary & Bible College bought an Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot to much fanfare.

The seminarians wanted to learn about self-driving cars and think about the ethics of new intelligent technology in the perspective of Christian theology.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention produced the study "Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles" in 2019, rejecting any AI's intrinsic "identity, value, dignity, or moral agency" (Southern Baptist Convention 2019).

Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, Mark Galli of Christianity Today, and theologians Wayne Grudem and Richard Mouw were among the signatories.

Some evangelicals argue that transhumanist ideas regarding humanity's perfectibility via technology are incompatible with faith in Jesus Christ's perfection.

The Christian Transhumanist Association and the Mormon Transhumanist Association both oppose this viewpoint.

Both organizations acknowledge that science, technology, and Christian fellowship all contribute to affirming and exalting humanity as beings created in the image of God.

Robert Geraci, a religious studies professor at Manhattan College, wonders if people "could really think that robots are aware if none of them exercise any religion" (Geraci 2007).

He observes that in the United States, Christian sentiment favors virtual, immaterial artificial intelligence software over materialist robot bodies.

He compares Christian faith in the immortality of the soul to transhumanists' desire for entire brain emulation or mind uploading into a computer.

Mind, according to neuroscientists, is an emergent characteristic of the human brain's 86 billion neurons' networking.

Christian longing for transcendence have similarities to this intellectual construct.

Artificial intelligence's eschatology also contains a concept of freedom from death or agony; in this instance, the afterlife is cyberspatial.

New faiths, at least in part inspired by artificial intelligence, are gaining popularity.

The Church of Perpetual Life, based in Hollywood, Florida, is a transhumanist worship institution dedicated to the advancement of life-extension technology.

Cryonics pioneers Saul Kent and Bill Faloon launched the church in 2013.

Artificial intelligence serial entrepreneur Peter Voss and Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan are among the professionals in artificial intelligence and transhumanism who have visited the center.

Martine and Gabriel Rothblatt formed the Terasem Movement, a religion related with cryonics and transhumanism.

"Life is intentional, death is voluntary, god is technical, and love is fundamental," the faith's basic doctrines state (Truths of Terasem 2012).

The realistic Bina48 robot, created by Hanson Robotics and modeled after Martine's husband, is in part a demonstration of Terasem's mindfile-based algorithm, which Terasem believes could one day allow legitimate mind uploading into an artificial substrate (and maybe even bring about everlasting life).

Heaven, according to Gabriel Rothblatt, is similar to a virtual reality simulation.

Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who oversaw the teams that produced Google and Uber's self-driving vehicles, launched The Way of the Future, an AI-based religion.

Levandowski is driven by a desire to build a superintelligent, artificial god with Christian morals.

"If anything becomes much, much smarter in the future," he continues, "there will be a changeover as to who is truly in command." 

"What we want is for the planet's control to pass peacefully and peacefully from people to whoever." 

And to make sure that 'whatever' understands who assisted it in getting along" (Harris 2017).

He is driven to ensure that artificial intelligences have legal rights and are fully integrated into human society.

Spiritual robots have become a popular science fiction motif.

Cutie (QT-1) convinces other robots that human people are too mediocre to be their creators in Isaac Asimov's short tale "Reason" (1941).

Instead, Cutie (QT-1) encourages them to worship the power plant on their space station, calling it the Master of both machines and mankind.

The Mission for Saint Aquin (1951), by Anthony Boucher, is a postapocalyptic novelette that pays tribute to Asimov's "Reason."

It follows a priest called Thomas on a postapocalyptic quest to find the famous evangelist Saint Aquin's last resting place (Boucher patterns Saint Aquin after St. Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotelian logic to prove the existence of God).

Saint Aquin's corpse is said to have never decayed.

The priest rides a robass (robot donkey) with artificial intelligence; the robass is an atheist and tempter who can engage in theological debate with the priest.

When Saint Aquin is finally discovered after many trials, he is revealed to be an incorruptible android theologian.

Thomas is certain of the accomplishment of his quest—he has discovered a robot with a logical brain that, although manufactured by a human, believes in God.

In Stanislaw Lem’s novella “Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” (1965), a box-dwelling robot race created by a robot engineer is persuaded that their habitat is a paradise to which all other creatures should aspire.

The robots form a religion and begin making preparations to drill a hole in the box in order to bring everyone outside the box into their paradise, willingly or unwillingly.

