Review - Bicentennial Man

Robin William's "Bicentennial Man" is a rare Hollywood offering, a mainstream sci-fi romance. Syrupy and a bit circular, it's true to the Isaac Asimov story that inspired it, and is actually thoughtful about some of the issues humans may have to confront if -- as so many futurists predict -- AI machines evolve into some sort of species in the 21st Century. Like "Toy Story 2," this movie has an absurd plot, but is sometimes graphically dazzling, showing how computer animation is becoming an art form of it's own.

In the last few years, Robin Williams has gone from being one of the funniest movie stars in Hollywood to one of the sappiest, so there is reason to be suspicious of "Bicentennial Man," which was previewed in some theaters across the country this weekend.

The movie is plenty syrupy, but also surprisingly faithful to the Isaac Asimov story that it's based on, and to many of the issues it raised. Like the evolution of artificial-intelligence (AI) machines, questions about whether they can possibly have emotional lives, and their relationship with human beings.

Williams plays a household-appliance robot named Andrew who develops human-like characteristics - friendship, loyalty, humor, creativity, and faces some tough questions as a result? Is he a human or a robot? Are his feelings real, or simply the pre-programmed responses of neural pathways? Is he an appliance or some new form of life? Does he have rights and can he in any way be called human?

Probably the central question, and one Asimov often raised in his wirtings, was how exactly, creations like "The Bicentennial Man" are supposed to live in a culture with enough gee-whiz technology to create them, but that typically hasn't given a though as to how they'll get along in the world.

Andrew is programmed to live forever, at least theoretically, and this puts him in conflict with the life he wants to lead, especially the fact that he feels much more human than robotic, and that everyone he loves grows old, then dies.

Most humans see him as a machine, but spurred by a sympathetic and ethical owner and his daughter, Andrew sets out to hone his evolving skills and - one can see this coming from the first scene - ends up having a lot of heart and wanting a real one (in one hilarious and self-knowing scene, a fellow robot taunts him by singing the "Tin Man" song from the "Wizard of Oz)." Andrew decides that he needs to be free to figure all of this out, and he sets off on a quest to find his place in the world. It's at this point - three-quarters of the way through, that the plot begins to unravel, and stops being even remotely plausible.

The movie is at times gorgeously-shot, and makes innovative use of computer graphics to render cities, hospitals and offices of the future. It also deals sensitively and intelligently with a lot of the issues many suspect are coming, if even only a fraction of the predictions about AI machines come to pass.

Williams can't help but lapsing into the most wide-eyed, saccharine dialogue and character-development.

But this doesn't keep the movie from being surprisingly thoughtful and touching. And prescient, raising issues about technology and the future that hardly anyone in the United States really wants to talk about.

The three laws:

Just because it's likely to be a big part of this discussion I'll mention Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov's robot books dealt a lot with these laws and the conflicts arising from them. His primitive robots had trouble understanding the subtleties of the laws and dealing with the problems when the laws conflicted. The more advanced robots knew how to weigh the importance of the order. For example, for a robot to destroy itself, the order to do so would have to be very forceful otherwise the third law would prevent it.

Anyhow, I loved all Asimov's books, esp. his robot novels and highly recommend them to anyone who likes *good* sci-fi, detective stories, and deep thinking about what it means to be human/alive/sentient. I doubt this movie lives up to the amazing quality of his books, but maybe it will at least be a way to introduce people who wouldn't otherwise read an Asimov book to his work.

Humans are not that special damnit!

I haven't seen Bicentennial Man, so I'm probably going to put my foot in my mouth, but what I object to about the premise of this movie (and also with the similar quest of Data in Star Trek TNG) is the sheer arrogance of the notion that robots and cyborgs would want to become human!

This is a very common theme in Sci-Fi. Man creates robots. Robots develop self awareness, introspection, and thought. Robots (for some reason) lack "emotion" and "sensation". Robot seeks to become more human.

In my mind this is insufferable anthrocentrism. Humans, completely without proof, cling to the idea that they are unique and special in some vague and undefinable way. Even as we push the boundaries of self-definition through such methods as philosophy, natural science, and hi-tech, we continue to relish a feeling of superiority over the rest of the universe, that, as far as I can tell, is completely foundless in any empirical fact.

Mark my words: some day there will be programs that can write stories as well as humans. Programs that can put that delicate twist on Chopin as well has humans. Programs that can paint marvellous painting that express deep meaning as well as humans. You know this is true - we already have mechanisms that can translate like a third-grader and write stories like a fourth-grader. How much longer can it be before our marvellous intellects are mimicked by an algorithm.

I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.

Please tell me why machines cannot do this.

Sooner or later we will be confronted by the fact that everything we do is completely replicable, from the works of great geniuses to the droolings of cretins. (Hey - we already have the latter down :) What will humans do when confronted by irrefutable evidence that they are not special.

My guess is, they will ignore it. They will continue to posit superiority over their made mechanisms, even if those mechanisms can produce beauty and song superior to those of the most spiritual human. We're like that - intolerably arrogant and blind.

So, remind me again why a self-aware machine would crave to be human?

