Pygmalion <-> AI

 

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most useless technology that humans have ever aspired to possess. Actually, let me clarify. It would be useful to have a robot that could make independent decisions while, say, exploring a distant planet, or defusing a bomb. But the ultimate aspiration of AI was never just to add autonomy to a robot’s operating system. The idea wasn’t to enable a computer to search data faster by ‘understanding patterns’, or communicate with its human masters via natural language. The dream of AI was — and is — to create a machine that is conscious. AI means building a mechanical human being. And this goal, as supposedly rational technological projects go, is deeply strange.

[…]

Technology is a cultural phenomenon, and as such it is molded by our cultural values. We prefer good health to sickness so we develop medicine. We value wealth and freedom over poverty and bondage, so we invent markets and the multitudinous thingummies of comfort. We are curious, so we aim for the stars. Yet when it comes to creating conscious simulacra of ourselves, what exactly is our motive? What deep emotions drive us to imagine, and strive to create, machines in our own image? If it is not fear, or want, or curiosity, then what is it? Are we indulging in abject narcissism? Are we being unforgivably vain? Or could it be because of love?

But machines were objects of erotic speculation long before Turing entered the scene. Western literature, ancient and modern, is strewn with mechanical lovers. Consider Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor and favorite of Aphrodite. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes him carving a perfect woman out of ivory. Her name is Galatea and she’s so lifelike that Pygmalion immediately falls in love with her. He prays to Aphrodite to make the statue come to life. The love goddess already knows a thing or two about beautiful, non-biological maidens: her husband Hephaestus has constructed several good-looking fembots to lend a hand in his Olympian workshop. She grants Pygmalion’s wish; Pygmalion kisses his perfect creation, and Galatea becomes a real woman. They live happily ever after.

[…]

As the 20th century came into its own, Pygmalion collided with modernity and its various theories about the human mind: psychoanalysis, behaviourist psychology, the tabula rasa whereby one writes the algorithm of personhood upon a clean slate. Galatea becomes Maria, the robot in Fritz Lang’s epic film Metropolis (1927); she is less innocent now, a temptress performing the manic and deeply erotic dance of Babylon in front of goggling men.

 

Ref: Love Machines – Aeon Magazine