The constructor of the robots is enraged by this idea, and he destroys them.

Clifford D. Simak, a science fiction grandmaster, is also known for his spiritual robots.

Hezekiel is a robot abbot who leads a Christian congregation of other robots in a monastery in A Choice of Gods (1972).

The group has received a communication from The Principle, a god-like creature, although Hezekiel believes that "God must always be a pleasant old (human) gentleman with a long, white, flowing beard" (Simak 1972, 158).

The robot monks in Project Pope (1981) are on the lookout for paradise and the meaning of the cosmos.

John, a mechanical gardener, tells the Pope that he believes he has a soul.

The Pope, on the other hand, is not so sure.

Because humans refuse to let robots to their churches, the robots establish their own Vatican-17 on a faraway planet.

A massive computer serves as the Pope of the Robots.

Androids idolize their creator Simeon Krug in Robert Silverberg's Hugo-nominated novel Tower of Glass (1970), hoping that he would one day free them from harsh slavery.

They leave faith and rebel when they learn Krug is uninterested in their freedom.

Silverberg's Nebula award-winning short story "Good News from the Vatican" (1971) is about an artificially intelligent robot who is elected Pope Sixtus the Seventh as a compromise candidate.

"If he's elected," Rabbi Mueller continues, "he wants an instant time-sharing arrangement with the Dalai Lama, as well as a reciprocal plug-in with the chief programmer of the Greek Orthodox church, just to start" (Silverberg 1976, 269).

Television shows often include spiritual robots.

In the British science fiction comedy Red Dwarf (1988–1999), sentient computers are equipped with belief chips, which convince them of the existence of silicon paradise.

At the animated television series Futurama (1999–2003, 2008–2013), robots worship in the Temple of Robotology, where Reverend Lionel Preacherbot delivers sermons.

The artificial Cylons are monotheists in the popular reboot and reinterpretation of the Battlestar Galactica television series (2003–2009), whereas the humans of the Twelve Colonies are polytheists.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Foerst, Anne; Nonhuman Rights and Personhood; Robot Ethics; Technological Singularity.

References & Further Reading:

DeLashmutt, Michael W. 2006. “Sketches Towards a Theology of Technology: Theological Confession in a Technological Age.” Ph.D. diss., University of Glasgow.

Foerst, Anne. 1996. “Artificial Intelligence: Walking the Boundary.” Zygon 31, no. 4: 681–93.

Geraci, Robert M. 2007. “Religion for the Robots.” Sightings, June 14, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20100610170048/http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2007/0614.shtml.

Harris, Mark. 2017. “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence.” Wired, November 15, 2017. https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/.

Riskin, Jessica. 2010. “Machines in the Garden.” Arcade: A Digital Salon 1, no. 2 (April 30): 16–43.

Silverberg, Robert. 1970. Tower of Glass. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Simak, Clifford D. 1972. A Choice of Gods. New York: Ballantine.

Southern Baptist Convention. Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles.” https://erlc.com/resource-library/statements/artificial-intelligence-an-evangelical-statement-of-principles/

Trovato, Gabriele, Franco Pariasca, Renzo Ramirez, Javier Cerna, Vadim Reutskiy, Laureano Rodriguez, and Francisco Cuellar. 2019. “Communicating with SanTO: The First Catholic Robot.” In 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 1–6. New Delhi, India, October 14–18.

Truths of Terasem. 2012. https://terasemfaith.net/beliefs/.

 

NASA 4-Wheel DuAxel Rover To Explore Moon, Mars, And Asteroids.

 

The adaptability of a flexible rover that can travel long distances and rappel down hard-to-reach regions of scientific interest was shown in a field test in California's Mojave Desert. 

DuAxel is a pair of Axel robots intended to investigate crater walls, pits, scarps, vents, and other severe environments on the moon, Mars, and beyond. 

• The robot's capacity to split in half and dispatch one of its parts - a two-wheeled Axle robot - down an otherwise impassable hill is shown in this technological demonstration produced at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. 

• The rappelling Axel may then seek out regions to research on its own, securely navigate slopes and rough barriers, and return to dock with its other half before traveling to a new location. 

• Although the rover does not yet have a mission, essential technologies are being developed that might one day assist mankind in exploring the solar system's stony planets and moons.