Ok, that's my rant. Now I have to get some real work done :)

-konstant

Behaviourism

I adhere in some ways to the Behaviorist notion that what matters about intelligence is a) what goes into the machine and b) what comes out. There is nothing else. If you feel that there is more going on inside you than what can be summarized by your external stimuli and your external reactions, then you are mistaken. You are only observing an internalized output to external stimuli. The feedback you would normally express in the outside world is instead being piped directly to your brain's input valve.

There are serious problems with behaviourism.

First of all, if behaviourism were true, we could teach pigs to sing. We can't. There are built-in functions in the brain that make a difference in intelligence.

Second, human children learn language in a fashion which behaviourism can't account for. Children will learn whatever language they are exposed to. They learn the rules of their language without ever understanding them as rules. They do not make the type of mistakes a trial-and-error behaviour renforcement model would require of them. They always group words into structures, even in highly inflected languages and even when they get the fine points of syntax wrong. Furthermore (and most damningly) a human child can become fully functional in a foreign language in under a year, while few adults can do so under any circumstances. The most parsimonious theory that includes these facts is that humans, like other animals, have biological mechanisms in the brain that enable them to do these things.

Thirdly, there are growing bodies of evidence that large areas of human behaviour are biologically influenced. Several forms of psychiatric disease can be clearly traced to biochemical roots. Human sexual behaviour has clear biological roots (I doubt anyone would much bother with sex if their brains didn't force them too.) Even areas like anti-social behaviour are increasingly believed to have partially biological origins, possibly hereditary ones.

That means that humans are not tabula rasa as the behaviourists believed. What goes on in our brains is not a simple function of external stimula.

Now, that does not mean it isn't possible to understand these parts of the brain and program computers to emulate them effectively, but if we do so, we are emulating a human, not creating a truly new machine intelligence.

I can easily imagine a machine pretending to be human wanting to become fully human. Such a machine would likely have emotional states, since we are unlikely to be able to separate these genuinely human conditions from an abstract intelligence. We don't even have a good definition of intelligence, and even if we fully understood the biology and functioning of the brain, we are unlikely to be able to discuss intelligence apart from it's structural framework.

An AI that thinks like a human is likely to want the range of experience and the level of autonomy that humans enjoy. It's not implausible that it would want to be seen and treated as an equal to humans. It is conceivable that it would view itself as superior, but I find it hard to believe that any probable AI would wish to reject the ensemble of human experience in the way you suggest.

Re:Which story?

Actually no..

The movie sounds like it's based more on the book than on the short story..

Okay, background info:
The short story, called "The Bicentinial Man" is in "Robot Visions" and a few other of Asimov's robot compilations.

The book, called "The Positronic Man" was made by Asimov and Silverberg and based on the short story, but more fleshed out and longer.

I believe there was a book also called BM by Asimov alone, but he re-vamped it into PM later. I'm not sure of that though.

---

This is a review?

This was a movie. It had some special effects, was based on a book and raised some issues. Robin Williams was in it.

C'mon, admit that all you've seen is the trailer.


*smirking*

-nme!

Re:Humans are not that special damnit!

I agree with you to a large extent. Intelligence is emergent behavior. We percieve it as something unique and special, (well, because it is rather unique and special). However, there is nothing preventing non-organic systems from becoming intelligent. It is possible, if not probable, that non-organic intelligence would be based on a neural-network (like its biological counterpart). Neural networks are just humongous pattern matchers, with fuzzy logic. Given that, it may be possible for machines to "feel" certain things, or have quasi-emotions, or intuition. However, as a followup poster noted, humans themselves are not purely behavioristic. Therefore expecting machines to be entirely capable of becoming like humans, simply because both systems are behavioristic might not exactly follow. Humans have all sorts of weird non-logical biological influences on our "behavioristic" nature. We do stupid irrational things. We also make unaccountable stupendous and original leaps of innovation and thought. We have state which effects our outputs, starting before we were born. I am not saying that machines/robots/computer/non-organic systems /can't/ ever be human, I'm just saying that using a behavioral argument, it might not exactly follow. On a pure empirical basis, of course there is nothing stopping it, after all, we're all atoms. Humans are special. That's not to say they are more or less good or bad than anything else, but they are unique.

Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]

Re:Laws of Robotics (SPOILER WARNING)

Well, yes. They are bunk. That's why it's fiction. I'm not sure anybody, even Asimov, necessarily expected them to be taken as a serious model. For an interesting slam on them, check on the Harrison/Minsky book "The Turing Option", where the characters discuss their failed attempts to mimick the three laws.

Having said that, the three laws are an excellent model on which to build the huge base of work that Asimov did. Three simple laws, and yet he found enough material to write numerous stories, several novels, etc... He even evolved the idea, commenting in his later stories to the effect that "Earlier robots were of the 'if x more harm than y then do y' variety", while later robots were better able to weigh potentials.

The entire idea behind the three laws is the notion that human beings are not comfortable with their own creations unless they are convinced that there is some sort of built in protection. Sort of like a frankenstein-complex clause. We are afraid of being harmed, therefore the first law MUST be do no harm (hell, we even make our doctors swear that in the hippocratic oath!). The risk to Andrew Martin throughout his entire life is "You are human, I am not, therefore my 'life' is worth less than yours." At the root of all Asimov's robot stories is: "We are capable of creating better than our equals, yet we will deliberately cripple them to be beneath us."

d