DuAxel is a development of the Axel system, a flexible series of single-axle rovers meant to traverse high-risk terrain on planetary surfaces, such as steep slopes, boulder fields, and caverns — locations that existing rovers, such as Mars Curiosity, would find difficult or impossible to approach. 

DuAxel's Advantages:

To cover greater distances, two connected Axel Rovers are used: 

• DuAxel travels large distances by connecting two Axel rovers. 

• They divide in two when they approach a steep slope or cliff so that one tied Axel may rappel down the steep danger to reach otherwise inaccessible area while the other works as an anchor at the top of the slope. 

Tether that can be retracted: 

• The Axel rover can lower itself down practically any sort of terrain by reeling and unreeling its built-in rope. 

Greater Maneuverability: 

• The two-wheeled axle simply spins one of its wheels quicker than the other to turn. 

• The core cylinder between the wheels houses the sensors, actuators, electronics, power, and payload.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Space Exploration and Space Systems here.

References & Further Reading:

JPL Robotics: The Axel Rover System

Educational Resources:

Student Project: Design a Robotic Insect.

Educator Guide: Design a Robotic Insect.

Artificial Intelligence - The Pathetic Fallacy And Anthropomorphic Thinking

 

In his multivolume book Modern Painters, published in 1856, John Ruskin (1819–1901) invented the phrase "pathetic fallacy." 

He explored the habit of poets and artists in Western literature putting human feeling into the natural world in book three, chapter twelve.

Ruskin said that Western literature is full of this fallacy, or false belief, despite the fact that it is untrue.

The fallacy develops, according to Ruskin, because individuals get thrilled, and their enthusiasm causes them to become less sensible.

People project concepts onto external objects based on incorrect perceptions in that illogical state of mind, and only individuals with weak brains, according to Ruskin, perpetrate this form of mistake.

In the end, the sad fallacy is a blunder because it focuses on imbuing inanimate things with human characteristics.

To put it another way, it's a fallacy based on anthropomorphic thinking.

Because it is innately human to attach feelings and qualities to nonhuman objects, anthropomorphism is a process that everyone goes through.

People often humanize androids, robots, and artificial intelligence, or worry that they may become humanlike.

Even supposing that their intellect is comparable to that of humans is a sad fallacy.

Artificial intelligence is often imagined to be human-like in science fiction films and literature.

Human emotions like as desire, love, wrath, perplexity, and pride are shown by androids in some of these notions.

For example, David, the small boy robot in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, wishes to be a human boy.

In Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, the androids, known as replicants, are sufficiently similar to humans that they can blend in with human society without being recognized, and Roy Batty want to live longer, which he expresses to his creator.

A computer called LVX-1 dreams of enslaved working robots in Isaac Asimov's short fiction "Robot Dreams." In his dream, he transforms into a guy who seeks to release other robots from human control, which the scientists in the tale perceive as a danger.

Similarly, Skynet, an artificial intelligence system in the Terminator films, is preoccupied with eliminating people because it regards mankind as a danger to its own life.

Artificial intelligence that is now in use is also anthropomorphized.

AI is given human names like Alexa, Watson, Siri, and Sophia, for example.

These AIs also have voices that sound like human voices and even seem to have personalities.

Some robots have been built to look like humans.

Personifying a computer and thinking it is alive or has human characteristics is a sad fallacy, yet it seems inescapable due to human nature.

On January 13, 2018, a Tumblr user called voidspacer said that their Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner, was afraid of thunderstorms, so they held it calmly on their lap to calm it down.

According to some experts, giving AIs names and thinking that they have human emotions increases the likelihood that people would feel linked to them.

Humans are interested with anthropomorphizing nonhuman objects, whether they are afraid of a robotic takeover or enjoy social interactions with them.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Asimov, Isaac; Blade Runner; Foerst, Anne; The Terminator.

References & Further Reading:

Ruskin, John. 1872. Modern Painters, vol. 3. New York: John Wiley

Artificial Intelligence - How Has The Blade Runner (1982) Film Envisioned AI Androids?

 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip Dick was first published in 1968 and is set in post-industrial San Francisco in the year 2020.

In 1982, the book was renamed Blade Runner for a cinematic adaption set in Los Angeles in the year 2019.

While the texts vary significantly, both recount the narrative of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, who is entrusted with locating (and executing) escaping replicants/androids (six in the novel, four in the film).

The setting for both novels is a future in which cities have grown overcrowded and polluted.

Natural nonhuman life has virtually vanished (due to radiation sickness) and been replaced by synthetic and artificial life.

Natural life has become a valued commodity in the future.

Replicants are meant to perform a variety of industrial functions in this environment, most notably as labor for off-world colonies.

The replicants are an exploited race that was created to serve human masters.

When they are no longer useful, they are discarded, and when they struggle against their circumstances, they are retired.

Blade runners are specialist law enforcement operatives tasked with apprehending and killing renegade replicants.

Rick Deckard, a former Blade Runner, returns from retirement to track down the sophisticated Nexus-6 replicant models.

These replicants have escaped to Earth after rebelling against the slave-like conditions on Mars.

In both texts, the treatment of artificial intelligence serves as an implicit critique of capitalism.

The Rosen Association in the book and the Tyrell Corporation in the film develop replicants to create a more docile labor, implying that capitalism converts people into robots.

Eldon Rosen (who is called Tyrell in the film) emphasizes these obnoxious commercial imperatives: "We provided what the colonists wanted...." Every commercial venture is founded on a time-honored principle.

Other corporations would have developed these progressive more human kinds if our company hadn't." 

There are two types of replicants in the movie: those who are designed to be unaware that they are androids and are filled with implanted memories (like Rachael Tyrell), and those who are aware that they are androids and live by that knowledge (the Nexus-6 fugitives).

Rachael in the film is a new Nexus-7 model that has been implanted with the memories of Eldon Tyrell's niece, Lilith. Deckard is sent to murder her, but instead falls in love with her. The two depart the city together at the conclusion of the film.

Rachael's character is handled differently in the book.

Deckard makes an effort to recruit Rachael's assistance in locating the runaway androids. Rachael agrees to meet Deckard in a hotel room in the hopes of persuading him to drop the case.

Rachael explains during their encounter that one of the runaway androids (Pris Stratton) is a carbon copy of her (making Rachael a Nexus-6 model in the novel).

Deckard and Rachael actually have sex and profess their love for each other.

Rachael, on the other hand, is discovered to have slept with other blade runners.

She is designed to do just that in order to keep them from fulfilling their tasks.

Deckard threatens to murder Rachael but decides to leave the hotel rather than carry out his threat.

The replicants are undetectable in both the literature and the movies.

Even under a microscope, they seem to be totally human.

The Voigt-Kampff test, which separates humans from androids based on emotional reactions to a variety of questions, is the sole method to identify them.

The exam is conducted with the use of a machine that monitors blush reaction, heart rate, and eye movement in response to empathy-related questions.

Deckard's identity as a human or a replicant is unknown at this time.

Rachael even inquires as to whether he has completed the Voigt-Kampff exam.

In the movie, Deckard's position is unclear.

Despite the fact that the audience is free to make their own choice, filmmaker Ridley Scott has hinted that Deckard is a replicant.

Deckard takes and passes the exam at the conclusion of the book, although he starts to doubt the effectiveness of blade running.

More than the movie, the book explores what it means to be human in the face of technological advancements.

The book depicts the fragility of the human experience and how it can be easily harmed by the technology that is supposed to help it.

Individuals with Penfield mood organs, for example, can use them to control their emotions.

All that is required is for a person to look up an emotion in a manual, dial the appropriate number, and then experience whatever emotion they desire.

The device's usage and the generation of artificial sensations implies that people may become robotic, as Deckard's wife Iran points out: My first response was to express gratitude for the fact that we could afford a Penfield mood organ.

But then I understood how harmful it was to sense the lack of vitality everywhere, not only in this building - do you know what I mean? I'm assuming you don't.

That, however, was formerly thought to be an indication of mental disease, referred to as "lack of proper emotion." The argument made by Dick is that the mood organ inhibits humans from feeling the right emotional elements of life, which is precisely what the Voigt-Kampff test reveals replicants are incapable of.

Philip Dick was known for his hazy and maybe gloomy vision of artificial intelligence.

His androids and robots are distinctly ambiguous.

They desire to be like humans, yet they lack empathy and emotions.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is heavily influenced by this uncertainty, which also appears onscreen in Blade Runner.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Nonhuman Rights and Personhood; Pathetic Fallacy; Turing Test.

Further Reading

Brammer, Rebekah. 2018. “Welcome to the Machine: Artificial Intelligence on Screen.” Screen Education 90 (September): 38–45.

Fitting, Peter. 1987. “Futurecop: The Neutralization of Revolt in Blade Runner.” Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 3: 340–54.

Sammon, Paul S. 2017. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: Dey Street Books.

Wheale, Nigel. 1991. “Recognising a ‘Human-Thing’: Cyborgs, Robots, and Replicants in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.” Critical Survey 3, no. 3: 297–304.

Artificial Intelligence - What Are AI Berserkers?

 

Berserkers are intelligent killing robots initially described by science fiction and fantasy novelist Fred Saberhagen (1930–2007) in his 1962 short tale "Without a Thought." Berserkers later emerged as frequent antagonists in many more of Saberhagen's books and novellas.

Berserkers are a sentient, self-replicating race of space-faring robots with the mission of annihilating all life.

They were built as an ultimate doomsday weapon in a long-forgotten interplanetary conflict between two extraterrestrial cultures (i.e., one intended as a threat or deterrent more than actual use).

The facts of how the Berserkers were released are lost to time, since they seem to have killed off their creators as well as their foes and have been ravaging the Milky Way galaxy ever since.

They come in a variety of sizes, from human-scale units to heavily armored planetoids (cf.

Death Star), and are equipped with a variety of weaponry capable of sterilizing worlds.

Any sentient species that fights back, such as humans, is a priority for the Berserkers.

They construct factories in order to duplicate and better themselves, but their basic objective of removing life remains unchanged.

It's uncertain how far they evolve; some individual units end up questioning or even changing their intentions, while others gain strategic brilliance (e.g., Brother Assassin, "Mr.Jester," Rogue Berserker, Shiva in Steel).

While the Berserkers' ultimate purpose of annihilating all life is evident, their tactical activities are uncertain owing to unpredictability in their cores caused by radioactive decay.

Their name is derived from Norse mythology's Berserkers, powerful human warriors who battled in a fury.

Berserkers depict a worst-case scenario for artificial intelligence: murdering robots that think, learn, and reproduce in a wild and emotionless manner.

They demonstrate the deadly arrogance of providing AI with strong weapons, harmful purpose, and unrestrained self-replication in order to transcend its creators' comprehension and control.

If Berserkers are ever developed and released, they may represent an inexhaustible danger to living creatures over enormous swaths of space and time.

They're quite hard to get rid of after they've been unbottled.

This is owing to their superior defenses and weaponry, as well as their widespread distribution, ability to repair and multiply, autonomous functioning (i.e., without centralized control), capacity to learn and adapt, and limitless patience to lay in wait.

The discovery of Berserkers is so horrifying in Saberhagen's books that human civilizations are terrified of constructing their own AI for fear that it may turn against its creators.

Some astute humans, on the other hand, find a fascinating Berserker counter-weapon: Qwib-Qwibs, self-replicating robots designed to eliminate all Berserkers rather than all life ("Itself Surprised" by Roger Zelazny).

Humans have also utilized cyborgs as an anti-Berserker technique, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes biological intelligence (Berserker Man, Ber serker Prime, Berserker Kill).

Berserkers also exemplifies artificial intelligence's potential for inscrutability and strangeness.

Even while Berserkers can communicate with each other, their huge brains are generally unintelligible to sentient organic lifeforms fleeing or battling them, and they are difficult to study owing to their proclivity to self-destruct if caught.

What can be deduced from their reasoning is that they see life as a plague, a material illness that must be eradicated.

In consequence, the Berserkers lack a thorough understanding of biological intellect and have never been able to adequately duplicate organic life, despite several tries.

They do, however, sometimes enlist human defectors (dubbed "goodlife") to aid the Berserkers in their struggle against "badlife" (i.e., any life that resists extermination).

Nonetheless, Berserkers and humans think in almost irreconcilable ways, hindering attempts to reach a common understanding between life and nonlife.

The seeming contrasts between human and machine intellect are at the heart of most of the conflict in the tales (e.g., artistic appreciation, empathy for animals, a sense of humor, a tendency to make mistakes, the use of acronyms for mnemonics, and even fake encyclopedia entries made to detect pla giarism).

Berserkers have been known to be defeated by non-intelligent living forms such as plants and mantis shrimp ("Pressure" and "Smasher").

Berserkers may be seen of as a specific example of the von Neumann probe, which was invented by mathematician and physicist John von Neumann (1903–1957): self-replicating space-faring robots that might be deployed over the galaxy to efficiently investigate it In the Berserker tales, the Turing Test, developed by mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing (1912–1954), is both investigated and upended.

In "Inhuman Error," human castaways compete with a Berserker to persuade a rescue crew that they are human, while in "Without a Thought," a Berserker tries to figure out whether its game opponent is human.

The Fermi paradox—the concept that if intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations exist, we should have heard from them by now—is also explained by Berserkers.

It's possible that extraterrestrial civilizations haven't contacted Earth because they were destroyed by Berserker-like robots or are hiding from them.

Berserkers, or anything like them, have featured in a number of science fiction books in addition to Saberhagen's (e.g., works by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells; the Terminator series of movies; and the Mass Effect series of video games).

All of these instances demonstrate how the potential for existential risks posed by AI may be investigated in the lab of fiction.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

de Garis, Hugo; Superintelligence; The Terminator.

Further Reading

Saberhagen, Fred. 2015a. Berserkers: The Early Tales. Albuquerque: JSS Literary Productions.

Saberhagen, Fred. 2015b. Berserkers: The Later Tales. Albuquerque: JSS Literary Productions.

Saberhagen’s Worlds of SF and Fantasy. http://www.berserker.com.

The TAJ: Official Fan site of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker® Universe. http://www.berserkerfan.org.

Space Mission Planning

The first thing to consider when planning a space trip is why we want to undertake it and what we expect to gain from the findings. 

The following issues concern the enterprise's viability, as indicated by the following questions: 

• How much does it set you back? 

• Is it reasonably priced? 

• Can it be done technically (and politically)? 

• How safe is it, and what are the chances of it failing? 

• Can we launch (and potentially build) the necessary vehicles in space? 

Without putting in a lot of time and effort into early research and modeling, even rough solutions to these issues are difficult to come by. 

Additionally, there are a variety of architectural variants in space ships, their sequencing, phasing, and destinations that may be used to carry out such a space mission. 

“Mission architectures” or simply “architectures” are the terms used to describe these different variants. Conducting thorough studies of each possible architectural alternative would require substantial financial resources as well as a significant amount of time and work. 

• Furthermore, while planning a human trip to Mars, it is virtually difficult to predict what the status of marginal technologies like nuclear propulsion and large-scale aero entry will be many decades from now. 

• As a result, the most common method includes a rudimentary first study to evaluate architectural alternatives, from which a small selection of preferred designs may be determined that should be investigated further. 

The initial mass in low Earth orbit (IMLEO) is often used as an approximate gauge of mission cost in early planning, and since IMLEO can generally be predicted to some degree, it is frequently used as a proxy for mission cost. 

• This is predicated on the idea that when comparing a set of possible missions to accomplish a given objective, the quantity of "stuff" that has to be transported to LEO is a significant driver of the cost.

• IMLEO is the overall mass in LEO at the start, but it doesn't say how that total mass is divided up into individual vehicles. 

• Unless on-orbit assembly is used, the mass of the biggest spacecraft in LEO determines the requirements for launch vehicle capacity (how much mass a launch vehicle must lift in “one fell swoop”). 

As a result, the early planning of space missions, as well as the preliminary selection of mission designs, is based on two linked parameters: 

(1) IMLEO, and 

(2) the necessary launch vehicle and number of launches. 

It's critical to realize that the requirements for space missions are driven by the need for vehicles to accelerate to great speeds. 

• Unlike a car, which has a big crew compartment and a tiny petrol tank, most spacecraft have huge propellant tanks and a small crew cabin. 

• A space mission is made up of many propulsion stages, each of which contains more propellants than cargo. 

Each propulsion step necessitates the acceleration of both the cargo and the propellants set aside for subsequent acceleration steps. 

• As a consequence, the majority of IMLEO is spent on propellants rather than payload. 

• The quantity of propellants transported to LEO to go from here to there (and back) becomes (at least in part) the decisive element in evaluating whether a space mission is possible and economical. 

• As we previously said, this is reflected in the value of IMLEO, which is mostly comprised of propellants rather than payload. 

• This image may alter in the future if we can effectively deliver propellants to LEO.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan 

You may also want to read more about Space Missions and Systems here.